1. Jason Falkner show, Viper Room June 9, 2005
Jason is one of my favorite songwriters, and he played with a new band at The Viper Room. He played a bunch of new songs, all of them were fantastic. Honestly, I think he could fart in a mason jar and I would have to seriously consider it from an artistic standpoint. He played two songs from his latest EP "Bliss Descending", and played a few from his "Can You Still Feel" album. I have seen him play a few times, but have never seen him do so many songs from CYSF with such a good back up band. I always wish that he had more of the harmonies from the record happening live, but I'll get what I can. This guy is what in conversation you would call "underrated". He's not so much "underrated" as just not really "rated" at all - nobody outside the L.A./Japan song geek subcircle even seems to know about his music and that's a shame. The stuff that this guy plays on guitar while singing is so amazing it literally bums me out.

2. Cinderella Man
Really liked this one. If you saw "Million Dollar Baby", (and didn't kill yourself) , but might have wanted the tried and true "underdog goes through the whole underdog thing, and eventually beats the odds, yadda yadda yadda", well here's your movie. Ron Howard usually doesn't start my engine so much, but this movie was pretty spot on all the way through. Won't destroy your mind with impossible to see plot twists, but very satisfying.

3. The Day After Tomorrow
Ahhh, where to begin. My friend Dan had rented this little number, and the other night we checked it out. Didn't see it in the theaters because I have a standing "no Roland Emmrich or Dean Devlin movies" rule. This was a reaction to sitting through "Independance Day", which not only made me hate the bozos who made that piece of shit, but briefly also made me hate all human life. Since TDAT was a rental, and cost me no money to see, it seemed that there would be no harm in seeing it from a "what the hell, the effects are probably good" point-of-view. Well, to begin let's just say that if I had been in the theater, I would have walked out, if I had rented it, I would have asked for my money back, and if I had purchased the DVD, I would use it to clean up "litter critters" from the cat box. I won't bother with going over all that was wrong with this piece of shit, because I had Dan smack me in the head with a hammer afterwards to try and erase it from my long-term memory.

4. Batman Begins
Pretty great. Not perfect, but easily one of the best superhero movies yet. The good: the character development of the first half of the movie, the explination of the batsuit, batmobile, and all the toys, and Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman. The Bad: trying to pack way way too much into one movie, the really overdone "BATVOICE", the bullshit with Gordon magically knowing how to drive the BatmobileTankThing and fire anti aircraft missles. A good movie, but with all the build up about FEAR and becoming THE FEARED ONE and stuff, once he was Batman, it wasn't so impressive.

5. War of the Worlds
Nice to see Spielberg tryin' to get all Spielbergy. This is kind of a companion piece to Close Encounters, but where CE3k had a magical transcendent ending, WOTW ended a bit like a cold lonely stale fart. ...A fart farted into a lonely distance, and answered with only tears. How the hell can you end a movie like that? It never explained anything - the bloody vines, the aliens' motives, nothing. Just a big mystery, one that you couldn't give a shit less about discovering the answer to once you realize that the aliens spent a million years waiting for their big debut and somehow forgot to do the math on the fact that they would be killed by EVERYTHING IN OUR ATMOSPHERE.

6. Fantastic Four
No way, not even going to attempt this one. As much love for comics as I've grown up having, and as cool as the original Stan Lee/Jack Kirby FF comics were, nothing can disguise the load of cockwash this one most surely is.

7. Sideways
Finally saw this, and it was as good as I'd heard. At this point, I really think that Paul Giamatti should be in every single film released by Hollywood.

It could only help.