Been a while, hasn’t it? Almost a month since my last post. Anyway, here’s some stuff, in no particular order.

*X-Men 3:* I saw this last weekend. My personal impression was that it was about as good as the first one, but not as good as the second one. It’s not a bad film by any means, but it’s not a great one either. There were a few specific things that bugged me, and a few specific things that I liked. We’ll start with the stuff I liked. I didn’t go into the movie knowing that much about the plot; I had seen a few previews, but I was avoiding most of the buzz on purpose. Because of this, there were quite a few surprises throughout the movie for me, some of them extremely shocking. I also thought that Kelsey Grammar’s Beast was pretty good, even if the big blue furball looked a teensy bit silly on-screen.

Like I said, though, there was some stuff that wasn’t so good. For one thing, one of my favorite characters was conspicuously absent from the entire movie, with no explanation whatsoever. Not only that, but the new characters were something of a mixed bag. Beast and Kitty Pride were fairly well integrated, but Juggernaut seemed a little goofy, and Angel was so minor a character that he could easily have been lifted out of the movie with very little impact to the plot. It also irked me a little that everything about this movie (including the subtitle: ‘The Last Stand’) screamed finality, but the still left it open for a sequel at the end. One or the other would have been fine; I just wish they had had the courage to stick with a specific theme.

*Age of Mythology:* I played this board game with my friend Mike the other day, and it reminded me how much I enjoy playing it. It was a really exciting session, with a very close ending that hinged almost entirely on a single battle in the last turn. I’ve heard reports about how certain strategies never seem to fail if you stick to them, but I think the game works well when you have a group of players who are there to have fun rather than to win at all costs.

*Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children:* I had seen the Japanese, fan-subbed version of this movie a while ago, but I recently picked up the English language version, and I’m glad I did. The translation is easy to understand, for the most part, and there’s a very helpful (if very dated) ‘scenes from _Final Fantasy VII_’ special feature that catches you up on the backstory. Very satisfactory, indeed.

*Angels and Demons/The Da Vinci Code:* I borrowed _Angels and Demons_ from my mom a while back, read it, and enjoyed it. So, I figured I’d get a copy of _The Da Vinci Code_, and read it like everyone else in America. I’m about halfway through it right now. My general impression of Dan Brown’s writing is that he’s good at writing a compelling, well-researched literary equivalent of a Hollywood blockbuster. You learn a fair bit that you didn’t know while reading these books (lots of conspiricy stuff here, as well as some art history and symbology), but the books are clearly written for the masses; or at least, for Dan Brown’s version of the masses. Brown explains a lot of stuff that doesn’t need to be explained, peppers his writing with the literary equivalents of special effects and money shots, and his characters often display exaggerated emotions, disproportionate to the situation. All of this seems to be in the book to hold the attention of Joe Sixpack; the problem is, I don’t think it’s necessary. I think the average American (or at least, the average reader) is smarter than Brown gives him/her credit for, and it sometimes seems like Brown is talking down to the reader. This is actually somewhat ironic, because I’m constantly finding little linguistic errors within these books; apparently, neither Brown nor his editor are as smart as they think they are. What I’m trying to say is that they are, overall, pretty enjoyable books, but there are much better books out there, and I don’t think that _The Da Vinci Code_ deserves all of the celebrity that it’s gotten.

Anyway, I’ll try to post more often.

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