Look, I know I shouldn't be saying this because this book is the IMPORTANT BOOK to keep children off of drugs, but it's pure drug hysteria. It's one of those books that you read before you even know anyone who drinks beer and it scares you. Later on, you take drugs anyhow especially when you realize that your potsmoking cousin has yet to shoot up with heroin. By making a huge issue out of drugs, it undercuts it's message and renders it useless. False notes include:

"Alice" being tricked into taking acid: Acid's expensive. Acid's also easy to freak out on, and if you are with someone whose tripping that isn't liking the experience, it's going to ruin your evening. Usually when people take acid for the first time, their friends make sure that they are not going to go paranoid.

Dealing to school children: Why would 10 year olds want the stuff? They've all been indoctrinated in the "Drugs kill little kids" paranoia. If you were dealing to elementary kids, you'd be lucky to get out of the playground alive.

Being raped by heroin addicts: Heroin kills all sexual urges. Nothing more to say there.

Shooting up after being on acid for awhile: People don't go comparison shopping for drugs. People tend to settle on what they like. I was a pothead in college. My friends were drunks. We usually didn't mix and match and I only know a few people who even tried smack or cocaine.

Being tricked back into Acid: This had to be the most ridiculous scene in the book. Alice is babysitting. She eats the candy in the dish. It's Acid. She goes nuts. Huh? Did her friends break in when she wasn't looking? Did the nice young couple that hired her do it as part of the DRUG CONSPIRACY! Is this the magical Acid that doesn't fall apart at room temperature. Besides that why would a drug addict want to actively recruit other addicts. Drugs aren't plentiful. If someone wants to stop using, you let them. It leaves more for you.

It would have been so much more realistic if "Alice" had tried to hang out with her old friends and realized that they had nothing in common and that made her want to go back on drugs if only to have something to talk about with them. The evil drug addicts who try to get their lost sheep back into the fold is the stuff of Moonies, Scientologists and Christians - not drug fiends.

I could go on but I won't. All in all, this is a silly melodrama, with a lot of drug myths strung together in order put fear into the hearts of teenagers. If you want to read a REAL diary about drug addiction - read THE BASKETBALL DIARIES by Jim Carroll. It's urbane, realistic, funny and blisteringly evil. It shows the pure horror of drug addiction from the perspective of a punk kid who doesn't realize how horrible life is getting for him until it's too late. He's not a whiner like "Alice" and he's not making excuses for himself and there's no "He died of a heroin overdose isn't that sad" shock ending. The movie is Disney-melodrama, but the book is pure brilliance.

For other books about drug addiction try Please Kill Me: The Oral History of Punk, Trainspotting or even Naked Lunch.

If you want to know what drug addiction is really about then don't read the literary equivalent of Reefer Madness.

These four novellas are some of the best writing ever done by Stephen King or any writer for that matter and they show his versatility as well as his grasp of the human capacity for both decency and horribleness. His horror is good not because it's original (although the Gunslinger series is one of the most unique series ever written) but because he captures human beings at their most ordinary and makes it extraordinary. It is no coincidence that these character driven stories have inspired three of the greatest movies of all time. Individually here are my impressions.

"Rita Hayworth and The Shawshank Redemption" - I loved this story the first time I read it because of the interaction between the asocial banker and his narrator friend. It still holds up, but the movie made it much better. Some might be disappointed because this book goes for realism where the movie went for emotional heartstrings, but it is still an excellent story about hope and redemption and patience.

"Apt Pupil" - even creepier than the movie. The 13 year old kid at the beginning has something wrong with him. It's not just the loss of innocence, but the story of monsters being given forms. The 13 year old's fascination with brutality and death is given free reign when he comes face to face with one of the greatest killers of the 20th century. Without an inkling of regret he makes the old man tell his stories and gets off on them. This is one of those stories that makes you remember how creepy you might have been as a teenager, how creepy other teenagers might have been and how the conscience can be turned off for good. If you were feeling too happy with SHawshank, Apt Pupil will bring you up short.

