In a society filled with perfect people what do you do with those born with blemishes and birth defects? Well, why not send them on dangerous missions to explore unknown worlds? Since they are not "perfect" they have become expendable -- Expendable Crew Members. And then how do you get rid of troublemakers and politically inconvenient people when an omniscient, omnipresent League of Peoples disallows "doing away with" someone? How about if you banish them to a planet that no one can escape from? There you have the whole Expendable story in a nutshell.

Pirates 3 wasn't nearly the dud that Pirates 2 was but it also wasn't even close to as good as Pirates 1. In Pirates 3 they got rid of most of the slapstick, cheeseball antics and they tried to make a story of it. The special effects and action scenes were reasonably well done with the one exception being the part when Calypso was released from her spell and grew to gigantic proportions. That effect has been done so much better in other movies. They could have done better here.

A while ago I read the first book in Orson Scott Card's Homecoming series: The Memory Of Earth. It was interesting enough that when I came across the second book in the series, The Call Of Earth, it snagged me. Unfortunately it wasn't quite so good. The book dragged on quite a bit. Card expanded a lot on the concept of the Oversoul that he created in the first book. However, I think that was the problem with the book. He took it too far.

It's been a while since I created a new Cafepress design. My Fourth of July design from last year was my most popular one so I figured I would make a new design this year. Actually, I'm going to make a few. This design uses a camo texture on the date "070407". I like it quite a bit. Here's a link to the 070407 shop at Cafepress.

For a summer opening blockbuster Spiderman 3 had all the standard elements: amazing special effects, great action scenes, cool villians, and cooler heroes. These elements were combined to make a reasonable movie but it just didn't hold my attention. I was looking forward to the new Spiderman movie just because I liked the other two but this one was a bit disappointing. There were too many times in the movie where the pacing slowed to a crawl and the story just became uninteresting. At least 30 minutes (of the 2:20) could have been cut out without missing any of the action or lessening the story.

There really does seem to be a fascination with time paradox movies in Hollywood lately. Off the top of my head I can think of The Lake House, Premonition, and now Next as recent offerings that had time issues central to the plot. In Next the Chris Johnson, played by Nicholas Cage, has the unique ability to see up to 2 minutes into his future. In Las Vegas, where he lives, this comes in quite handy. Although Chris keeps a low profile he doesn't escape notice. Eventually the FBI tracks him down and uses him to diffuse a national crisis. I won't give anymore of it away.

Meet The Robinson's is a quirky story about time travel and an orphaned boy's quest to find himself and become great. That's it in a nutshell. Along the way it is funny, a bit odd, and sometimes touching. Since it is a kid's movie the most important thing is to see how the kids react. My kids loved it. They thought that the Robinson family was hilarious. The dinosaur was the family favorite.

Sandra Bullock seems to have a recent interest in time paradox stories. First there was The Lake House and now we have Premonition. In Premonition Sandra's character, Linda Hanson, gets the news that her husband has died in a car accident. When she wakes up the next day she finds that he hasn't died. In fact, no one knows anything about it. And again, when she wakes the day after that, everyone is acting like he's dead again. It's a strange story of twisted up time and the dependencies caused by the time aberrations.