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Until now, I had never seen an Oliver Stone film. They’re all rated R and usually filled with violence too graphic for my tastes. The only clip I ever saw of Platoon was about three seconds of a violent rape scene, and it was enough to convince me that Oliver Stone movies are — shall we say? — not for me.

But I had heard and read good things about World Trade Center, Stone’s latest. And since I had already experienced the violence it depicts, having seen all the horror of September 11th as it unfolded on live TV five years ago, I wasn’t worried about being exposed to Platoon level violence. The movie is based on real accounts, after all.

As it turns out, World Trade Center IS violent, very violent, far more than I suspected it to be. Personally, I would have given it an R rating. The depiction of death is too real, too gruesome. Yes, those moments are brief, but so was the rape scene in Platoon, and it haunts me to this day, burned forever in my memory. This simply isn’t the kind of movie a 13 year-old should be admitted to see.

Some of the moments were so harrowing in fact that that Lauren and I had stop to movie, go online, and read the synopsis of the film. We had to know if certain characters were going to survive or not before we could finish watching the film. It was too close to us. September 11 is too fresh a memory. The people depicted in the film were real people with families and loved ones and bright futures ahead of them. I suppose I should have known that watching something like this would cause all the emotions of September 11 to swell up in Lauren and me again, but I wasn’t prepared for that. So we had to go online and find out what happened. We had to know if the characters would pull through or not. It was going to be too painful an expereince to watch them suffer without knowing if a happy ending wasn’t waiting at the end of the tunnel. Whether that happy endiing comes or not, I won’t say. You should experience the film for yourself.

The story revolves around two port-authority police officers (played by Nicholas Cage and Michael Pena) who are trapped twenty feet under the rubble of the World Trade Center. They’re both pinned down, unable to move or call for help. But you can’t set a two-hour movie down in a dark hole where the actors can’t move. That would be a play. Besides, the people affected by September 11 were not only those trapped in the rubble or those who perished in the incident. Families suffered. Loved ones suffered. And so Oliver Stone cuts back and forth between the police officers and their families who fear their hunsbands and fathers may have died. They don’t know. They can’t get word. All they can do is sit and wait. And the performances by Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhall as the officers’ wives is both honest and inspiring. While their husbands endured a physical hell, they endured an emotional one.

The website dedicated to the film has far more special features than the DVD did. After the film, Lauren and I spent another half hour at the site watching the video interviews of the people depicted in the film. So yes, some of the characters survive. If you don’t want to know who, don’t go to the website until after you’ve seen the film. But the interviews are great. It was fascinating to meet the real the people so soon after seeing them protrayed in the film.

Should you see this movie? Only you can decide, but I’m glad I did. It reminded me of how important the war on terror is. It reminded me that there are evil people out there who want to destroy our society as we know it. And yet, there are a lot of good people as well. Brave people. Selfless people. People with real guts, real heart. And that is what makes World Trade Center such a wonderful film. My only gripe — and it’s a big one — is the film’s depiction of a former US Marine who’s participation in the rescue efforts was critical and who, for whatever reason, chose not to collaborate with Oliver Stone in the making of the film. As a result, the marine is depicted as a Christian zealot, kind of a half-crazed god-fearing robot. His character is completely unbeleiveable and probably no where close to being accurate. Yes, he was a Christian. But instead of making Christians look like selfless, decent people, Oliver Stone has to make them seem like dumb zombies. Shame on Oliver Stone for this. Lauren and I were so bothered by it, that we did some research online about the guy. Turns out, a writer from Slate magazine had interviewed the real former Marine. And guess what? He’s not crazy. He’s simply a private person. And Oliver Stone’s depiction of him in the film infuriated the journalist who had actually met the guy. So yeah, Oliver Stone has an obvious bias. Too bad he couldn’t have toldl the complete truth as it unfolded. That would have made a good film even better.

The third book in the Dark Tower series is longer than the first two and moves at a much more languid pace. It took me awhile to get into it. But once I did I was up for the ride.

Much like my favorite TV show LOST, The Dark Tower continues to layer itself in eery mystery. Just when you think you’ve got the gunslinger’s world all figured out, something bizarre shows up that throws all your theories out the window. In fact, I couldn’t help but draw similarities between the mysterious polar bear in the pilot of LOST and the giant, nuclear powered cyborg bear that ravages the forest in the beginning of The Waste Lands. Two crazy bears show up where they shouldn’t be. Coincidence? Probably, but I briefly entertained the notion that the LOST team had taken a page from King’s rulebook.

