I saw the movie Hero today. Wow.
That movie is beautiful. The use of color is amazing in the telling of the story and the premise is fantastic. The story is touching and the work is beautiful. It is, in my opinion as good or better than Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The nature of truth is explored and illustrated in a way that you don't expect. There were several times where I felt the movie was nearly over and thought to myself... that was so fast, and yet the story kept unfolding taking twists and turns that I didn't think to try to predict.
Wow. Go see it.

Yesterday TBWITWW and I went to the Taste of Chicago. It was a good time. Kind of like a picnic with a couple dozen thousand of your closest friends. At The Taste, we sampled a variety of food, most of which was excellent. Here's the rundown.

• O'Brien's Restaurant & Bar
• Celtic Corn on the Cob A Taste staple. Roasted corn on the cob, doused in butter, and with their special seasoning blend. Yum! Very Good

• Penang Malaysian Cuisne
• Roti Canai Indian style pancake with curry chicken and potato dipping sauce. This was just okay. The flavor was good but the chicken walked through with stilts on. The serving size was quite small for being 8 tickets ($4)
• Coconut Pudding A light, refreshing pudding with a hint of coconut flavor. If was hotter out it would have been too sweet, but the pudding (which had a texture more like jello) was very good, and a generous portion.

• Bella Luna Cafe
• Beer-Battered Artichoke Hearts Pretty much exactly as advertised. Bite-sized peices of artichoke heart, battered and crispy, with an amazing dipping sauce. These are great.

• Vee-Vee's African Cuisne
• Jerk Chicken with Red Beans and Rice This was a dissapointment. The chicken was not very good and very much full of fat and bones, very little meat, and the beans and rices were also not very tasty. Perhaps we would have gotten a meatier piece of chicken with the full sized portion instead of just the taste.
• Sauteed Goat and Fried Plantain This, on the other hand was very good. The goat was cooked well and has that somewhere-between-beef-and-venison flavor that makes goat good, and the plantains were just at the borderline between being potato-ish and banana-ish, which gave them just the hint of sweetness to offset the mildly spicy sauce. Delicious.

• Cousin's Turkish Dining
• Borek Spinach and Feta Cheese Pie. Spinach and feta in a crispy filo dough crust. While tasty, nothing overly exciting or special about this one.
• Tavuk Adana Spicy Ground Chicken, Greens and Cucumber Yougurt Sauce in a Pita. The greens in this consisted of iceberg lettuce and red cabage. But otherwise this was quite good. The chicken was spicy like breakfast sausage... just a hint of heat in the mouth, but no lingering heat, and nicely offset by the sauce.

Pirates of the Carribbean
At first I was wary of the concept of a movie based on an amusement park ride, much less a Disney movie based on a Disney amusement park ride. But people said it was a great move, and a lot of fun. Well... this will teach me to listen to other people. It wasn't a bad movie, but then again it wasn't a good movie either. There were a few amusing moments, but over all, I was no more engaged by this movie than by sitcoms; not the good sitcoms, but the ones you watch in the half-hour between when one show you like ends, and another starts.
5 of 10

Gunpowder Empire by Harry Turtledove
I really enjoy the Alternate History genre, and this series, based on the idea of parallel worlds, is off to an interesting start. Turtledove realizes that war, especially world wars, lead to great leaps in technology, and in a world where the roman empire never fell, and there have only been border skirmishes, the technology hasn't progressed beyond cannons and muskets. In this book a family comes from a slightly futuristic world to trade in this 18th century level Roman empire. Well written and entertaining, but not real deep, I enjoyed this book.
6 of 10

A Call to Service by John Kerry
They guy wants to be leader of my country. I thought I'd see what he had to say. After reading this 200 page campaign ad, I can honestly say, he hasn't won my vote. The last section of the book, in which he lays out his concept of encouraging service to the country by expanding AmeriCorps and providing incentives for people and companies to do volunteer work and other service activities is great. I'm deeply in favor of that. However, everything before that in the book reads like a campaign speech, in which many things are promised, the current administration is blamed and scorned, and no ideas for actually accomplishing any of the things that Kerry says are needed, are presented.
I'll sum it up for you... George W. Bush: Bad! Clinton: Good! George HW Bush, Ronald Reagan: Okay for Republicans. JFK: Great! Republicans: Bad! Democrats: Good! Nixon: Who?
I still don't have a canidate I want to vote for.
4 of 10