"the Body" - A bittersweet tale of four boys travelling to see a dead body. Most of their conversation is the kind of "up yours. Suck my big one" kind of talk you get from 12-year olds but buried beneath the surface is a real pain in all four of them. It's only the narrator and his friend Chris who recognize that their lives can be different and part of the journey is the friendship between Narrator and Chris developing into a mutual partnership agaisnt the forces in their lives that will drag them down. Also, Stephen King makes reference to his friend Harlan Ellison with "I have a friend who writes stories in the window of a bookstore". It's one of those things that I always like about Stephen King. He's not only honest about his influences and likes to promote people that you might not be reading, but he's also bereft of the competitive nastiness that would screw up these friendships.

"Breathing Methods" - this one is just weird. There is a framing story about a bunch of rich guys who meet at an impossibly huge apartment to tell stories and then there's the story about a woman who gives birth under extremely unusual circumstances. It's one of those stories that you are going to love or hate dependign on your sense of humor, but you probably won't forget it for awhile.

So definitely buy this book. Make your own decisions about these stories. Some you'll love more than others. Three of which you'll compare to the movies either favorably or unfavorably but they will stay with you.

This movie opens with Crocodile Dundee blowing things up in the New York Harbor and instead of getting arrested, the Coast Guard (or is it NYPD) laughs because he's just another whacky Australian engaging in antics. Because after all, no one that strange would ever be in New York City so they should give him the benefit of the doubt or something.

It just gets worse. As Croc decides to get a job dealing stationary, the girlfriend's old boyfriend/friend/who cares he's dead 10 minutes after you see him anyhow gets pictures of drug dealers shooting people. He's shot but not before getting the pictures to her. Oh yeah, and the drug dealers seem a little more like drag queens than big time dealers. But then again, these are Hispanic actors and it would be years before Robert Rodriguez did any movies that anyone would want to be in, so they took the dealer roles because La Cage Aux Falles wasn't hiring. There's also the big white guy with the ponytail who would later go on to Hong Kong and get beat up by Jet Li in a dozen movies, but he's pretty inconsequential here.

And when the Crocodile Dundee gets a "gang" (although real gang members don't wear mohawks because their friends would beat them senseless for it. Nor do they cultivate a Boy George look, unless they have discovered new things in prison) to help him break into the dealer's house and rescue the girlfriend, the tamest version of Wild One comes on the soundtrack and you know that Iggy Pop should sue whoever convinced him to give the rights over.

And the less said about the cowboy junk at the end the better. Although it's not as awful as the rest of the movie, you are cheernig on the bad guys by this point, if only it would mean that the movie would end sooner.

So if you remember watching this movie as a kid and you are tempted to buy it now, don't. Let your memories lie dormant without trouble. This is not even a bad movie that you can enjoy (like Showgirls). This is just bad.

Better Tomorrow was one of the most boring John Woo movies I've ever watched. Over and over again Chow Yun Fat whined and the other guy tried to make things right with his whiny brother played by Leslie Cheung. Even the final gunfight lacked the charm of other Woo movies.

This movie, on the other hand, is amazing. The first five minutes give you all you need to know to keep up. And then it's off to America to see the TWIN BROTHER of the Chow Yun Fat character from the first movie (yes, we know it's a soap opera plot device, but who cares?) runnign a restaurant as gangsters with a distinctly Chinese-British-phony Italian accent try to run him out of business. His "You don't like my rice" line is classic as he has them apologize to his rice.

Anyhow anotehr gangster comes to stay with Chow Yun Fat and it turns out that his associates want to kill him (and kill his daughter pretty fast too) and so Chow is in the midst of the gun battle. Shortly thereafter Lesli Cheung gets shot, insists upon calling his wife and in the time he spends talking to her he could have had those bullets removed. I'm just saying.

ANyhow it all comes down to one of the most kinetic, drawn-out, enjoyable battles in history of films as the three take guns, rifles, machetes and basic cooless in order to wipe out the entire Hong Kong gangster structure at once. I just can't say enough about how cool the final gun battle is. I don't even remember the boring parts then (and tehre are ALWAYS boring parts in Hong Kong movies. The Killer suffers from the 5th or 6th viewing becasuse of those damn guilty conscience scenes and musical montages) and I even forgive Woo for the first subpar movie (I almost forgive Chow Yun Fat for being in City on Fire, but I can't take it too far now)

So buy this movie. Or wait until a better DVD comes out as indicated by another reviewer. But definitely go see it if it comes to a theater near you.