(NOTE: I’ve noticed several Stephen King references in the third season of LOST already, so maybe I’m not far off base. In the first episode of Season Three, a few of the Others are having a book club meeting in which they’re discussing a Stephen King novel, and in a later episode, as Sawyer lies strapped to a table, the Others bring in a white rabbit with a black number 8 on its back. The image of this rabbit was created by King in his book On Writing. Hmm.)

What I love most about The Waste Lands is that King devised a way to bring back one of my favorite characters who had died in the first novel, the young boy Jake whom the gunslinger adopted as a surrogate son. Their relationship is a great one. The lone gunslinger without a family and children of his own and the young boy whose real father is a major putz. Pardon the cliche, but they complete one another. So I’m happy to see him back.

Jake’s drawing — or his passage from his world into the world of the gunslinger’s — is a particularly intense sequence. One of the highlights of the book.

As for the rest of the characters — Eddie, the recovering heroin addict, and Susannah, the legless black woman who’s true self only emerged at the end of the second book when her two, polar opposite split personalities merged into a single complimentary being — are back for book three. In fact, Roland has been training them with his guns and the ways of his ancestors, and Eddie and Susannah have become gunslingers in their own right. The four of them form a ka-tet, a group of people bound together by ka, the mythical force of the gunslinger’s world that draws him toward the Tower and dictates much of what happens along the way. Think of it as a mystical version of fate.

As for plot, The Waste Lands follows Roland and his crew as they continue toward the Dark Tower and cross a barren land long “passed on.” The villages and farms they find along the way are nothing more than dusty empty shells of a life long abandoned. Toward the end of the novel, the travelers reach the decaying city of Lud, and it’s here where The Waste Lands really takes flight. The last 150 pages zip along and kept me up at night.

I was surprised, however, by the novel’s cliffhanger ending. Fans of the book who read it when it first came out had to wait six years for the fourth book and a resolution to book three. Fortunately for me, I’m coming late to the party. I didn’t have to wait at all. I’m deep in to book four already.

A friend of mine highly recommended this book, and since I had always struck gold with this particular friend’s recommendations, I decided to give it a go. The result was one of the most rewarding books I’ve listened to in a good long while. I loved every moment of it — the story, the language, the world it existed in, the characters with their dark, painful secrets. It was a delightful experience from beginning to end.

Of course, it’s easy to love a story if you have two British readers like Bianca Amato and Jill Tanner telling it in your ear. Their perfomances were flawless, so moving in fact that at times I felt as if I were watching a play or taking a stroll with a real human being as they gave first-hand accounts of actual events. It was captivating. Storytelling at its finest.

I should point out that The Thirteenth Tale is a debut novel. It’s author is a British former academic who decided to take a stab at writing a few years ago and pooped out this on her first try. It’s enough to drive you batty with envy. It’s like a prospector stiking a gold nugget on his first swing of the pick ax. (Notice this is my second use of a “finding gold” metaphor.) The fact that this is a debut novel is also depressing because it means I can’t rush out to the library or book store and pick up another Diane Setterfield novel. There aren’t any. Sigh.

The Thirteenth Tale calls itself as a novel of “gothic suspense” and pays tribute to Jane Eyre and other classic Victorian novels I didn’t appreciate when I read them in high school. But don’t think of it as a stuffy British yawn. It’s anything but.

Margaert Leah is a lonely, isolated woman who works in her father’s antiquarian bookshop and whose fascination with biographies has led her to write a few short biograhies of her own, one of which at least was published. When the book opens, Margert receives a summons from Vida Winter, the most celebrated and mysterious English author of recent history — mysterious because Ms. Winter is somewhat of a question mark. She’s incredibly reclusive. All of the attempts by journalists over the years to uncover Ms. Winter’s past have failed miserably, and not for lack of trying. Ms. Winter is always happy to entertain a journalist curious of her past, but that’s all she ever gives them: entertainment, colorful stories of exotic places and wild adventures and none of which are true. In other words, Ms. Winter lies.

And why, you ask? Why does Ms. Winter invent so many untruths about her own upbringing and history? Well, partially because in Ms. Winter’s mind a lie is always more intersting. She says:

“My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie.”

And so it is that when Margaret receives a summons to Ms. Winter’s home and a subsequent invitiation to hear Ms. Winter’s true life story, Margaret is skeptical. Will Ms Winter finally divulge the truth? Or is this merely more theater, one last chance to tell a good whopper before the terminal illness killing her takes her in the night?

