These are very high quality, very delicious chocolates. The company was founded in 1913 in Belgium and their products are only available in, depending on who you ask, 25 to 50 stores throughout the United States.

I work for a teaching conference over the summer, and one of my instructors bought me a half-pound assortment as a thank you gift. She purchased it at Chocolat du Monde, this very nice chocolate boutique in the Village.

You can tell the chocolate is made with high quality ingredients. The ganache was to die for, and the orangette—a candied slice of orange peel dipped in bitersweet chocolate—just about did me in.

The only downside is that because it’s imported from Belgium and because it’s made by such a fine chocolatier, it’s quite pricey. Worth the splurge though!

Made year-round at three different Dr. Pepper plants in Texas, most notably the one in Dublin, this stuff is sweetened with sugar cane instead of corn syrup.

It’s fairly easy to get your hands on some if you’re in Texas, as long as you keep your eyes open.

One of the perks of living close to the border. Bottled in Mexico, where they still use sugar cane. Coke headquarters in Atlanta swears there’s no difference between sugar cane and corn syrup, but they’re wrong.

Mexican Coke tastes a lot less harsh, and cleaner. It’s hard to explain, but you can definitely tell the difference.

On the way back home from watching this movie, I called my ex-boyfriend who informed me that he got my hilarious voicemail that I’d left two hours prior. When I asked him what he was talking about, he dictated it back to me: “I’m going to go see The Happening. Hope it doesn’t suck.”

This complete hatred of M. Night Shyamalan kind of mystifies me. Everyone loved The Sixth Sense, then Signs did really well, then The Village didn’t, then Lady in the Water really didn’t, and now The Happening looks like it’s going to do about the same.

Personally, I really enjoyed Lady in the Water, despite it’s negative critical reception. When I looked up The Happening on Rotten Tomatoes and saw the meager 11% rating, I looked at what Rober Ebert said. He gave the film three stars out of four, acknowledging that he was probably going to be in the minority. That was enough for me to go see it. Love me some Ebert.

Shyamalan himself compared The Happening to The Birds, which I think was a mistake. I can see why he chose it: the “villain” in The Happening, like in The Birds, is something that is constantly around us and that we have no control of. But wow, does any director really want to compare himself to Hitchcock? Ever?

I suppose it’s fitting, given Shyamalan’s hubris, that the biggest problem I have with the film is the directing. The premise is strong, if not a little kooky. The cast is good – Mark Wahlberg is quickly becoming one of my favorite actors, John Leguizamo did well with what little he was given, and while Zooey Deschanel feels like she’s really reaching in places, she shines in others.

The first real false note happened pretty early in the film, in a diner. One woman has a horrific video sent to her phone – an iPhone, of course, thank you product placement – and she shows it to Wahlberg. The man in the video is about to do something horrific when the person filming seemingly drops the camera. Everything gets shaky and dark. In my mind, this is the perfect place to end things. You know what’s about to happen to the man. Once you start using your imagination, however, whoever was filming picks up the camera and you see him meet his horrific end. Now my friend and I often joke about the jazz adage It’s the notes you don’t play, but it applies here. The footage is cartoonish. A lot of fuss has been made about this being Shyamalan’s first R-rated movie, but if you ask me, what made his prior thrillers so effective is the suggestion of violence, not the display of it.

Another thing I have a problem with is his use of slow motion, which I think is equivalent to the exclamation point in fiction. One is fine, two is okay, but any more than that and you’re really pushing it. The first time he uses it, it’s only for a few seconds and it announces the fate of a character minutes and scenes before anything actually happens. The second time it feels like he’s trying to put extra emphasis on a tragedy that’s already pretty over the top. I think it would have been a stronger film if he had kept everything rolling at the same pace.

Finally, I felt the film was a little preachy. There’s a point where all the characters seek temporary shelter in a model home in a subdivision. When they hike out of the area, there’s a billboard advertisement for the place. At the top, the ad reads, “You deserve this!” That sort of attitude permeates the film, really, and that gets to me because when I pay $9.50 for a movie ticket, I don’t want to be taught a lesson.

Oddly, the first thing this reminded me of is Hitchcock’s Psycho, which ends twice. Once, when the events of the film are resolved, and a second time, after a little psychology lesson. I can understand Hitch’s footnote-esque ending – 1960’s film audiences were not as sophisticated as today’s are. Without the psychiatrist character to explain Norman Bates, the audience would have been lost. But this is 2008, and I think the average person can grasp the message of this film without having it screamed at them by an actor playing a scientist on a television channel a character in a movie is watching.

Amazing music, yes, but it’s an “authorized” bootleg, which means certain words—I think you know which ones—are edited out. You get all into the music and suddenly, BLEEEEEEEEEEEEP.

It’s only on one track, “Just Like That,” a bitter goodbye song of sorts. The words in question aren’t part of the official lyrics, they’re part of an extended verse. It feels improvised, but the censorship completely takes you out of the experience of enjoying it.

