Cure, Our Brand Is Crisis, & the entire Sharpe series

Cure is the movie that made Kiyoshi Kurosawa a star, and it is very good. It's also somewhat disappointing in that I think I had it built up in my mind as a great film, and it's merely very good. Of course, the very good film Fallen is similar, so it's not like I don't like movies like this. It's more about the detective rather than a supernatural being inhabiting the bodies though. It's not as good as Pulse, but it's better than most serial killer movies made of late.

Our Brand Is Crisis just makes me happy I never work for bad candidates... oh, man. I could tell some stories, but I won't. At least I don't work for Bob "0 for 7" Shrum. Just watching these guys try to struggle to reframe the election explains why Democrats have been screwed for a while. Ugh. I wonder, though, can we blame Bob Shrum for all the deaths in Bolivia during the revolt? I'd like to. It's not like we can't blame him for a lot of other deaths through his incompetant campaigning.

Sharpe (and his miniseries of now 15 movies (which I've watched over the last fifteen weeks)) follow Lt. Sharpe (and his various promotions and demotions) and British troops from Portugal through Spain, France, England, Belgium, and on into India during and right after the Napoleonic wars. As I'm a fan of the Bernard Cornwell books and had seen the first few when they originally aired on PBS back in 1993 and 1994, I enjoyed them all. Until it got to the one not based on a book of Cornwell's, Sharpe's Justice (although Sharpe's Mission wasn't based on a book, it was at least still set during the war), which is set in Yorkshire after Napoleon was exiled to Elba. And is horrible. Really, just very out of place in otherwise superior TV movies. The series has a lot of people I enjoy in sometimes small, sometimes large roles, ranging from Brian Cox, Pete Postlethwaite, Elizabeth Hurley, and Paul Bettany to Alexis Denisof, Alice Krige, and Phillip Glenister. And that isn't to forget Sean Bean as Sharpe and the very good Daragh O'Malley as Sgt. Harper. The main cast is generally very strong, and the theme song (of sorts), Over the Hills and Far Away, gets stuck in my head quite a bit.