November Update

Apologies once again for going so long without posting - apparently there are about thirty people out there who check this thing at least once a week for updates, and I'm letting you down. Also, do I know more than thirty people?

First of all, let's just consider the most magical event from this last week: Seven years after the Sept. 11 attacks, we now have a President-Elect Barack Hussein Obama. If you had told me back in those cold, paranoid, anthrax-laden days back in September and October of 2001 that this would happen, I wouldn't have believed it. I still don't think it's quite sunk in.

In more ironic news we have this figure:

California Proposition 2 (humane treatment for farm animals): Yes 63.2%, No 36.8%
California Proposition 8 (bans same-sex marriage): Yes 52.3%, No 47.7%

So there're about a million of my fellow Californians who were more moved to aid lovable pigs and chickens than they were to leave committed gay and lesbian couples alone. Pretty sad, but that's a problem with direct democracy: it rewards sentimentality and fear-mongering in equal amounts.

I also intend to get back into the movie-reviewing game, but here's a sampling of what I thought about the movies I've seen in the last month or so:

New movies:
Appaloosa: 8/10
Religulous: 6/10
Quarantine: 5/10
Body of Lies: 4/10
Ghost Town: 7/10
W.: 5/10
Let the Right One In: 8/10
Repo! The Genetic Opera: 5/10
Zack and Miri Make a Porno: 5/10
The Lost Skeleton Returns Again: 7/10

Old movies:
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three: 8/10
Raw Force (1982): 7/10
Homicidal: 6/10
Strait-Jacket: 6/10
Midnight Cowboy: 8/10
The Stepfather: 7/10
Cat-Women of the Moon: 3/10