We got some Asbach Uralt-filled chocolates from the Vermont Country Store for Christmas. The best European chocolate filled with the best German brandy. And I don’t mean a liqueur-infused filling—I mean they are filled with honest-to-Gott brandy. These are dangerously good. After you’ve tried them, all other chocolates will seem a bit disappointing.

We got an assortment: some with a cherry along with the brandy, some shaped like kidney beans, some bottle-shaped, some with a sugary crust surrounding the brandy. All of them spoiled us forever.

Biggest surprise in the documentary: Even in her sixties, Eleanor Bron is still hot!

Is it just me, or did the writers of Wall-E borrow more than a little from Idiocracy? A dystopian future where trash is piled sky-high, a giant corporation that controls a huge percentage of people’s existence, lazy humans being coddled and marketed to death, a plot line that hinges on the resuscitation of plant life…

Or were both movies borrowing from something else?

In any case, on balance, I may not have loved this as much as I hoped to, but I still enjoyed it. Some of the gags run way too long for the level of humor they’re at, like the misfortunes of the hit TV star of the hit TV series of 2505, “Ow, My Balls!” But then there are wonderful little touches throughout that gave me a good belly laugh, like Justin Long’s cameo as an M.D. at St. God’s Memorial Hospital (the Kaiser Permanente of the future?) or the motor-head graphic design that pervades everything in law enforcement.

If nothing else excels in this movie, the special effects certainly do. Loved the Costco, the Jet-skis at the Washington Monument, and the comically terrifying descendants of today’s monster trucks.

It could have been this decade’s “Network,” but it’s just too silly to achieve that kind of greatness. Then again, maybe that’s a good thing.

I saw this in previews at La Jolla Playhouse. My wife took me thanks to free tickets from a friend who was on the crew. I enjoyed it a lot, even more so than I expected I would. Dang, that Montego Glover has a really good set of pipes!

Seattle will be privileged to see this sometime early in 2009 at the 5th Avenue Theatre.

James Cagney is remembered too often as a caricature (e.g. “You dirty rat!”, a line he never uttered). This movie is an excellent example of his work and shows how skilled an actor he really was. If my memory is correct, this was his first starring role.

Until I saw Wall-E, I never would have believed that a sweet, family-friendly, Disneyesque love story could be combined with a darkly humorous, dystopian sci-fi movie—and work. Yet it does, and outstandingly so. Pixar’s best movie ever, at least until the next one.

Watch this to find out why gas prices are getting so high, and why things will get a lot worse before they get truly awful.

I downloaded The Slip yesterday and finished listening to it today. It’s better than With Teeth, still not as good as The Downward Spiral (but then, I don’t think Trent will ever top that one). But I like it a lot. And, hey, you can’t beat the price!

My favorite tracks are “Letting You,” “Echoplex,” and “Head Down.” But I’m betting “1,000,000” will get the most airplay (after an F-word-ectomy for the FCC).

NIN may be the highest-profile artist yet to make a music album free—in both the “beer” and “speech” senses. It’s under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us ). Thus you have Trent’s permission to make copies, remix, etc., as long as you don’t try to resell it.

Best of all for audio geeks, you can download it in MP3; lossless, CD-quality FLAC or AIFF; or full-on, uncompressed, 96-kHz, 24-bit WAV. Sweeet.

http://theslip.nin.com

My wife had to stop watching when it got too depressing in the middle. I didn’t feel motivated to continue because I was somewhat disappointed with it. Comparisons to Napoleon Dynamite are apt, only the characters in this movie are twenty-somethings and even less likable.

“The Girl Who Was Death” may be the most forgettable Prisoner episode of the whole lot.

“Fall Out”—talk about going out with a bang. Crazy. I mean really, honestly, what-was-Patrick-McGoohan-smoking crazy. Wish they didn’t have to get canceled and forced to put all of their eggs in that basket, but still… marvelous. It may be the most memorable episode of grown-up television I watched as a child.