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Made of some sort of super-alloy of gold, titanium, and win.

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A generous person would regard it as a positive trait of mine—forgiveness, the ability to grant the benefit of the doubt—that I can tell everyone who will listen that a movie looks like it'll suck harder than a $10 whore but then I'll go tosee it anyway. As it turns out, 21 sucked a lot less than I expected. It's based on the book, Bringing Down the House by Ben Mezrich, which I read and really quite enjoyed some years ago.

The movie diverges significantly from the book, which itself is a true(ish) story, but this turns out to its advantage in my view. The movie introduces an antagonist in the form of Laurence Fishbourne's Vegas security consultant, and wedges in the mandatory love interest too, neither of which I remember from the book. These changes ultimately make the story a better fit for the movie medium, though they're a little more on the formulaic side than any of us would have wanted.

In fact the whole movies looks like it came off the end of a production line, with fewer surprises than a transparent Kinder egg, but if it doesn't stand out as fantastic it also doesn't stand out as terrible. The gambling and maths angle appealed to me, and made it that much more enjoyable. In the end I wouldn't be confident in recommending it to someone who didn't share those interests.

Maybe sit it out and go play the slots instead.

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Marks out of ten: 300

Ok, for a change I'm going to take a break from my usual love-it-or-loath-it style and give you a mixed review. I enjoyed this film, but it wasn't as good as it could have been. It had everything I knew it would have but none of what I hoped it would have.

300 is a ball of solid testosterone marinated in adrenalin and wrapped in a loin cloth. It's a style-fest, a gore-fest and a comic book on the screen. Every part of it looks beautiful: every beheading, impaling, stabbing, slicing, swing of a sword or hurling of a spear is crafted into a piece of art visible for one twenty-fourth of a second. Like its predecessor, Sin City, you could take any given frame from this film and hang it on your wall. Just don't let any children or the faint of heart see it. There will be blood.

If that doesn't sound appealing then you're not going to like 300. There's not much more to it than that. There are no characters to get behind unless you get caught up in Leonidas's sub-Gladiator quality bellowings about honour and glory. The parts that aren't directly about putting sharpened bits of metal in people seem to have been fairly dubbed the "bathroom breaks".

But then, if you're not all about hardened men's men kicking ass so hard the Persians are still feeling it 2500 years later, then what are you watching this for? You won't feel anything when any character dies. You won't get dragged into caring about the people of Sparta. But you might just be so pumped full of adrenalin that you punch a hobo on your way out of the cinema. (Note: Don't do that.)

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Final Fantasy XII is better than I expected. I got it yesterday afternoon thanks to an anonymous benefactor and my clock is already showing a worrying eight hours played. In typical Final Fantasy style, I was awestruck before I had even got to the point of entering my name (or the point where you would ordinarily enter your name—you don't get to do that in this game so I have to play as Vaan instead of my more usual Poo).

The battle system is a huge change from the last game. There are no more random encounters. Monsters are visible on the world map, so can be approached or avoided. Characters control their own actions according to pre-set strategies but accept orders when you want to give them, so you can take as much or as little control as you want. I don't exactly keep up with gaming news but I remember reading some objections to this system. I like it. Let's face it, most of us just held down the circle button for the random battles in the other games so that "Attack" would be selected. This just automates that process, so you can focus on just the important actions.

One small thing that I really liked and which is just indicative of the overall polishedness of the game is the fact that several save points warn that the area you're in will take a long time to get out of and suggests that you may want to save to a new file. This is brilliant. How many times did you save after what later turned out to be a point of no return? Never again.

I'll avoid making overly-favoursome comparisons to VII for fear of being lynched, but this really is a very good game. Frankly the only reason I'm not playing it right now is that I can't get access to the television. Otherwise I think I'd probably just play it through in one sitting and come back here with a comprehensive review in about 100 hours.

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I've been living a lie. All of these entries I keep writing about movies, all the news and reviews, they're all a sham. I'm not a proper film fan, for two unavoidable reasons: I've never seen The Godfather and I haven't seen Rocky.

Thankfully our culture is riddled with the elements of cultural osmosis. I've seen enough parodies, references and sundry derivatives to have an idea of what these icons represent to the people who have got up off their asses (or in the case of iconic films, I guess got down on their asses) and watched them. This is what I have gleaned about Rocky:

A flawed protagonist with a simple life and simple ideals, driven by a deep desire and his true love for another, trains, prepares, and puts his heart and soul into a fight. He does his absolute best. And by the end, it doesn't matter if the judges say he won or lost the fight, because that's not what it's about. It's about being all you can be, whatever that is. It's about being proud to be who you are. And it's about the crowd, both in the movie watching the fight and in the cinema watching the film, knowing that they're watching someone special.

At least, that's what I think Rocky is about. It's what Rocky Balboa is about.

I'm reserved about saying this so early, but potentially film of the year for me.

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I was expecting The Chronicles of Narnia minus all the overbearing Christian allegory. Instead, Pan's Labyrinth is more like Schindler's List with fairies. And in Spanish. Rather than use the real world of 1940s Spain as a launching point for a child's journey into the fantastic, à la Narnia, Labyrinth is mostly set in reality with only brief forays into the Labyrinth. That reality, with Franco's fascists hunting freedom fighters in the woods, is far scarier than anything in a fairytale. Even in farytales like these, which are much closer in style to the Grimms' than to Disney.

That this film is the product of the same mind that inflicted Mimic and Blade II on the world is astounding. It's a masterpiece, in the literal sense. Undoubtedly the highlight of Del Toro's career (okay, so I haven't seen Hellboy but I think it's a safe bet), and a confident prediction for at least a nomination in the foreign film category at this year's Oscars.

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"Adaptation for the strip-mall cineplex."

Of course I haven't actually seen Adaptation yet (it's on its way from Screenclick) but that summary sounds about right from what I know. My own, less erudite but possibly more accessible, judgement is that Stranger Than Fiction is a fantastic premise in search of a story to do it justice. It's worth seeing, and it has some delightful moments (Ferrell's reaction to hearing about his imminent death is hilarious), but it really doesn't live up to its promise.

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Anyone else watch this yesterday? I really wish I had enough confidence in other people to be able to sit back and laugh at Liddle in the comfortable knowledge that no-one could fall for his deranged ramblings, but unfortunately I don't.

Nearly everything he said was wrong in at least one important respect. But I really got quite annoyed when I realised this simple truth: Liddle interviewed a number of prominent atheistic intellectuals, including Richard Dawkins and Peter Atkins. He must have posed them the same questions he spouted in his commentary, including questioning how science is supposed to provide moral guidance. This is such a frequently raised question, and so easily answered by any thinking atheist, that they cannot have failed to provide a satisfactory answer. That he continued to pose the question, and left it unanswered, in the show means that he is either too dumb to grasp it--which I find highly unlikely--or deliberately ignoring it and knowingly broadcasting a deception.

I won't try to talk about all of the rest of the show, but it was all similarly absurd. You can watch it online at The Richard Dawkins Foundation.

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The most annoying central character since Kevin McCallister actually appears to become slightly more competent after his surprisingly (and disappointingly) non-fatal lobotomy half way through this farce. The giant killer radioactive snot monster is off screen for far too long, especially since its existence is largely ignored when it's not around. There's no sense of danger. Nor is there much in the way of pace. Or anything praiseworthy, really.

It's a pity. I usually enjoy a good monster rampage movie.

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I want to be a secret agent. Seven thumbs up.

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