300 I liked this movie a lot more than I thought I would. After Sin City, I assumed that the question of the comic book adaptation had been settled -- yes, you can make a shot-by-shot remake of a graphic novel if you want to, but there's really no reason that you should. 300 director Zack Snyder achieves a two-things-at-once feel in his film that Robert Rodriguez entirely missed in his; there are scenes where the dialogue being quite seriously spouted by the actors is completely at odds with the visual composition of the shots, and that's the point. 300 works as a film, while Sin City didn't, because the choice is entirely up to the viewer which "version" to pay attention to; you can look at the visuals (which tell the story quite elegantly) or you can tune out the CGI and watch the acting, which is as good as it could be. In fact 300's low budget (relative to other blockbuster action films) is a huge part of its charm. It feels often like a high-school theater version of a much bigger work -- the 300 look more like 15, and there's basically only five speaking roles of any import. After the pointless Sin City and the dreadful Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow I was worried about the future of all-digital film, but obviously there's a whole new group of young auteurs coming up now to whom the style makes perfect sense. 300 isn't a great movie but it definitely stands as a small landmark. It's quite obviously green-screened throughout, but is the first of that sort of movie I've seen where that wasn't the first, foremost, and only reason to even see the picture.

The Simpsons Movie I didn't hate it, but I felt strongly afterwards that it didn't need to be. Unlike the "South Park" film, which came out at the exact right point in that show's life cycle and really elevated both Matt Stone and Trey Parker's ideas of what they were capable of and what the country would allow them to get away with, there isn't anything left to be added to the legacy of "The Simpsons" as a TV series. The movie simply exists. There was money to be made, and so it was, but on the whole the Movie feels like a tired, nothing-added souvenir of a cultural phenomenon well past its peak. Exactly like the "X-Files" movie, come to think of it. It would be nice if we lived in a society where the people who owned "The Simpsons" respected their property enough to just leave it be. In every sense the perfect half-hour sitcom, why take the best-evolved freshwater fish in existence and toss it into deep salt water?

The War I meant to write a piece when it originally aired in September about how important and wonderful Ken Burns' The War is, but I didn't then. Now I'm really not going to give it the time it deserves, because I still feel like I've barely scratched the surface having watched it twice through on DVD. Instead of trying to speak to the film, I'm going to share something I've long thought that hopefully will impress upon you the importance of understanding our history enough that you'll make the time commitment to get through this massive work at least once. I suspect that the United States is presently under the control of men who are old enough to remember the pride, unity, and nobility of the WWII era without necessarily having any real sense of its human costs. The neocons are so consumed by the idea of a "just war" that they'll quite gladly throw out truth, democracy, due process, and much else in the pursuit of framing our various current military exploits in a far more flattering light than they deserve. The War, quite eloquently, puts paid to the idea of a "good" war. It has a lot of other significant things to say about race, class, gender, culture, and nationality, but more than anything else, what is unforgettable about it is the haunted look still in the eyes of men who lost the better part of themselves to a necessary conflict.