Those are the queations The Thirteenth Tale poses, and Setterfield keeps you guessing almost to the very end. Is it all a lie? Is Ms. Winter simply spinning another yarn? Or is the tale of the Angelfield family, the tale Ms. Winter unfolds, the truth fiinally revealed. I won’t spoil the fun by telling you here. You;ll have to find out for yourself, but I can assure you it’s certainy worth the effort.

Emma Thompson. What a gal. She can act. She can write. She can sound intelligent in an interview. How can you not love Emma Thompson? I first became infatuated with her after Sense and Sensibility. The scene at the end of the film when Hugh Grant returns gets me choked up every time. I thought she should’ve won the Oscar for her performance, but she got the Oscar for best adapted screenplay instead. Oh well, an Oscar’s an Oscar.

Thompson proves that she still has writing and acting chops in the delightful family film Nanny McPhee based on the Nurse Matilda children’s book series. Nanny McPhee is a Marry Poppins-esque character who uses special magical powers to discipline especially naughty children. The seven children in question belong to Colin Firth, a mortician and widower being forced to remarry by his aunt and benefactor (Angela Lansbury). The children in the film were wonderful little actors who pulled off the difficult task of being naughty and adorable at the same time. (One of the documentaries on the special features section of the disk suggetsed that working with children is as difficult as one would expect, especially when its seven children all under the age of ten, many of whom have never acted in a film before.)

The always beautiful Emma Thompson is hidden beneath the warted and ugly face of Nanny McPhee. We and the children find her frightening at first, repelled by her grotesque appearence. But each of her ugly features disppear as the children learn one of five important principles. By the film’s end, Nanny McPhee is radiant in all her Emma Thompson beauty, wartless and wonderful.

The script is sharp, simple, and funny. Colin Firth is Colin Firth, which is to say charming and British and handsome and lovable. Angela Lansbury did what was she was told, but I found her character a little over the top, even for a colorful comedy. The set design was neat and fitting for the tone of the film — bright vibrant colors — but since I noticed it and found it very Un-Victorian, I wonder if such a bold design is a good thing or a bad thing.

It’s a wonderful film, one we’ll likely buy and watch again and show to Luke and Jake once they’re older. I can’t recommend it enough. Magical and sweet and touching and full to the brim of Emma Thompson, one ingredient Lauren and I can’t get enough of.

I enjoyed the first Pirates of the Carribbean movie. Loved it in fact. I thought Johnnie Depp’s performance was hilarious and well worth all the attention it received. The action was intense and spiced with humor. A great flick.

Then I watched this movie, the sequel, and wondered where it all went wrong. Dead Man’s Chest broke box office records for having the largest opening weekend ever. Something like a bazillion dollars. People flooded to the multiplexes to see this movie. Were they as disappointed, I wonder, as I was?

Dead Man’s Chest felt more like a theme park ride than a movie, which is appropriate, I suppose, since the franchise is based on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyworld. The problem with this comparison, of course, is that theme park rides are fleeting bursts of suspense quickly forgotten once the ride stops. You can’t find meaning in a theme park ride, nor is there any rational order of events. It’s just random action: swoop this way, jolt that way, zip upside down, and as quickly as it’s started, it’s over. Please exit to your right.

That’s Dead Man’s Chest in a nutshell, a series of seemingly random events that don’t appear to coincide with anything that has happened previously. One minute the pirates on a ship sailing the seas, the next they’re on an island inhabited by cannibals with Captain Jack mistaken for a god. Imagine that, someone mistook for a god. How original. What a unique plot invention. I never would have thought of it (rolling of eyes).

Tsk tsk. The whole mistook god thing was an old joke back when the Ewoks did it in Return of the Jedi. Doing here feels stale.

But even more annoying was how characters from the first pirate film kept popping up randomly throughout the sequel completely untrue to themselves; as if the screenwriters were bored with their own creations and felt the need to reinvent everyone. The commodore, for instance, the picture of a perfect English gentleman is now a drunk, foul smelling blaggart with a self-serving violent streak. And the fair maiden (Keira Knightley), who was unquestionably valiant to her love in the first film, is now unjustifiably attracted to someone else. Ugh.

No, I was terribly disappointed with this film. Lauren and I even debated turning it off before it had finished, but I said no, let’s give it time. It’ll get better; I’m sure of it.

But it didn’t get better. And rather than leave me in anticipation for the third film, Dead Man’s Chest left me indifferent. Will Captain Jack be rescued from the sea monster? Will Keira Knightley redeem herself and run back to her faithful Will (Orlando Bloom)? Will Will’s father be rescued from eternal servitude to Davey Jones? Do I really care one way or another?

Sadly, no.