Not too pale yellow amberish color. Very floral and fruity nose, mostly peachy and grapefruit citrusy. Obviously sweet, but still acidic enough. I had hoped it would have a more syrupy body, but that was probably silly of me. Still good. More aperitif than dessert I think.

The cinematography was quite amazing, really, and the best part of the movie. I had seen some of the footage before in other things, though, and I guess it all had been shown as part of a BBC series. The narration was minimal, and really not all that good. It can be admittedly hard to link together random nature shots, but this documentary did it worst than most. I liked it better without the sound.

There is a lot of death and violence shown (seriously gratuitously extended violent scenes). I am surprised it was rated G. I guess “natural” violence, just like slapstick cartoony violence is “OK”, but what do I know; I like playing GTA after all and am obviously morally suspect.

So, ultimately, this movie was pretty bad. The story was lame, acting by the main characters was universally awful (except for the scientist “vampire” guy), and the dialog was shockingly poor. It was so bad that I couldn’t even laugh at the badness.

Visually, I thought the action sequences enjoyable to watch though. Equilibrium was a much better movie from this director.

Since I did watch it all the way through (well, with some muting and fast forwarding), it was worth consuming. Barely.

While I did not think that it was a great movie, it was entertaining enough, and thus not really a waste of money. I do think the book was better, though (which was just OK as well). I thought the CSI-style writing of the book would translate better for the movie screen, but it did not really turn out that way. The movie stuck to the book for the most part, but there were changes, perhaps to keep those who read the book interested; otherwise, the changes did not add much.

It does pale in comparison to the last movie I saw, but, as I said, entertaining enough.

Now that I finishing reading this book, maybe I can fake being a doctor. Um, well, not really. It was interesting, though.

Given all the hoopla I had head about this book, I thought it was going to be better than it was; I expected something more in “The Name of the Rose” vein. It was more like “National Treasure”. However, I did find it entertaining enough to keep reading.

I did not particularly care for the writing style, as it read more like a TV or movie adaptation to me. I suppose since the movie is coming out shortly, that is a benefit.

I’ve always loved the title of this book. Its on par with “the Shadow of the Torturer” and “The Claw of the Conciliator”. I remember reading it on a flight from Calgary => Minneapolis => Detroit => Syracuse years ago.

As for the other 99.999% of the words of the novel, they are good, too, The Gap series really picks up with this book (three of five); the following books are good as well.

I did not really care for the first two books (“The Real Story” and “Forbidden Knowledge”), and have skipped them when I have reread the series. I suppose they are required to understand the story, but once was enough for me as I got the picture that most of the characters are sick/depraved/damaged/abusive/blahblahblah the first time through.

Anyways, yes, if you got through the first two books in the series, they really start getting good with this one.

There are better choices. I did finish the bottle after a couple of weeks though. On the other hand, one can’t expect the world of a $5/750ml port.

I don’t remember much about this wine. The bottle was finished, though, so it must have been alright.

I would have liked to drink this wine, but it was corked when I opened it up. The cork popped out like a cannon, and it obviously had some past storage issues as I could see that wine had blown past the cork. Undeterred, I drank a glass anyway. Unfortunate. I poured the rest down the drain. Ah, well.