Gran Torino is another home run from Clint Eastwood! It manages to be funny, heart-warming, and heart-breaking. Highly recommended.

Revolutionary Road is the story of a couple’s rocky relationship, set in the fifties. These two people would like to think they’re special, but by their actions they make themselves ordinary.

My main problem with this movie is that it’s too obvious. You can see the train wreck coming a mile away. And just to make sure that you get the point, an oracular crazy guy pops up twice to scream the truth in their (and our) faces. You want to say to the couple, “Listen to the crazy guy! He’s telling it like it is!” But they don’t.

Despite that, it’s an absorbing story, worth watching. One that makes you think “whew, good thing I missed out on the fifties!”.

The Miracle Strain, by Michael Cordy, is a pretty silly work of fiction involving a conflict between a weird Christian cult and a doctor developing gene therapies. Hm, the premise doesn’t sound impossibly bad, but once you start reading, you realize that you could drive a tank through the plot holes. The writing style does not redeem the book (think Dan Brown or David Baldacci), and the characters are the barely fleshed out stock figures that you generally find in thrillers.

This was a fast read, and comparable to something you might find written by Dan Brown, but with a miserable plot. Somewhere between Brown’s really bad Digital Fortress (which had below average writing) and the much better The Da Vinci Code.

I don’t think I could be convinced to read anything by Cordy again. It was just too much nonsense.

I’ve been using My French Coach for just over a week. In that time, I’ve progressed from “Pre-Schooler” to “Third Grader”.

Overall, I’m still enjoying this and I do believe that I’m learning. However, I have a few complaints about things that begin to stand out after using it for a while.

1) When displaying French nouns, we are not given the gender (le or la). This is important, and I cannot understand why it was left out. I hope they will start including it in future lessons, but I doubt it.

2) It is too easy to progress to the next level; just a few exposures to a new word in a few games and they claim that you have mastered it and can move on. However, I do not feel like I have actually mastered the words in each lesson unless I’ve already seen them before. I’m wondering how helpful this learning tool will be once/if I get to lessons where I don’t know most of the words already… that has just started to happen.

3) So far, the lessons and games are weak in teaching grammar and sentence construction. I want to know more than just a few nouns and verbs, I want to construct sentences.

Up to the current level, I feel like this is a good motivational tool to keep me studying French. It’s like a very entertaining and interactive set of flash cards. I’d never find it interesting to sit down and study a set of flash cards day after day, but My French Coach is effectively helping me to do that. I am curious about how the game works as you advance.

I don’t want to say much about Seven Pounds; saying just about anything will be a spoiler. The movie is hugely emotional. There’s not a very complicated plot, although the way the story develops, it does keep you guessing for a little while. The story, which is completely believable to me, is something you would more likely find in an indie film. It’s hard to believe that mainstream America will turn this movie into a blockbuster.

I am surprised at the many negative reviews. At Vanity Fair, the reviewer criticized Will Smith for “how highly [he] may regard himself”. WTF? I saw another review that called the movie self-important. I have no idea what these reviewers are talking about; I think it reveals more about the reviewer than about the film.

The movie was a little too long but other than that, it’s definitely worth watching. I laid down six bucks to see it and I got more than my money’s worth!

The Dark River is book two in a trilogy by John Twelve Hawks. I’m continuing to enjoy the series. It has suspense, and imaginative turns which I didn’t see coming. We get action in foreign cities, glimpses into covert societies and communities, mysticism, chases, fights to the death, and so on. The characters are better fleshed out than in most action/suspense books, although I’d prefer even more depth.

This second book is slightly disappointing compared to the first book in the series, although it only has a few flaws.

First, at a few points, it tries to provide a synopsis or reminder of what occurred in the first book, The Traveler. When I came to those admittedly short parts, I just found them an annoying distraction, a drag on the pace of the story.

Second, this book spent too much time exploring the world of free running, which, in my view, did not really advance the plot. In contrast, I felt that the exploration of an off-the-grid community in the first book made more sense and fit more logically into the book’s ethos.

