Absolutely great! It was like all the best parts of Happiness, Napoleon Dynamite and all those spelling bee films released in the last two years. I love a director that can do dysfunction.

Amazingly, I had never before seen a Soderbergh film. I’m going to hazard a guess that they’re not all as wacky as this one. Schizophrenic as it was, some meaningful emotional impact managed to squeeze through and I came to care about his crazy characters. The generic non-speech was hilarious, the “have one person in every conversation speak in a foreign language” bit was not as amusing. Having seen this side of Mr. Soderbergh, maybe I’ll give in and watch Ocean’s Eleven.

As much as I want to dislike Matt Damon, he’s done some good films, and The Departed counts among them. A great plot, great characters, lots of good old American violence, even the Boston accents were endearing.

London in the eighties was apparently indulging in fashion that was just as embarassing as we were doing here in the colonies. In spite of being a bit hard to follow at times, this film gets into some meaty subject matter in the form of the love affair between a (male) white trash London punk kid and the son of a Pakistani immigrant who endured some pretty substantial racial hatred, some of which came from his now lover. This one also has some iffy production values, but not nearly as bad as Atanarjuat.

Sterling was sort of sucked off my reading list in the wake of the giant crater left by everything Gibson wrote after Neuromancer. It seems that he was off writing about life extension and its post human consequences, and weaving it all into an engaging tale. A page turning story, and interesting in that it doesn’t involve nanotech. On the downside, the title and the way in which it factors into the story are a little annoying.