Last night I watched Equilibrium Starring Christian Bale and Taye Diggs. It is set in a future world where all emotions are banned and are regulated by drugs and also by the Grammaton Clerics, super-cops who root out any speck of emotion or evidence of artwork and poetry. Thier job includes burning books and paintings and other such authoritarian fascist duties.

Bale is the highest ranking cleric and is so ruthlessly efficient as to even kill his own partner when he betrays some emotion. In all reality the story in this film is pretty weak, a generic copy of Farenheit 451, but the star of the film are the visuals.

The fight sequences (with the exception of the final one) are crisp and quite imaginative. The Gun Katas that the clerics use are quite impressive to watch, but it is not explained how the clerics have become so superhuman. I initially questioned the choice of putting most of the cops in motorcycle helmets, but it made for some interesting visuals with shattering glass and blood spurts.

The direction is adequate, but the sound design has some strange choices, such as cops who sound like they're talking through radios even though their mouths are uncovered and they are quite close to who they are speaking to.

All in all worth a rent if you like the sci-fi wire-fu genre, but not if you don't.

Also I watched the first disc of Season One of Michael Moore's The Awful Truth. Man Moore can be an asshole, and sometimes I thought he was exploiting some of the people such as the guy who needed an organ transplant that his insurance company refused to provide, but he gets results. The guy got his transplant, the UPS worker who lost his job gets it back, and they run off the crazy Baptist preacher with their Sodomy Wagon. The look on the preacher's face as he sees them coming down the street in their pink RV is priceless.

I also went to see The Matrix: Reloaded today, but I haven't really formulated my opinion's on it yet. I thought it was good, but I felt it was losing most of the crowd who were there to see fight scenes.

And Finally: Showgirls was on television the other day and it was interesting to watch, since instead of just cutting the nudity out of the movie, in most cases they covered it with animated clothing, quite noticable animated clothing.

How do you make a terrible movie more terrible? Take away the only thing in the movie that might be of some interest and cover it with badly animated clothing.