Lucky Number Slevin starts off splendidly and then careens into a ditch. A muddy ditch swollen with fetid water. By an abbatoir closed down by health inspectors due to infected manure.

The cinematography is superb - sumptuous settings, gorgeous colours, and good composition. Likewise the acting - the characters tower above the flimsy plot they are forced to inhabit. My complaint is about none of those.

What is set up as a smooth heist movie turns into anything but. Not only that, but it does so in such a contrived and Rube Goldberg way that it spits on the elegance of the initial set-up. Are you intrigued by Bruce Willis’ hints about the Kansas City Shuffle—“When everyone looks right, go left”? Prepare to be disappointed. It turns out to be just a bunch of pretty words Bruce Willis’ characters makes up on the spot and that play no part in the direction of forthcoming events.

There is, in fact, no heist. No con. No wily job. Just a huge WTF. But the getting there is pretty. Watch Thank You for Smoking instead. Or rent Ocean’s Eleven.

Iain M Banks is perhaps one of the most singularly creative writers of science fiction working today. His works have breadth—reading one will not spoil the others. He has no formula, except one that calls from grandiose settings, spectacular vistas, and intense, original plots.

Look to Windward is a very fine novel in the Culture universe—an extrapolation of social democracy onto a vast interstellar scale, speculation about sentience, and exploration of abundance. The novel itself tells the story of Mahrai Ziller, an exiled composer and the events leading up the first peformance of his latest symphony. Vast conspiracies, interstellar intrigue, spectacular megafauna, and wondrous lifestyles involve themselves in the happenings.

I am thoroughly satisfied with the book, but I would neither call it the best of the Culture novels nor one you should necessarily start with. Myself, I started with the sublime Use of Weapons, though Consider Phlebas or Player of Games would also do well in that role. Banks’ latest, The Algebraist, is one of his best and a good place to start, but it’s set in a universe of its own.

Having said that, I still recommend Look to Windward. It’s every bit as fantastic as it should be.

-Wachowskis don’t get the fundamentals of totalitarian society. The secret police have agent provocateurs that go around denigrating the government. Those who do not rat on these agents are punished. This trains the populace to rat/fink/snitch on each other’s disloyal opinions because otherwise they risk getting in trouble themselves. There is no freaking Freedom of Speech, and people who have a habit of saying “bollocks” at official truth don’t live long.

Life is cheap. The police commissioner would not be some sort of a moral stalwart 15 years in - the police would have committed plenty of crimes against humanity during the bloodless putsch, and shit floats to the top. If they accidentally kill a tied-up hostage, the correct thing for the police to do is to kill all the other hostages and dump their bodies in a pit somewhere. Dead humans tell no tales.

This is 2006. The Western world has had a century of ever more insidious marketing and ever more insipid focus groups. The next fascist movement will not have a black colour scheme - it will use friendly pastels, and would be called something like “Claria” or “Levitra”. And the lead spokesperson will be physically attractive. Real power can be wielded from behind the throne.

-I am really disappointed in the army-of-V scene which I understand the Wachowskis made up. It’s weird and completely fascistic. They really should have used normal, standard, disordered civilian rioters. Mobs of them. With barricades and flags and songs. Because North Americans don’t know how to riot in an effective, pointed manner. And they never see a proper riot, and so they don’t know how to properly tell a government to go shaft itself. The French know how to riot, and the South Koreans know how to riot, and sometimes even the Germans know how to riot. I’ve seen some footage of effective riots, and it’s really impressive. I wish there was more awareness of such things. Bah.

BTW, this is probably obvious, but everyone confesses under proper torture. Evey didn’t break because she was undergoing something stylized and fake. V wasn’t trying to torture her - he was just making her suffer. Don’t have any grand fantasies about yourself being able to resist drugs, sensory deprivation, desperation, and pain.;)

-Overall, it’s a good movie. Could have been much better, but alas. We live with the movies that are made, not the movies that could be made.

Thank You is a tremendously witty, sharp, and entertaining movie. It moves at a brisk, convincing pace through a delectable gauntlet of plot and visual. The soundtrack is absolutely perfect, and so is the integration of gorgeously subtle computer graphics for effect. An absolute delight, the dialogue flies back and forth and the plot moves like the cups of a con artist.

The basic thesis rests on the old academic vanguards of rhetoric and logical fallacy which are sadly seldom taught in our teach-to-the-job society. By using strawmen, ad hominems, and ad absurdums; by exluding the middle option; by redirecting the flow of conversation into new channels and choosing the battles, the protagonist soars to greater and greater heights. And so does the fabulous plot.

The depth may not be tremendous, but the picture is an utter delight. I recommend it wholeheartedly.

My one quibble is in the fate of one of the female characters. WTF was she busted down and WTF did she get busted down that far? It seemed as though the scriptwriters were perversely punishing her for being female. But it’s a footnote in this otherwise excellent movie. See it.