Such a shame!

Wow. I don’t have words for how much I didn’t like this movie.

First of all, the first few minutes are screaming something. Namely something along the lines of, “Hi, I’m Steven Spielberg and I’m making the fourth installment of Indiana Jones. Look, it’s a fedora! Indy wears a fedora! And he doesn’t like snakes! Hilarity ensues! Also, America in the 1950’s was full of squares, greasers, and commies!”

The whole film was much too intent on winking at the audience, which made it hard to take seriously. Were any of these good choices:

Surprised prairie dog shots? Doubtful.
Aliens? No thank you.
Nuclear explosion? Nuh-uh.
Shia LeBouf getting repeatedly hit in the nuts? No.
Cate Blanchett as a Russian? Absolutely not.

Not to mention the crystal skull that everyone is carting around looks like it’s made of cheap molded plastic and stuffed with balls of Saran wrap. What was the budget again?

Also, George Lucas, we need to have a talk about CGI monkeys. They made no sense when you edited them into THX-1138 years after you shot it, and they don’t work here either. Please quit it.

My father thinks I’m being too harsh. He said, “You don’t understand. Old people like me like having the closure.” But don’t I understand? Didn’t I grow up loving Indy, too?

Yes, the film has some great fight sequences, I’ll give you that. But what’s missing is a good story, and without it it’s just another action movie. Indy deserves more than this campy send-off. As one of my friends said, “For me, Indiana Jones ends with he and Sallah riding off into the sunset,” and I have to say I agree.

What is this recent trend with reviving characters that we have no business reviving? Are moviegoers so nostalgic about old heroes that they need to see them struggling past their prime? What about new heroes? What about new stories?

Leaving the theater, I had serious doubts about the future of Hollywood. Perhaps that’s melodramatic, but upon returning home and finding that Sydney Pollock had died, I gave it some more thought.

There are still many great living directors—Spielberg, yes, and Lucas. There’s also Scorsese, Coppola, Woody Allen, and even Sidney Lumet is still making films three years after receiving his Lifetime Achievement Oscar. But films like Indy 4 say to me that the great directors of the 1970’s and 1980’s have really had their moments in the sun, they’ve made their masterpieces, and they’re beginning to fade out. There are young directors that I really like—Wes Anderson and Steven Soderbergh just to name two—but I don’t feel that any of them are quite ready to take over yet, and I fear for Hollywood until they are.

Very dreamlike.

Wardrobe by Chanel.

Hypnotizing cinematography.

I am SHOCKED that this only has an 88% worth consuming. Shocked.

To me, The Squid and the Whale and Margot at the Wedding are almost the same film; they explore similar themes, have similar characters, and share the same dark sense of humor, but I enjoyed this movie much more.

From what little I’ve seen of Baumbach’s work, he tends to tell his stories piecemeal. I think this works a lot better in this film than in Margot, perhaps because it’s much lighter fare. Like Margot, the film centers around family dysfunction, but doesn’t seem to take itself as seriously.

(In a lot of ways, the central themes reminded me of Wes Anderson. I did a little Googling and found that Anderson produced The Squid and the Whale, and Baumbach co-wrote Anderson’s The Life Aquatic.)

Squid, in my opinion, also has a much better cast than Margot. (Nicole Kidman was good, of course, but Jack Black gave a really off-putting performance, and I think Baumbach’s decision to cast his wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh, was a mistake.) Laura Linney and Jeff Daniels give brilliant leads. Billy Baldwin – who is apparently going by William Baldwin now, perhaps in an effort to be taken more seriously – does a competent job of playing the younger son’s tennis teacher, and Anna Paquin has a real edge playing one of Daniels’ students young enough to be entranced by his intellectual bullshit.

In the behind the scenes documentary, Baumbach says, “I’m drawn to characters who are articulate and cultured and aware of psychology and art but who have immense bilnd spots in terms of their emotional life.” That’s all well and good when it works, but when it doesn’t – and for me, Margot is an example of this – the characters are exasperating to the point that you can’t relate to them. Thankfully in Squid, it works, although you can’t help but come away from it feeling Baumbach believes those kinds of characters are in some way superior, and that’s the kind of attitude that is going to get him into trouble. (Or at least allow him to make more movies like Margot.)

This was essentially a half-season, thanks to the writers strike. Eleven episodes instead of the usual twenty-something, not to mention the finale was canceled and another episode was taken out of sequence and aired in its place, which left a giant continuity error.

I read an interview with Bill Lawrence, the show’s creator, and it’s clear there’s been a lot of D to the rama. NBC has essentially washed its hands of the show, which is unfortunate.

However, there’s an upcoming season of 18 episodes for ABC, which is quite exciting. It will be the final season, which is sad, but not as sad as ending the series without resolution.