My friend got a screener for Charlie Wilson’s War recently, and I watched it last night. I was expecting a great movie, and I got it. It’s hard to believe America came so close to abdicating Afghanistan to the Soviets; here I thought our modern political class was uniquely feckless and dysfunctional.

UPDATE: I had to add some of my favorite quotes from the movie. I don’t think any of them are spoilers:

I just finished reading David Harsanyi’s new book, Nanny State. In it, Harsanyi recounts the exploits of various nannies—individuals and organizations who seek to use the power of government to force adults to make the correct choices about what to eat, drink, etc.

My..erm..friend just got a workprint of Shoot Em Up, the Clive Owen action movie about..well..shooting. Having watched it, my first reaction is “damn, if I’d paid for that I’d be really pissed off right now!”

Yesterday I read Cory Doctorow’s apocalyptic novella, When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth, which was hyped quite a bit on Boing Boing etc but I had no interest in reading until I saw it was included in an anthology of apocalyptic SF. As you may know, I love apocalyptic fiction of all kinds.

When I was in Iraq I bought a bunch of stuff to keep my intellectual faculties going in the face of the not-particularly-challenging day-to-day work. One of the items I most enjoyed was Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences, which is a great little book consisting of a bunch of brief English compositional techniques combined with extensive quotes from English literature demonstrating each technique.

Yesterday I finished reading William Gibson’s latest novel, Spook Country, set in 2006 North America. It references Gibson’s previous book, Pattern Recognition, though a seuel it is not.

There’s not much to say about it. If you like Gibson’s previous works, you’ll like this one.

Right on the heels of my review of Enemies Foreign and Domestic, I’ve finished John Ross’ 800+ page tome Unintended Consequences. Much like Enemies, the high-level plot of this book is one of gun owners enduring one injustice after another until the breaking point is finally reached and they begin to fight back. The details are different, but the message is the same.

So I watched Casino Royale last night. Granted I did have a couple of drinks throughout the movie, but it came across as a very stylized, straining attempt at a Bond movie.

I’m not really a fan of the genre, so my objections are not based on purist grounds, I simply didn’t get the point of the movie. If I wanted to combine violence with World Series of Poker, I’d watch this movie; otherwise I don’t see alot of value.

Of course, the Bond girl was hot, and a more compelling character than usual, but that’s not enough to carry an entire movie.

I watch a fair number of movies, but I never get around to writing reviews. I’m stuck on a tech problem right now, so I may as well kill some time and write up some braindumps.

Children of Men

There’s just something about dystopian visions of a near-future Britain populated by doe-eyed subjects ruled by a right-wing government; both Children of Men and V for Vendetta feature this somewhat unimaginative theme, and yet both end up kicking ass.

At first I expected CoM to be a shitty second-rate action movie (coincidentally, also my expectations for V), but almost immediately it began to show surprising depth and richness. For whatever reason I love dystopian near-future stories, but even given my positive bias CoM was exceptionally well done.