This life's hard, man, but it's harder if you're stupid.

Supernatural, Season 4
Bunny Colvin, Evil Angel of Darkness. Well, Kripke got some quality guest stars for this season including Robert Wisdom, Misha Collins, Kurt Fuller, and Richard from Felicity. Sadly, the casting for the females is rarely as good. I realize you can't have Amy Acker on every week but there must be some actresses in Hollywood and Vancouver that are both hot and able.

"You don't wanna go fightin' ghosts without any health insurance!" Sam, you may be a poor man's Riley Finn, but you you are no where near a Jim Halpert. (Padalecki was working his best David Copperfield with a dash of Freddie Mercury in that de-deomonizing stance.) But I do appreciate the writers' trying some deeper, more ambitious storylines (God! Lucifer! Angels at war!) and even doing a decent job with the ones they rip off.

You poor, freakish, unnatural, stumpy little bow-legged Lamb Of God. Sniff. Of course, my favorite part of the show remains the Dean and the Demian's recaps.

Merlin - Well, it's not as bad as the Flash Gordon reboot, but not that much better.

Near Dark - Lost Point Break Boys! by Katherine Bigelow!
There's plenty of bloody wanton violence - including several scenes of vamps flambe, but it moves at a dirgelike pace with a lot of WTF scenes that take you out of what little plot there is to the movie. Like, say, the relationship between a young Adrian Pasdar and some random blonde we never hear from again which is the basis for the whole damn movie. Essentially, she was a cute stranger and he was bored on a Saturday night in a small town, and she bites him when he makes with the date-rapey groping. Twu wuv!

And why does Pasdar just stand there expecting his 8-9 year old sister to outrun a station wagon of vengeful vamps (one of whom is a young Bill Paxton)?

But you do get to see Lance Henriksen with a rat tail! So there's that!

The Friends of Eddie Coyle - Subtlety writ large. Wait. No, really. And it's from the guy who directed Bullit.

Public Enemies
Funny. Michael Mann is known for action thrillers, but to me his best film is The Insider where the only action is Russell Crowe falling down on the front lawn.

Anyhoo - torture and interrogation techniques, surveillance techniques, who are the criminals? Lofty questions, all, and there was a fantastic cast in amazing costumes... but I felt so detached from it all. And the only question that's answered by the movie is: Is Johnny Depp unsurpassingly cool even with a pencil-thin mustache? (Answer: Yes.)

If you want good crime drama, go with Eddie Coyle.

Oh. It was my birthday. And I thought of this.

Sally: No, no, no, I drove him away. AND, I'm gonna be forty.
Harry: When?
Sally: Someday.
Harry: In eight years.
Sally: But it's there. It's just sitting there, like some big dead end. And it's not the same for men. Charlie Chaplin had kids when he was 73.
Harry: Yeah, but he was too old to pick them up.