Friday Amazon Deals

Only a handful of new ones (but there are tons of active deals in this mega-DVD sale post, and this mostly-DVD post as well) :

The Addams Family: The Complete Series is going for $34.99 (50% off).

The Complete Far Side is back on sale at $75 (50% off).

The Harman Kardon GPS-500 Widescreen Portable GPS Navigator, MP3 Player, and Video Player is on sale for $199.99 (60% off).

As far as I can tell, it's not a part of any of the existing DVD sales, but Season One of Weeds is $12.49 (58% off), and Season Two is $17.49 (56% off).

Sweeney Todd

I liked it.

Even if they didn't use "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd."

This was not the "makes movies so bad that getting your eyesocket fucked by John Holmes would be less painful than watching" Tim Burton behind Planet of the Apes, thankfully. It wasn't the utter genius behind Big Fish, either. This was the quirky, flawed, but watchable one who gave us Corpse Bride, Mars Attacks, and Batman. I'm okay with that.

Basically, this was a fun film, with a surprisingly great performance by Helena Bonham Carter (Burton's current nepotistic casting choice), and Johnny Depp offering a slightly less loopy and more homicidal version Jack Sparrow. The Sondheim lyrics are still wonderful (although fans of Lloyd Webber shouldn't listen to them, as they might experience an epiphany and punch themselves in the balls sixty-two times to atone for their musical sins). We get Wormtail and Snape as the villains, which is always fun. There's also a minor (and, frankly, pointless) Anthony Stewart Head cameo. The gore isn't aimed at the horror audience, so once you get past that and accept it for thin, theatrical corn syrup, it's entertaining. And you do get to see Borat killed.

My only real complaint (other than the aforementioned omission of TBoST) is that there's no marketing tie-in with, say, Hot Pockets for a Mrs. Lovett's Meat Pies product.

Friday linkage

1. P.Z. Myers rebuts yet another creationist. I know that it's the intellectual equivalent of King Kong Bundy squashing S.D. "Special Delivery" Jones at the first Wrestlemania (except for the fact that I always liked Jones), but it's still an entertaining read.

2. Oh, remember how your mom always used to say that you shouldn't run with a screwdriver in your hand, because you might fall and stab yourself in the head, thus blinding you, killing you, or causing brain damage? Turns out that's just another old wive's tale.

3. coffeinhell shares the real secret behind the Wolverine/Cyclops rivalry!

4. This is made of win: a stapler whose head turns 90 degrees to make stapling the binding of, say, zines really easy.

5. The top videos on MTV, VH1, and CMT's online networks in 2007. Note that #1 is clearly an example of virtual rubbernecking.

6. David Pogue stages a one-day strike, and his son explains why you need the tutorial to play Wii Table Tennis.

6.5 Pogue also has a follow-up to the responsible downloading piece from last week.

7. Two banks in our small town have been robbed in the last few days. Neither is ours, but both are walking distance from our bank.

8. Radiohead's free download experiment is ranked as the 59th dumbest business move of 2007. Surprisingly, 1-58 do not include the people who actually spent money on Radiohead's music*.

9. Walmart's cheap-ass Linux box nabs a 1.5 star review from PC Mag. Ouch (although citing things like, "Programs written for Mac or Windows will not run" as a con is silly).

10. Finally, Netscape is officially on its deathbed, If you're one of the seventeen people still using it as your primary browser, switch to Firefox (or Safari, or Opera, or Anything But IE) by February 1.


*Have I mentioned that I find Thom Yorke almost as annoying as Rivers Cuomo?