Confessions of a Liberal Puritan

I finally watched and re-watched JM's USA movie Cool Money last week, and found that though the first half hour (which was all I'd initially seen before changing channels and leaving the VCR to tape the rest) can seem a bit slow, it's actually a pretty watchable and entertaining little flick. I guess I was expecting (on the basis of the brief promos) something smooth and very stylish and fanciful (on the order of Peter O'Toole and Audrey Hepburn in How to Steal a Million, perhaps). If they'd stuck with the original title, The Pierre Heist, I might have more correctly tuned my expectations to "true crime story," rather than expecting "frothy fantasy about cool-looking crooks in tuxedos" (which this, of course, was not). ( Sis prefers JM crazy )

I'm sure everybody and their aunt has already weighed in on last Friday's SciFi lineup, but I can't resist jotting down my own reaction to the SG1 finale. ( spoilers for SG1 'Moebius' )

Finally, I see that my earlier prediction was right, about the male critics panning Miss Congeniality 2 (at least if Ebert & Roeper were any indication), but I still predict that this film will do more-than-respectable business. The women and girls who were watching it with me last Thursday were just having way too much fun for it to bomb.

Maybe it's not Shakespeare or Jane Austen, but then it's not trying to be. But what it does aim to do it does very well -- to provide lots of broad comedy and a few telling observations about women and self-confidence (given society's "push-you-pull-you-and-run-you-over-with-a-truck" head games with young girls), in a throw-away wrapper of a reasonably entertaining (if improbable) "solve-the-crime-and-save-the-victims" plotline.