Hooray!

No, I'm not going to give you a blow-by-blow of the final I had to write three separate essays for that kept me up for 40 hours straight. Nor am I going to whine to you about the week long sound board duties I had for my department's annual 10 Minute Play Festival. And most of all, I'm not going to ask you to feel sorry for me for writing a total of 65 screenplay pages within two days (over 50 of which were done in a single 19-hour period) to finish my 103-page first draft.

(Poor, poor Michael.)

Nope, not going to do that at all.

What I am going to do is tell you that all my work is done, which means before Christmas you should be getting a handful of new reviews: the theatrical release The Good Shepherd (out on Friday), and a few DVDs: the four-disc Narnia set I promised a while back, and Spike Lee's epic documentary When the Levees Broke, which I've heard is nothing short of phenomenal. We shall see.

I also won't be reviewing these next ones for The Cinema Source, but I've also managed to recently see upcoming December movies Dreamgirls, Perfume, and The Good German. So at some point perhaps I'll give you all some brief opinions on all of those.

Oh, what the heck, how about now. Respectively: (1) Fantastic singing, totally generic story; (2) very well made, but made me way to angry to be even remotely entertaining; and (3) highly stylized and mostly cool all around, with a few minor issues.

And with that, I'm heading out to go catch a train home. If you don't check back before then, Merry Christmas.