I enjoy end-of-the-world science fiction, and I Am Legend was a great example of the genre. Perhaps I am biased, because I do love watching Will Smith do his thing. But this movie kept me alternately on the edge of my seat, and peeping out from under the covers. Very definitely worth watching!

I’ll watch anything by Luc Besson, based on good past experiences – The Fifth Element, The Big Blue, Leon: The Professional, La Femme Nikita, the list goes on. Angel-A has very little in common with those movies. There’s very little action. This is more a movie of self-discovery, and I found the plot somewhat simplistic. However, the acting is very good, and the characters are fun to watch. Paris, the city, plays a very nice role as well. So I’m glad I rented this, although it’s nothing like what I was expecting.

Funny how many bad reviews Cloverfield got here… The handheld camera action didn’t bother me at all – after a little while I hardly noticed it. Maybe that’s because I watched it on my PC at home. For the rest, it’s just a fun/creepy monster movie. It wasn’t too scary or too gory for me, I enjoyed it. I loved seeing all the great shots of NYC, too.

If you watch the DVD, be to sure to catch the “Clover Fun” special feature (bloopers).

Qui a tué Bambi? is just so-so. I’d give it a lower rating if it were American, just because I like watching French movies – the language and the setting made this bearable.

I was never scared. The heroine is perky, but most of the time seems to sleepwalk through what’s happening. The bad guy spent most of the movie wearing a scowl, looking peeved more than anything else. It’s a bit of a snooze.

Did I miss something? Babylon A.D. introduces us to some interesting characters, and there are a few weird mysteries where you think “huh? What is happening?” And then it just ends. It’s vaguely reminiscent of The Fifth Element, and when it started I thought it had some promise of being that good, but it fell flat on its face.

In two words: Don’t bother.

The Thai Yellow Curry frozen dinner from Helen’s Kitchen is good! In general, I want my food to be cooked fresh. But for a frozen meal, this is a winner!

Caveat: IMHO, this is barely hot at all, but it has a very nice flavor.

Pluses: All organic ingredients, vegan, 13 g of protein, relatively reasonable 390 mg of sodium (reasonable for a frozen dinner).

Drawbacks: 5 g of saturated fat, presumably from the creamed coconut (but it tastes so good!), 10 g of fat total. So you don’t want to eat this every day. But you shouldn’t eat frozen dinners every day, anyway.

Goodbye my friends
Maybe for forever
Goodbye my friends
The stars wait for me

The song transmits such a terrible feeling of loss and sadness! I definitely want this played at my funeral.

You gave the best you had to give
You only have one life to live
You fought so hard you were a slave
After all you gave there was nothing left to save
You’ve got nothing left to lose…

I picked up Firewall because it was written by a Swedish author, Henning Mankel, and I’d recently enjoyed The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, also by a Swedish author. Pretty silly reason. Well, there was that, and the fact that my local Barnes & Noble was having a 3-for-2 sale.

I was not disappointed. I enjoy Mankel’s style. He fleshes out his story and characters by adding quick little mundane details that seem to come straight from your own life. Wallander, his police detective, is moody, going from pessimistic one day to upbeat the next, for no particular reason. He becomes paranoid about his colleagues, but later feels amiable towards them. He writes himself a note to do something and leaves it on the floor in front of his door so he won’t forget it in the morning. Etc. These little details make you feel like Wallander is a person, not the cardboard cutout that so often appears in genre fiction.

Aside from that, the mystery in this book, involving financial network security, was intriguing. Although it didn’t contain enough detail to make me perfectly happy, it did keep me eagerly following along to find out more. I was slightly disappointed by the ending. There was a bit of that element where the evil arch-villain trips himself up by making his master stroke far too complicated. However, getting to that ending was entertaining, so all is forgiven.

Plus, it’s kind of fun walking through a world where all the place names remind you of items from an IKEA catalog.

I am succumbing to the idea that the Swedes are just really good fiction authors. Maybe it helps that a book has to be pretty good for it to be worth translating from Swedish into English.

Babylon by Bus is the autobiographical account of two young American men, Ray Lemoine and Jeff Neumann, who head for Iraq to become NGO workers soon after the defeat of Saddam Hussein, during the “lull” before the major insurgency.

I’ll be brief. My impressions are accurately reflected by the 1-star and 2-star reviews at Amazon.

The narrator (the story is told from the POV of LeMoine) has an almost comically arrogant attitude. He and his friend, both surprisingly jaded for people so young, seem compelled to encourage each other into the most inane, pointless behaviors. If you ever want to understand why people hate Americans, this book gives numerous examples of the stupidity that sometimes makes me embarrassed to be American myself.

The story makes some vague claims about the good that was done by the two authors in organizing aid to war victims under the CPA. I suppose this proves that two fools just might accidentally do something right once in a while.

I give this book two stars because I think it might be educational. In a few instances, their underlying experiences are interesting, from a sort of back-alley perspective. Unfortunately, the whole story reeks of their overweening self-righteousness and “too cool for school” perspective. When they are assaulted by two men who beat them with their shoes, you want to join in and shout along with the attackers “You are stupid men! You are arrogant Americans!”

To get a grittier feel for post-war Iraq, I’d much rather have heard from some of the interesting characters described in the book, such as Marla Ruzicka or A Heather Coyne. I don’t have any good recommendations for alternative information sources, however.

Full disclosure: I opposed the invasion of Iraq, as did the two authors. So my criticisms have nothing to do with their claims of liberalism.

I picked up the audiobook of Babylon by Bus at the library today. I have a lot of driving to do tomorrow, and I was looking for something interesting to occupy the time.

I got through the first disc today. So far, I’m finding it kind of irritating. Their attitude strikes me as exceptionally cavalier and stupid. This may be aggravated by the sound of the narrator’s voice. I’m still planning to finish it, and I hope it improves.