I have a problem with the story’s MacGuffin, which I ignored in the first book and which became harder to ignore in the second. We keep coming round to the idea that a large nefarious organization is going to “control” everyone by taking away our privacy. There are cameras everywhere, your every action is being tracked, and it is asserted without explanation that this is a terrible thing.

I agree that it’s bad when your landlord plants a camera in your bathroom. But if there are cameras out on the street, how will this impact your actions? There are people out on the street all over the place, ooh, watching you already. A camera is just another eye, and probably an unmonitored one as well. What exactly are we afraid of here?

The novel does very little to explain this. At one point, we see a couple of malicious characters using cameras to track a woman, following her down the street, with the hope that she’ll enter a dressing room in the lingerie section of a department store, where (somehow) they’ll have access to the security cameras there. OK, sleazy behavior like this is a risk when cameras are planted everywhere, and it should be a criminal offense to plant cameras in dressing rooms, anyway (it’s not). Is this behavior a threat to civilization? No.

To enjoy the novel, you just have to let the motivation slide. Our heroes are fighting a big bad organization, with lots of murder on both sides, to protect you from Peeping Toms (admittedly, I am exaggerating here). That’s the big problem but if you can ignore it, then the book is a lot of fun. There’s another MacGuffin involving a quantum computer which struck me as a lot more interesting than the “big brother is invading your privacy” bogeyman, but it didn’t get so much attention in the second book. In any case, I am looking forward to the third book.

I’ve been using My French Coach for two days and I’m already up to the rank of “First Grader”. I think I’m progressing so fast because I wasn’t ranked correctly in the first place. I also think it’s too easy to progress. For example, I might be exposed to a word ten times in various games, and then I’m assumed to have “mastered” the word. In fact, that’s not really the case. I may be able to pick the correct translation in a multiple choice quiz, but if I were asked to translate the word without any hints, I might be unable to. And if I did get it right, I might still get the spelling incorrect.

Despite that, I’ve spent at least 4 hours over the last couple of days playing with the gadget. So far as motivation goes, it seems to be working.

I was only slightly disappointed when I finished The Traveller. I felt like the book was wandering a little bit towards the end, but maybe that’s my own fault for not reading it straight through. Regardless, I’m eager to get started on book two, The Dark River.

I got a Nintendo DS for Christmas, along with Ubisoft’s My French Coach.

When initializing, the game tests you to start you at the correct level. I started at level 10, which sounds great! But they give that level a rank of “Pre-Schooler”. Oops!

I didn’t read the manual before starting, but jumped right in. I give the game kudos for how easy it was to start.

The software consists of learning modules and game modules. Mostly, I’ve been playing four games: word search (hunt for French words in a square matrix of letters); a whack-a-mole style game where you bop the critters holding the French word that matches the English word you are hunting; a multiple choice quiz game where you’re given an English word and a set of four French words to match it with; and a similar word match game called “Flash Cards” which isn’t really flash cards. In the Flash Cards game, you are given a French word, sometimes spoken and sometimes written, and then given a choice of four English words with which to match it. So the multiple choice game and the flash card game are similar, but differ in which direction you are translating to/from.

Will I become fluent in French by playing this game? I do not think so. However, I have found that my motivation in studying French is sporadic at best. In contrast, I know that I can obsessively play video games for hours. So much so, that I have stayed away from video games for many years, since I tend to be unable to play them in moderation. And indeed, in the last 24 hours of possessing this game, I’ve played it for about two hours.

My hope is that this will be a good motivational tool, to drive me to pick up my French text books more often. I think the interactivity will help in keeping me interested. Time will tell.

I have to be wary of the temptation to buy a “real” video game module for my new Nintendo DS. One of my nieces was playing MarioKart on her Nintendo, and I asked her to show it to me. It was quite a lot of fun! I can see myself ejecting “My French Coach” in favor of a mindless video game and never coming back to it. Maybe I could play just for a little while…

I first watched Holiday many years ago, and since then it’s my favorite Christmas film. It’s a simple romantic comedy starring two greats, Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn. But its message is resounding: money is a means to an end, and nothing more. On top of that, Holiday is bursting with cheer. It always amazes me that It’s a Wonderful Life, which is so dreary and depressing, enjoys such success in contrast.