So I was reading a magazine this weekend and saw that Samsung has just released another slider type phone (1, 2). There are a ton of these style phones available and I keep wondering why. Every time a new one is released I hear nothing but bad feedback on how the slider system works; either they keep breaking or they’re just not as cool as the one from the Matrix. Gadget makers just keep producing new versions, though. Because everyone wants to be Neo.

A few weeks ago I had dinner with a really nifty guy — a professional boxer — who has a new slider phone. It was cool. I wanted it. Why? Because everyone wants to be Neo.

In case you’re wondering, you can buy the actual Matrix phone. You can probably even find a carrier that will service it. But why would you want it? Even if some company decided to take this body style and add all the new GPS and mp3 and camera features that every phone has now, who would want this brick? It’s huge! But I know some of you are going to click that link and buy it. Why? Because everyone wants to be Neo …

Also, make sure to read “What code DOESN’T do in real life (that it does in the movies)“.

Let me say one thing: I was fully prepared to be disappointed by Casino Royale. I haven’t seriously enjoyed a 007 movie since the Roger Moore days. I thought Pierce Brosnan was going to be the perfect Bond; he’s a terrific actor and I’ve loved him in everything else he’s done. I think he was a great choice, but the writing in Tomorrow Never Dies and The World Is Not Enough just didn’t do it for me, and I never even bothered to see Die Another Day. That should tell you something.

I’m a huge James Bond fan. When I was a kid my dad and I would frequently have 007 marathons and watch four or five movies at a time. We used to make compilation VHS tapes (with a TRS-80 connected to the VCR) and put our own graphics and songs on them. I used to spend hours analyzing the bad guys and writing my own spin-offs. I’ve probably seen Octopussy a hundred times. I wanted to be James Bond.

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You’d have to look far and wide to find an actor involved in more projects lately than Alec Baldwin. He’s currently starring in 30 Rock on NBC and this weekend I saw him in two major motion pictures: The Departed and Running with Scissors. I like Alec Baldwin. I really do. His choices baffle me, though. Sometimes he picks pure winners and sometimes he picks dogs.

30 Rock is a perfectly mediocre television show. Tina Fey is a comic genius and the show’s concept is interesting. I’ve only seen one episode, but I don’t think I’m jumping the gun to say that this isn’t exactly a comedy on the same level as Seinfeld or even Everybody Loves Raymond. It’s a decent television show, though, and Baldwin’s character is wonderfully strange and stupid. He’s brought to the show by NBC executives to hawk the G.E. Trivection Oven, an experiment in product-placement which cannot possibly be real, but apparently is. On a five-star scale, this show gets exactly two and a half stars. I doubt it will last two seasons, but it’s not a bad show.

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My girlfriend and I had dinner last night at The Rainbow Room and then went to see The Perfect Victim play at the Whisky A Go Go on Sunset Blvd. We didn’t know it in advance, but the Whisky was hosting a “launch party” for a new concert review web site, TheConcertGoer.com, so there were several bands playing and they were filming.

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This is quite possibly the coolest thing I’ve ever seen on YouTube. It’s The Matrix, starring Kermit the Frog as Neo.

After I shot a (pathetic) 51 at Penmar yesterday, I scooted to Nagao to grab dinner. On the way home, with five steaming cups of miso and several orders of sushi riding shotgun, I popped into the Brentwood Blockbuster because my girlfriend wanted to watch The 40-Year-Old Virgin. My BB account expired sometime around 1998 so I had to buy a copy. The not-very-helpful Blockbusterista said that there were four used copies in the store, but he had no idea where they were, things weren’t alphabetized well, it wasn’t his “usual” store, and he could only sell me a new one for $21.99. Yeah, right.

After spending a good twenty minutes browsing through stacks of dozens of copies of The Adventures of Pluto Nash and the assorted random not-very-good movies that always seem to be all that any BB ever has, I left empty-handed.

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Every now and then the entertainment industry manages to do something right. Last night I saw Little Miss Sunshine at The Westwood Crest Theater, my favorite place to watch a movie. Aside from a few trailers I’ve seen on TV, I had no idea what to expect from this film, so I was pleasantly surprised when it was wonderful. At one point I was laughing so much that I was crying. (I think that hasn’t happened since the last time I saw Steve Carell on the big screen, when Jim Carrey was making him talk nonsense in Bruce Almighty.)

