Movie Update

1. Saw Syriana. Wasn't all that blown away by it. It was no Traffic. I don't know why. Maybe it's the lack of characters I could sympathize with. In Traffic I felt for the Benicio Del Toro character, the Michael Douglas character, the Don Cheadle character, and (at times) for the Catherine Zeta-Jones character. In Syriana, no character captured my sympathy and so I never really got emotionally invested. By the end of the film, the most sympathetic character might have been the terrorist. That's messed up.

Not that a movie has to have sympathetic characters to be good. Syriana does a decent job making its point. Like everybody else, I think "Corruption is how we win" should be the next "Greed is good." Syriana is, if nothing else, educational. But it didn't pull me into its world like Traffic does, or like (I suspect) Munich will.

2. In my list of good movies from this year, how could I have forgotten the wonderful Kung Fu Hustle? Think Looney Tunes meets Crouching Tiger.

3. Rotten Tomatoes has a hilarious piece on how to transform this year's worst bombs and make them Oscar contenders. I especially love the suggestions for Hide & Seek (just have Dakota Fanning play every role) and Stealth (have Jaime Foxx play Ray Charles . . . as a stealth pilot!).