While Phoenix in Obsidian is a nice stand-alone that has next to nothing to do with the rest of the book, it doesn't do enough to save the book from the large price tag.

The other three stories are important stories in the Eternal Champion series. The Eternal Champion is the first novel written when Moorcock was 18. Besides a nice plot twist, it's not much more than a standard Sword and Sorcery fantasy indistinguishable from hundreds of others. The Sundered Lands has a little more depth to it, but that only means that you can't give it the benefit of the doubt that you can give to The Eternal Champion. It has too many elements of other Moorcock books so you recognize every part from a better book.

And To Rescue Tanelorn is a slight story indeed, only there to introduce the reader to Tanelorn which shows up in many other Moorcock books.

All in all, this is a great book to familiarize yourself with teh concept of The Eternal Champion, Tanelorn and even the black blade, but it's definitely not the first Moorcock book you should buy. Unless you are already a fan, you will not be impressed. Read Elric or Corum or Hawkmoon if you want a good introductory Moorcock book.

I think I am finally going to have to admit that I like Keanu Reeves. Every movie I see him in, he's Ted. Ted the lawyer, Ted the Christ-figure, Ted the Buddha-figure, Ted the son of Satan, Ted the guy with the wife turning into a vapire, Ted the serial killer. He's just the same dopy guy in every movie and yet that character is really beginning to grow on me and I'm starting to realize that there is a difference between his roles. Maybe a subtle one but it's a difference. And he must be a very nice guy because he keeps ending up in all the great movies and despite how much I might be starting to like him he's still not THAT talented.

This is a movie of pure brilliant evil. Al Pacino would be great for the last 15 minutes alone when he's over the top, blaspheming against G-d, nature and the American Judicial System. But the fact that Pacino lets himself play it down for most of the movie is great. He's polite. He's suave and there's just something a little off about him. He also lets Keanu have most of the movie. Usually if you are on screen with Pacino, forget about being remembered unless you happened to be DeNiro, but in this movie the director and the actor know how to hang back and make Reeves look good.

Basically this movie is a parable about a lawyer without a conscience or at least without one that is going to stand in the way of winning. Due to his success he gets hired by a high-profile law firm with sinister undertones and begins to get a whole new breed of killers off. Oh yeah, the President of the law firm is Satan.

This movie has some beautiful scenes including the final denoument with Satan and Reeves as well as the empty street of New York City that Keanu Reeves walks over to get to his confrontation. Charlize Theron (sic?) is the unraveling moral fiber that undercuts Reeves' flirtation with the dark side. Where he makes choices and loses a little more of his soul, she goes insane and changes her Belinda Carlisle hairdo to the Belinda Carlisle-postcocaine hairdo.

This is an amazing movie. Brilliant and psychotic. Religious enough to please religious folks and blasphemous enough to entertain everyone else. Rent it, buy it and watch it over and over again.

One caveat: the lawyer as devil storyline has been done to death. It's great here but one wonders why the festering resentment against lawyers is so pervasive. Then again that is on of the few professionals besides drug dealer or hitman where people hate the successful practitioners. Oh well, occupational hazard for the neat cars and the big houses.

This book seemed like just another rehash of the basic training storyline from Starship Troopers. But there's less to it than in Starship Troopers. I don't like the characters. The only one that says anything other than the "gee shucks, we're in the space patrol" line is an utter creep and many of the scenes just drag along. I heard that kids have liked this book and it seems more written for teenagers than adults, but there's not a lot to recommend. Only in the last 30 pages does the book pick up and start doing things, but up until then it's training, training and more training.

For better Heinlein books of this style try either Starship Troopers or Podkyne of Mars.