How about this? When’s the last time you saw a flick featuring two actors with whom you’ve shared many a beer? I had no idea that Justin Shilton and Wallace Langham were in this movie. Justin is — follow me here — the ex-boyfriend of my girlfriend’s parent’s good friend’s daughter. I haven’t seen him in about two years, but I used to hang out with him all the time; we went snowboarding together in Big Bear and I actually ran justinshilton.com for a year or two. And Wally is my girlfriend’s ex-best friend’s ex-boyfriend’s good friend. (I haven’t seen him since 4th of July ‘05 when we watched the fireworks with him and his son at Lakeside Country Club.) Both of them are good guys and I was very proud to see them on the big screen.

If you’ve never seen Midnight Run, I’m here to tell you it’s a pretty damn good movie. Charles Grodin always cracks me up. I am way behind on my media consumption this month. There’s the five most recent episodes of Rescue Me and the last two episodes of Entourage waiting on my TiVo.

I’ve been on a bit of a reading binge lately, though. In the last month or so I’ve knocked off How to Lose a Battle: Foolish Plans and Great Military Blunders, Dr. Twitchell’s excellent Branded Nation: The Marketing of Megachurch, College Inc., and Museumworld, and The Best American Sports Writing 2003. I also have four books that I’m dying to read in the on-deck circle right now, too: The Secret Life of Lobsters: How Fishermen and Scientists Are Unraveling the Mysteries of Our Favorite Crustacean, Positively Fifth Street, Next Man Up : A Year Behind the Lines in Today’s NFL, by John Feinstein, and Dr. Twitchell’s Where Men Hide.

My biggest fear was that they were going to screw up the music. John Williams’ score in the original movie made the film. I mean, the music was the movie. There couldn’t possibly be a movie without the duh, duh-duh-duh, da / da-da-daa. The first time I had any idea that there was a new movie coming was when I saw a one-sheet outside a theater about six months ago. It was just his logo on a black background with the title below in a very, very small font. The sight of it brought me close to tears.

Yes, I am that much of a geek.

When I was a kid I lived for each new issue. I was at the comic book store with seventy-five cents the day they got there. My sister and I religiously watched the cartoons. I had the old radio shows on cassette tapes. I painstakingly perfected the S in the margins of every textbook I owned through elementary school, high school, and college. I knew every arch-nemesis, every power, every girlfriend (human or mermaid).

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The only two positive things I can say about Failure to Launch are that it was not quite as bad as A Historyof Violence and that it had a decent soundtrack. (And, of course, for some reason that soundtrack is not available at Amazon or on iTunes.)

Let me put it this way: Terry Bradshaw did the best acting in the film. McConaughey plays the exact same character he’s played in every role he’s ever had. Parker spent the majority of the film being very loud and looking very old.

Let me put it another way: There is a 3+ minute scene in which a couple of the supporting cast members — the “subploteers” — perform CPR / mouth-to-mouth to revive a bird they shot with a BB gun.

The only reason I can’t say that this film was worse than A History of Violence is because at no point did it attempt to pretend that it was a good movie. I can’t imagine that anyone involved with this waste of time even remotely thought they were producing a good movie, and it shows.

If you have a choice between catching a Saved by the Bell marathon on cable and going to see this flick, go with Screech.

