In brief...

A bunch of small things, none of which require a full blog entry.

G minus G.

I'm pretty sure Garfield Minus Garfield isn't very funny to me any more. There are too many moments that I recognize from my own life. Poor bipolar Jon. Maybe I'll get to a point when I can laugh my fool ass off at it again, but for now it's too close to a somewhat painful home.

Arena Football.

As I type this, the Philadelphia Soul (my team now that my old team went out of business) is leading the San Jose Saber Cats 44-27 in Arena Bowl XXII. If you're a sports fan and you've never been to an Arena League game, I highly recommend it. It's high-speed, high-scoring, high-skill, rock and roll football. I was in the house when the Albany Firebirds won the Arena Bowl in 2000, and it was one of the best sports experiences of my life. As a bonus, the Arena Bowl is in New Orleans this year.

Now it's 46-27. The Soul have "PHL" in big letters on the fronts of their jerseys.

The Dark Knight.

Overall, Dark Knight is magnificent. Go see it; it's an Iron Man / Spider-Man 2 / X-Men 2 level superhero movie. Heath Ledger is more amazing than you've heard he is.

No big spoilers here, but I had a couple significant beefs with the film. 1) There was no effort whatsoever to make Gotham not look like Chicago. Too many exteriors of the city features wide-open boulevards in a city that had been clearly designed in the previous film as cramped and claustrophobic--you know, like Gotham City. 2) The movie is about 20 minutes too long, in my humble opinion. In retrospect, the subplot with the Asian gangster ended up having much less of an impact on the story than it looked like it was going to, and could have been seriously compressed. Something needed to go; my attention was getting tired in the final act, and a good screenplay trim would have taken care of it.

Hellboy 2: The Golden Army.

This is a love it or hate it movie. I loved it. It looks like all of the cool stuff from Pan's Labyrinth all the time. The first time I saw it I thought the story was thin; the second time I changed my mind. The story isn't thin, the visuals are so dominating that everything else is thin by comparison. Even if you hate the story and the characters, it's just beautiful to watch, and the most delightfully imaginative movie I've seen since The Fellowship of the Ring.

Getting my first manicure and pedicure

was awesome. I will do it again. I probably won't get color on my toenails again unless I go with James Bond.

I would kill James Bond

for his place in Hell's Kitchen. Kill him dead.

James Ricks

came to see Henry IV, Part 2 last night. I was surprised by how thrilled I was to see him. You go, James Ricks. You are awesome. I hope my Hamlet cast and his Richard III cast can find a way to hang together. With those two scripts, we're going to need to lighten things up after rehearsal. It's going to be a great fall for Shakespearean tragedy in Richmond.

Wall-e

I can't believe I still haven't seen it. Liz is going to kick my ass.