Thank You for Smoking, Casque d'or, The Notorious Bettie Page, Shanghai Ghetto, & Last Man Standing: Politics Texas Style

Another long couple of weeks and half-assed reviews. I can't wait for election day.

Thank You for Smoking was pretty good, but a little weak in the satire part. I enjoyed it, but it just felt like it should have been much more pointed.

Casque d'or was not nearly as good as Le Trou. I just couldn't care about it.

The Notorious Bettie Page was a pretty good film, although with Mary Harron and Guinevere Turner behind the camera, it was expected. Well, apparently Turner wrote BloodRayne, so it's not a 100% thing, but American Psycho was great. Gretchen Mol was definitely better than I was expecting. And David Straithairn kicks ass in everything he does.

Shanghai Ghetto was a movie I'd seen trailers for when it came out. I saw movies in the same theater every week for a while, and it was before each film. Made me consider watching it in the theater, until I realized it's a Holocaust documentary. Doesn't need to be seen on the big screen. It's about something in history most people never knew about: that the Japanese allowed a large amount of Jews to get to Shanghai in the late 1930s. That they did so because they thought that the Jews controlled the world was a strange thing, but it could have been worse. They at least saved many lives. Their approach to enormous Jewish power was to try to be nice, while the Nazis clearly went in the other direction. I am continuing to see every single Holocaust documentary out there. It'll happen someday. They have to run out of interesting angles at some point.

Last Man Standing: Politics Texas Style was a really interesting look at a local legislative race in Texas, with a look at the 2002 Governor's race for Texas, which was just a big mess of a race. Seriously, why would anyone vote for Rick "I'm not a gay Governor" Perry? Is it just that he's a Republican? Because it's a shame that someone that much worse than Bush gets elected.