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Crappy day at work, so on a whim, saw Silver City, which I knew nothing about, other than the amusing confluence of events that spurred me to choose this film over Sky Captain or whatever. (I could have also seen ResFest at the Brattle, but... I tend to stay away from short-film festival things now. In my experience, they tend to be 25 percent fabulous and amazing, 25 percent meh, and 50 percent Oh my god, shut up, you pretentious hack. The price just isn't worth it if I can't fast-forward through the off-pissing krep.) Alas, the confluence was more amusing than the movie. While Ebert & Roeper apparently went nuts about it, I see that the Globe reviewer gave it 1.5 stars, which is closer to my reaction. Quickly, my thoughts before I read that review:

I liked it OK but can't really recommend it; my main beef was that the lead role was terribly acted. Or maybe "barely acted". The guy was supposed to be a private detective, and acted more like someone playing a private detective in a role-playing game. Speaking his lines and emoting just enough to show that he was paying attention; otherwise taking it easy, helping himself to some more Cheetos. It was kind of embarrassing to watch all the secondary characters else act the hell out of him at every dialogue.

There was positive audience reaction from the anti-GWB bones the film tossed out every now and again, but that was about it. The story was kind of interesting, I guess, with a lot of stuff happening and a clear and intentionally unsatisfying resolution to all of it. There are ways to do this well, especially in political satire. I am not sure that this hit any of them.

NYC Subway Battel | Hot Hot Cockpit Action | The "E" stands for potted mEat

This is a heartwarming story, I say without irony.

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Yes, I played through all of Ace Combat 04 again, blasting through all 18 missions in just a couple of play sessions, which is kind of unprecedented for me. I take a vague sort of snob-pride in not being so obsessive about video games that I try to unlock every single thing, so I rarely bother replaying things.

It's still pretty easy on the 'Hard' setting. In fact, it's probably easier than starting the 'Normal' game from scratch, since the larger mission-award purses let you buy the better planes sooner. I saw that I just unlocked the chance to play the game yet again on a new 'Expert' mode, and the Web tells me that beating that will give me 'Ace' mode. Sheesh! No thanks, twice is enough. It's still a great time, though, and I'll probably get Ace Combat 5 when it comes out next month.

(Addendum to previous post on this topic: Oh, I guess they did send the Marines in. I wasn't really paying attention to the radio chatter on my first play-through. The mission is still kind of silly.)

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A warning to my friends: please don't use eVite, most certainly not to me, probably not to anyone else either. I say this because it looks like Spam (unknown From header, almost entirely HTML body) and will automatically be treated as such by anyone who uses Spam-filtering software (such as myself) and didn't think to have it make exceptions for eVite mail. I am missing a party this weekend in part because I didn't see the invitation until Thursday night (when the host asked me if I got it), too late for me to plan the time for it properly. eVite does have some nice Web-based features, so if you do use it to send invitations, please follow up with a simultaneous plain-old email to your invite list.

Here ends today's episode of Jmac tells you how to act because he must think he's better'n you or sumthn.