Just a bunch of random thoughts I’ve been meaning to post …

• It took me for-freaking-ever to recognize that it’s Matt Dillon doing the voiceover on the Pontiac Torrent commercials. It took me five minutes to find and download Struggle, by Ringside — the music from the commercial. I snagged a couple of their other songs, too. Pretty good stuff. I thought (incorrectly) that it was something by Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, a band I found on the Mr. & Mrs. Smith soundtrack. (Note: If you’re looking to grab the song on the soundtrack via iTunes, they trick you! The song is listed as Mondo Boongo and you have to buy the entire soundtrack if you want to get it. But! If you look, you can find the song on iTunes under it’s actual title, Mondo Bongo. Sneaky iTunes people.)
• I got a black Motorola RAZR (with Cingular) a few weeks before Christmas. With the sole exception of Motorola’s moronic address book — which has been retarded ever since they started making cell phones; why the hell does the same person show up multiple times if I add more than one phone number for the entry?! — this is hands-down the best cell phone I’ve ever had. I’ve had Verizon and Sprint since I moved to LA, and I think that Cingular has the best service here. The reception is even better than it was with my previous Cingular phone (a Nokia) and you just cannot beat the form factor. Slick.
• Quite Frankly, with Stephen A. Smith, on ESPN, is a darn good show. I don’t always agree with him, but I like his delivery. TiVo it. Update: I’ve changed my mind. He bugs.
• If you’re a web developer and you want to add slick graphs and charts to a site, you really can’t do much better than Fusion, from InfoSoftGlobal. It’s good stuff. Easy to build, Flash-animated, XML-driven, works with ASP or PHP. Check ‘em out.
• I’m going to do my damn level best to run the twenty-first L.A. Marathon this year. I’ve been chugging along with a friend since early December and am knocking out 5, 8, and 10-mi runs pretty regularly now.
• Rumor Has It is an excellent movie. Is it Oscar-worthy? No. But it’s very fun and very original and well worth your $10.
• Freakanomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Amazon) is one of the top twenty best books I’ve ever read. A good friend of mine sent it to me as a Christmas present from my Amazon wishlist. I tore through it in two nights and was floored. It’s making its way through my office now. I highly recommend it. (And thanks, Bob!)

It feels like I live in Alaska or something — it’s only quarter-past five and already full-on dark night outside. What’s up with that? It’s been pretty damn chilly lately. Well. Chilly for Los Angeles, at least. It’s mildly annoying because if I turn on the heater in my apartment I have to take my diploma off the wall in my bedroom and stick it behind one of my night tables. I have it hanging directly above the in-floor oil furnace that passes for a heating unit. The heater actually works amazingly well, and quickly. My apartment can go from freezing (okay, mid-40s) to broiling in about ten minutes from that thing. But I worry that I’m going to warp, spindle, or mutilate my diploma, so …

Anyway. I saw Prime last week. Forgot to mention that. It was pretty good. I’d give it four stars just on acting and direction, but the writing fell flat in places, and it didn’t really have a decent ending, so it’s just a three-star film in my book. Of course, I have no book. I also have no standard star-based ranking of anything, so take that with a grain of salt.

Last night I used LimeWire — wonderful tool — and Google to finally get around to finding the version of “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” that plays at the end of Die Hard. It’s by Vaughn Monroe, by the way.

Saw the new Johnny Cash biography, Walk the Line last night. Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon did a fine job of channelling Cash and June Carter. (I’m impressed that the actors did all their own singing, but I can’t understand why the soundtrack has the actors instead of the original songs.) The movie is a must-see if you are a Johnny Cash fan. If you’re not a fan, then you’re probably a commie-loving, Al-Qaeda operative and get the hell off my web site.

I haven’t written anything meaningful in a while, so why start now? Here’s some quick notes from me, because I know you care.

1. The poll question on ESPN’s college football page is, “Who will win Saturday’s showdown in South Bend?” As of quarter-past eleven Sunday night, 58% of the voters are picking Notre Dame. As much as I love Weis’ Wunderkids, as much as I love an underdog, as much as I loved Rudy, as much as I love a good upset, and as much as I would love someone to take down the Trojans … I live in LA. I get to watch USC every week. USC is ridiculously good. USC is better than Florida was in 95-96, and that’s a tough thing to admit. USC is going to beat the tar out of Notre Dame.
2. In Her Shoes is a terrific movie. It’s well-written, the acting is superb, the soundtrack is good, the plot is lovely, and you get to see a lot of Cameron Diaz skin.
3. If you are not winning by more than a touchdown with less than a minute on the clock, do not fool yourself into thinking you’ve beaten the Patriots.
4. A History of Violence is bad. It is pathetically bad. It is painfully bad. The plot is actually pretty darn good. The acting, writing, soundtrack, editing, and hell even the title fonts are wretched. I am seriously considering writing William Hurt and Viggo Whatsisname and asking for $21.50. Spend an hour and a half picking up dog crap around your neighborhood rather than seeing it.
5. Grey’s Anatomy is almost as good as West Wing.

This week’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback includes a delicious link to college football’s funniest fight song. It also includes the best football commentary on the web, and a little bit about that lovable V’Ger, from the first Star Trek movie.