Good Grief! More Reviews!

Black Book (C-) A WW2 era thriller masquerading as a moral quagmire. Director Paul Verhoven's proven himself as one of the most perverse filmmakers this side of Takashi Miike. So this Dutch Jewish girl's friends and family are brutally murdered by the Nazis while trying to escape to Belgium. So she gets caught up in the local Resistance movement, and gets romantically involved with a Nazi official so's she can find out when and where members of the Resistance have been locked up. Along the way, she discovers that a Resistance leader has been selling out escaping Jews to the Nazis, and was responsible for her family's deaths.

The story winds up getting pretty convoluted along the way, (Wait, so the other Nazi official, the fat one with the gross sexual appetite wasn't the mastermind? So was it her family's lawyer? No, so it was the Doctor who was selling out to the Nazis after all?) to the point I'd have to watch it again to be sure. Lead actress Carice Van Houten is quite the little yummy, though. And this being a Verhoven flick, we get to see her nekked a lot. So, um, there's that...


Shrek 3 (C-) Offensively inoffensive. When you see a Dreamworks brand(tm) animated feature, you know what you're getting, and if you expected any surprises, well, it would be like flipping to your local newspaper's comic page and seeing Garfield slashing Odie's face off.

This one has Shrek tracking down another heir to the throne of Far, Far Away on account of he doesn't want the job of king. Meanwhile, the disgruntled Prince Charming stages a coup while Shrek's gone. So Shrek and his pals have to usurp Charming and convince Artie, the potential heir, to take the throne. It's all pretty lightweight stuff. The jokes come and go, and I found myself glad to see the end of it.

One thing I noticed, on the DVD extras, was the odd presentation of a couple of cut scenes. It's noticeable in the fact that they're presented as storyboard presentations by members of the Dreamworks staff, who pitch the scene to other members who laugh obsequiously. My question is, why? The scenes weren't that funny, which is why they were cut, so why were the writers all laughing at 'em? Were they that afraid of getting fired?



The Complete Peanuts (1950-52) (Fantagraphics) (A) -What makes this volume worth getting is this: Not only are you being introduced to the world of Peanuts, and subsequently you can decide whether or not it's worth your while to continue picking these collections up as Fantagraphics and the Schulz estate continue to release them...(oh, believe me, it is!)

...But you'll be astonished on how quickly Schulz found his voice as a cartoonist. The melancholy pervasive through his later work starts to come through as early as '52. When he starts doing Sunday strips, the composition really stands out.His line work is bold and confident. Ivan Brunetti's statement that Schulz was the 'Brando' of comics really doesn't seem that absurd, in retrospect.

The only thing that bothers me, in continuing to collect these, is watching his work start to slide in the '80's. That might be too depressing to continue buying these. And given the regularity in which these volumes are released, it'll be sooner then later.