I just watched Thirteen Days. Despite Kevin Costner, it was good. It wasn’t excellent, but it was much better than any movie I can think of that I have watched recently. It was intellectually engaging. Which is more than I can say for that completely unimpressive (despite Angelina Jolie) crap that was Tomb Raider, which I watched on Saturday night. The comparison is inevitable: Indiana Jones movies are not perfect, but they do make a bit of an effort with the script. In the case of Tomb Raider the entire film existed only to package the few scenes where Lara Croft displays her virtues. There is nothing wrong with that, but if that were the primary concern I would prefer an increase in density and quality of the gratuitous Lara shots and a significantly reduced attention to the “plot.” (Or, simply, a well crafted plot of erotic content.)

On a different subject: this is not a new observation, but I find it an interesting cultural difference how most westerners point to their chests when they mean to gesture “I”, whereas the Japanese point to their noses, as if their nostrils were eye-holes for their homunculus.