Today is my beloved's birthday. Happy birthday, honey! He's 34. Yep, I like 'em young.

I bought him Doom 3 and we ate at the Sushi Boat. Mmmm.

Watched a couple of movies recently. First off was the hysterically awful House of the Dead. You know me - I can't resist a zombie movie. But this is staggeringly bad. Bad acting, lots of gratuitous bullet-time scenes, egregious continuity errors,.. I was afraid that this year was going to be merely mediocre but between the brilliance of Spider-Man II and this vomit bag my faith in Hollywood's ability to produce awe-inspiring movies at both ends of the bell curve has been restored. I can't say enough bad things about House of the Dead.

And in other news: The Last Samurai was more in the middle of the bell curve. Na, I'll give it some credit: the cinematography was wonderful and the acting was good. It spent too much time slamming Americans and romanticizing feudal Japan. In other words, I think Watanabe Ken is far more handsome than Tom Cruise is. Actually with the shaved head and the moustache/goatee thing he reminds me of my husband. Anyway, the movie itself has a decent story; I didn't think much of having the American have such a large role in the shaping of Japan's fate.

You know what amuses me? Japan was originally populated by the Ainu, a caucasian people. Oriental people invaded, took their lands, pushed them into marginal areas, etc. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? They also intermarried somewhat and that's why with a little practice you can tell Japanese and Chinese apart. Japanese people tend to have more angular features. No point to that observation; just amused by the Japanese culture=good American culture=bad silliness perpetuated in this movie.