I got into Joe Landsdale through his comic book work and I thank G-d that he took those jobs because it lead me to this twisted nasty little edge of Hell. A nice liberal couple comes face to face with hell when the wife is raped and the husband must confront his notions about human goodness head-on and ponder whether or not he is a coward instead of a pacifist. Meanwhile the rapist, hanging in his cell, isn't completely dead as his compatriots are alive and well and one of them is possessed. The car is racing towards them ready for more death. This book brings you face to face with pure evil.

There are rough portions. The teenagers are just nasty and evil, while you can see the husband's transformation from weakling to ravenous fighter coming a mile away. But this is an amazing book on its own merits and shouldn't be read if you are expecting a deep philosophical treatise on human nature. It's just fast, evil and damn good.

As someone raised by a single mother, I have to take issue with the author's assumption that women are caring and nurturing, blah blah blah. I learned pretty much most of my aggressive tendencies from Mom and very little from the action and slasher movies which I saw.

This book is the standard attack on gender roles which decides arbitrarily that the last 4000 years have been all bad, most of today is horrible and if only we could live in some Victorian society where the men are crying their eye's out at the drop of a hat, then life would be perfect. Sorry Harvard Boy. It's a long way from the Ivory Tower to reality.

What Pollack views as evil and detrimental is simple survival. Yes, boys are conditioned not to cry. But if boys cried every single time they got hurt they'd have no tears left for real emotional upheaval. I got a backache shoveling snow today. By Mr. Pollack's viewpoint, the fact that I simply swore and kept shoveling is a bad thing bruoght on by SOCIETY which is at fault particularly THE MEDIA. That men (and many women) like action movies is one of the few bonding things we got. YOu take a group of men who have absolutely nothing in common and the action movie will bond them - be it Enter the Dragon, Die-Hard or Schwarzennegger Kills People - it will create a community where there were only a bunch of people who had to work at the same place. Sports are the same way. I seriously doubt you can say the same thing about long treatises written by Harvard professors.

At heart, this book is an attack on aggressiveness and a cheerleading squad for sensitivity. While there is something to be said for the overabundance of Aggressiveness in a person at the expense of sensitivity, there is also something wrong with the overabundance of sensitivity at the expense of aggressiveness. It's not good to be a doormat, as the average feminist will tell you, so why should we be striving for that just because the opposite is also stupid.

For a better discussion on gender roles read Rene Denfeld's treatises on female aggression or The Preacher by Garth Ennis (in 8 installments). On the other hand if you are a Faludi fan, forget that I recommended anything. There's no hope for you.

These books have the addictive power of Jack T. Chick comics where there is the element of extremism, however the execution leaves a lot to be desired. And where Jack T. Chick are short these books seem to go on forever. Initially fascinating, but without skimming these books are unbearable.

The second of the series, it seems like most of the reviews in the series. A lot of filler pads out the fact that there isn't much of a storyline and a lot of it is in order to make you buy the next book in the series.

Actually there are many things that happen in this book. Buck and Raymond get to work for the antichrist. Buck and whatsherface start dating. Tsion Ben Judah gives his life to Christ in one of those Christian wet dreams where someone who speaks Hebrew and follows the Torah actually buys those "prophecies" that Christians have been using as proof since Tertullian and Jews have been rejecting as foolishness for just as long (example being the bogus "virgin birth" prophecy which isn't in Isaiah except in severely mistranslated versions). Moses and Elijah are hanging around the wall killing people and going at it like hopped up street preachers still.

Only it all seems like filler because the scenes that are supposed to be important like Buck and whatsherface dating aren't handled very well and you don't really believe that these two are becoming a couple. Other scenes seem like "we are setting this up so that in a later book things will be really cool" while half of the book rests on the characters having those internal monologues that say "yes, Jesus is the Messiah - got it?? Huh! Got it! Come on!"

Flatter than the first book and seems like set up to later books, there are plenty more guilty pleasures for your enjoyment. Now if you are a fundamentalist Christian you will love these books, but if you are just looknig for something extreme and wild read Please Kill Me: The Oral History of Punk, Naked Lunch or the early poems of Patti Smith and let this book fall by the wayside. If you don't think taht you can resist at least trying to read this book, there are probably better books in the series later on and you will get all that you need to know in the first chapter anyhow.