We watched Man On Fire (imdb | rotten tomatoes) last night, and I was prepared for it to be pretty bad — a co-worker said it was awful, and the reviews haven’t been stellar — but I actually quite liked it. I liked the style most of the time, it wasn’t overly predictable, and Dakota Fanning is too good an actor to only be 10 years old…it was rather alarming. And am I the only person who doesn’t mind when Denzel Washingtonn does something other than chew the screen with an Oscar-worthy performance? I like seeing him play the semi-everyman in dumb-ish action movies like Crimson Tide or Fallen.

I always find the vengeance movies a bit hard to swallow, but this one seemed to keep the avenging-angel heroics under control. It was terribly long (2.5 hours!), but not a bad movie at all for a lazy weekend.

I’m off for a week to attend the intensive part of my first MBA course. I likely won’t be able to post while I’m up there (it’s just north of the city, but we stay there for the whole week), so I’ll talk to you in a week.

Be good.

I’ll be off the air for a little while. I’m away for a week and, while I’ll likely have access to a connection, I probably won’t have time to post (nor anything to post about anyway).

Rawk.

Though I didn’t really want to see it, I suggested yesterday that we go see Bridget Jones: The Edge Of Reason (imdb | rotten tomatoes). Why? Because my wife loved the first one, and really wanted to see the second one. Also, she’d worked all day while I took the day off to study, so she needed a treat.

We should’ve stayed home. I can tolerate the first one when she watches it at home, but this one was just painful. My wife pointed out afterward that they’d just taken the first movie, scene for scene, and wrapped it slightly (but not much) different scenarios. If you played them on two screens next to each other, they’d probably pretty much match up at each crucial kissing/rescuing/sad scene. And yet, a whole slew of women in the audience cooed and swooned every time Colin Firth did something predictable.

Making it worse was the two guys sitting next to us; both talked loudly throughout the movie, and one guy would sing along with the soundtrack. My wife was giving them dirty looks long before I got annoyed with them, but when he started singing for the third time I leaned over and told them to shut up. I don’t think they heard me over the chorus of “Everlasting Love”.

Anyway, all around, a shite movie; I’m not really the target audience, but even my wife didn’t like it, and she’s most definitely the target audience. This movie is only useful for straight guys looking to build up bad-movie capital which they can then use to drag their wives/girlfriends to an equally bad movie. Like, oh, say, this one.

Leave it to The Onion to be brilliant & brutal.

“What’s so bad about this? Could some Democrat explain it to me in under an hour, without starting to scream or cry?”

Almost forgot…we watched Bad Santa (imdb | rotten tomatoes) on the weekend. Not bad, but I couldn’t recommend it to many people. It was funny, but uncomfortable funny. And no one who adores the Gilmore Girls should ever watch this movie. My girlfriend plays a slightly different character than the nice mom on TV.

Colin’s blog had a copy of a NY Times story today, which he calls a “…brilliantly simple clarification on why Bush won the election. He got more votes – its that simple. Its nothing to do with religion, or any other dark movement within the US.” I agree that it’s not a “dark movement”, and I agree with the author, David Brooks, that the liberal reaction to the election is akin to the “rage of the drowning man”. I also agree that the exit poll question that has everyone up in arms about “moral values” was worded in such a way that the results might be misleading.

However, I don’t believe for one second that it had nothing to do with religion. Brooks tries to refute this by claiming that no more evangelicals voted for Bush this time than in 2000, but that just means they’ve voted for him both times and in no way relates to whether or not their votes were influenced by religion. A week before the election, before we heard anything about this morality question on CNN, I mentioned a conversation I had with a friend about how Americans vote based on things like religion and gun control. This isn’t a new phenomenon. This wasn’t a sudden uptick in religious fervour. This is the status quo in America right now. The news media were expecting the issues to be war or terrorism or the economy, and it seems they weren’t. Now the media need to explain themselves, so there’s an epidemic of conservatism gripping the US, right?

Ask yourself this, and be honest: would George W. Bush ever have become president if a) his father hadn’t been president, and b) he wasn’t an evangelical? Of course not. I think the former got him to the primary. I think the latter got him to the Oval Office.

I offer up two examples from the last few days of how this election — and this presidency — most certainly have something to do with religion:

• The Washington Post says that christian groups themselves feel they spearheaded the Bush win.
• Karl Rove has said that Bush will defintely seek a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Reuters believes this stance was crucial in gaining a bigger share of the conservative vote.

My mother and mother-in-law would be so proud…we went to church yesterday. Sadly, it would not be for the reasons they would like; last night the Cowboy Junkies returned home to Toronto and set up camp at Trinity/St. Paul’s. It’s the perfect venue to see such an intimate show…all creaky wood and vaulted ceilings. It was meant to remind us that the Junkies recorded their breakthrough album The Trinity Session in a church, just a few miles away.

We were definitely among the youngest people there, and the crowd ranged from young children to people in their 60s and 70s. They played from 8:00 until after 10:00, with one encore: “Misguided Angel”, which they played in a very quiet, mournful way to close the encore and beckon the lights. Not owning any of their discs, that was the only one of their songs that I recognized. They did break out two covers which I didn’t recognize — a Neil Young song and a Townes Van Zandt song that was really pretty — and two more that I most definitely did: Neil Young‘s “Helpless” (which they used to close their first set) and a psychedelic version of the incredible & scary Bruce Springsteen song “State Trooper” from his brilliant Nebraska album. When they played the first few notes I knew what it was and nearly wet myself. Honestly, I would’ve been quite happy if they’d played those two songs and “Misguided Angel”…and maybe thrown in “Common Disaster” too.

Anyway, it was very intimate, as I said before. Margo often talked for 3 or 4 minutes between some songs, but would often lapse back into trances while singing, sometimes howling or getting up to dance. I see now why my brother loves her. And I can see why they’ve entered this iconic phase in their career; no one can name their last 4 CDs, but everyone knows who they are, they still draw crowds, they still sell albums. In my opinion, they’re perfect embodiments of Canadian music, like the Rheostatics. They’re a prairie novel: bleak but beautiful.

It definitely wasn’t a typical show for me, but it was certainly worthwhile.

If you like South Park, dislike Jerry Bruckheimer movies and aren’t afraid of puppets and/or crude humor, go see Team America: World Police (imdb | rotten tomatoes). It’s worth it just for the soundtrack (which includes the classic rock ’em sock ’em tune captioned above).