Tonight TBWITW and I rented "The Triplets of Bellville" which despite the title, is not really about the triplets at all. The story starts with a woman and her grandchild living together. The grandchild is clearly unhappy. The grandmother gets him a dog, which helps for a while. The train-set she give him only ends up giving the dog (Bruno) a lifelong animosity towards trains. Then she she discovers his scrapbook full of clippings of bicycles. This is the key. Fast forward to when the grandchild his competing in the Tour de France and is abducted and taken to America by the French Mafia. Grandmother gives chase and in America meets the triplets. With their help (and Bruno's) they rescue the grandson and defeat the Mafia.
This is a great story, told in the broad strokes that only animation can make work. The most implausable things make sense, because in the world of the movie they have been established as reality. The animation is interesting and the characters are fun. And, there about 5 lines of dialog in the entire movie. Which doesn't take away from it in the least.
8 of 10

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden surprised me. It was on the shelf at home and on the list of books that's been floating around the net, so I thought I'd give it a shot. Knowing nothing about it other than the title and what the cover looked like, I expected it to be okay at best. The cliche holds true though. The cover tells you nothing. The story in this book is told from the perspective of a Geisha who begins working in the time just before WWII. It is written as if dictated by the Geisha (now living in New York) to a friend. The author does a great job of getting that feeling across. The entire tone of the book is conversational, and carries an undercurrent of shared knowledge. You feel that you have some background that makes the story immeadiatley identifyable. The tone is light and relaxed throughout. In the end you feel like you've learned a bit about a friend.
There are no earth-shaking revalations, or even many surprises along the way, but this story doesn't need them. It is a relaxing read, yet still one that's hard to put down because it makes you feel like you do when the phone rings while a friend is over.
8 of 10

This is not the first time I've read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, and it probably won't be the last. However, I think I like the book less and less with each reading. This book is really two books put together, it is a novel and and political manifesto combined into one. The novel is interesting, with creatively written charachters who are larger than life. The political manifesto is impassioned and powerful and well thought-out, although, it seems, from a limited worldview. Unfortunately the switches between story and lecture are difficult to wrap one's mind around at times. And when a character gives a 3 hour speech, it makes for a long book, in much the same way as reading Shakespeare isn't nearly as great as seeing Shakespeare performed.
My biggest problem with the novel itself is that, while the characters span the spectrum from ultra-bad, to super-heroic, and several levels in between, the non-extreme characters are completely in-effectual, and in the end are written off. Eddie Willers is one of the most interesting characters in the book, yet at the end, he's left in the middle of nowhere. Cherryl Taggart is one of the only characters who shows any change, and she commits suicide. Which leads to one of the major issues with the integration of Ayn Rand's philosophy into the story. Her sociology seems to only apply to her heros. By the end of the book, the average person has been completely eliminated from the story.
And here is where we transition from the novel to the manifesto. Ayn Rand places the highest value on the the intellectual. She holds the human mind as her God-figure and claims that a body without a mind is a corpse. The builders of factories, the inventors, the creators of wealth are her heroes. This is all well and good. Acheivement must be celebrated. The goal of everyone should be to add something good to the world and make it better than it was when they started. But... the laborer seems to have no place in her philosophy. The average mind has no worth to her. There are many people for whom a simple job in a factory is enough. There are people for whom, even that is a great acheivement in life. In her value system, the person who does not trade value for value, is evil. Yet there are some who cannot contribute as much as they need to survive. A person with a physical handicap may not be able to do work on the level of someone who is not. In her system, this person would seem to be the "looter" she rails against. Like communisim is a theory that is great on paper, but requires that you ignore those who are unwilling to work, Ayn Rand's subjectivism ignores those who are unable to work.
Hank Rearden may be one of the greatest minds ever placed on paper, but without the people in his factory, he'd have no Metal.
A body without a head quickly dies... but a head without a body is only useful on Futurama.
6 of 10.

TBWITWW rented Lost in Translation last night. Wow. I was very dissapointed. It was like watching someone else's real life. As we all know, real life just isn't that exciting most of the time. You spend a lot of time sitting around doing things that are of no interest whatsoever to people outside of your life. This movie captured that perfectly. The characters were realistic and believable, but in the hour and a half of the movie there were about 5 minutes that were interesting enough to make me feel like it was worth giving up part of my life to watch theirs. The actors played their parts with sincerity and honesty, and with a more interesting movie, they would have been amazing.
In all honesty I hoped for so much more, something to make me think a lot more than I did, something that would bring a smile to my face perhaps, but in the end, I was left unfulfilled.
If you're thinking of renting Lost in Translation, do yourself a favor and rent Punch-Drunk Love instead.
3 of 10.