Photoshop has for a long time been the top-of-the-line photo editing program on both PCs and Macs. We had a student version on an old iMac back when my wife and I were students, but when I upgraded to a Macbook Pro I picked up Elements instead of full-blown Photoshop. It seemed to do everything I could imagine wanting to do with photos and more.

I never imagined you could do what you can with the latest version of Photoshop, though. If you've ever thought about upgrading to the full version of Photoshop, now would be the time, especially if you are a student and can get the student price, or if you can get the upgrade price. Some of the features on this new version are nothing short of astonishing.

First of all, it can do all the usual adjusting and layering and touch up and effects, and seems to do them better than ever. It appears to be quite stable, and very fast, possibly owing to the new 64-bit support on CS5. I've been working with Photoshop CS5 Extended every day for a few weeks (on a Macbook Pro, OS 10.6.3, 28GHz, 4GB Ram) and haven't had any problems or glitches. It installed without a hitch and runs nicely. No slow downs, no hangups, no crashing.

One thing I like is that when you open another program in Mac, the photoshop tools and utilities windows hide out of the way until you go back into it. Final Cut doesn't do that, for example, which means that if I'm working on Final Cut I need to move my windows out of the way to get at other things, or use Spaces and set my apps on different spaces windows in order to be productive.

There are three basic parts to the Photoshop package: an organizer (Adobe Bridge), a non-destructive photo adjuster (Adobe Raw, which is designed for RAW format photos but works on JPEGs as well), and an editor (Photoshop, which does ordinary adjustments and tweaks but also works with layers and masks and an inexhaustible array of effects to allow you to do pretty much anything you could possibly imagine with your photos).

What's new in CS5?

Mini Bridge - in addition to the ordinary Bridge program that helps organize your photos (and other files for use with other CS5 programs), Photoshop includes the Mini Bridge that functions like a bridge app that opens within photoshop itself. It only works, though, if Bridge is already open. Bridge also allows you to batch rename photos - which is very cool, especially with the funky way that cameras tend to name your photos.

Refine edge - Photoshop's selection tools are already pretty astonishing, and with the new refine edge tools (that work both for selections and for masks) they've gotten much more sophisticated, allowing you to fine tune selections in pretty amazing ways. For example with frizzy hair, where you can see through the hair at the edges to a background, refine edge can usually allow you to select just the hair and not the background. There's even a tool that allows you to get rid of reflections from the background on the subject. When I do green screen photography, it's always difficult to avoid getting some green light bounce on the perimeter of the subject. What's truly amazing is that with Photoshop's selection tools and refine edge, you really don't even need to use the green screen because you can replace the background of most photos without it.

New painting options - there are a whole range of new brushes you can paint with and each brush can be adjusted for thickness and stiffness, and several other properties that make photoshop into a true painting program, and allow you to use painting to either modify existing photos or create original artworks. The coolest painting feature is the "Mixer Brush" that allows you to treat a photograph as if it were covered in wet paint and to either paint from it as if it were a palette or to mix other colors with the existing colors on the photo.

3D & Puppet Warp - you can take a photo and make it into a 3-D postcard that can be rotated and re-oriented however you like. Additionally you can create three dimensional objects or make elements of photographs into 3-D objects so you can experiment with different ways of laying them out. Puppet Warp allows you to take an object and move its elements around - turning a head or raising an arm for example.

Improved HDR Pro Support - you can shoot photos with a range of exposures and it will bring them together in a single shot that captures all the nuance you want; you can then adjust these in case you want, say, to flatten the shadows or want less nuance in the highlights of a certain area in the photo. Note that this can even work if you don't have a tripod and just eyeball the frames, since the program will automatically detect the overlap regions. Pretty cool.

Automatic lens correction - Photoshop can figure out what kind of lens you have and correct for distortions in the lens.

Content Aware Fill - of course the most astonishing feature of CS5 is the content aware fill. CS4 (and Photoshop Express 9) already had the content aware transform that allows you to shrink a photo and let it know which parts you don't want warped and which parts you'd like to lose. Content Aware fill is like a mixture between that function and the healing brush tool. You can select, say, a piece of garbage on the lawn in an otherwise nice photo, then fill it with content aware fill and Photoshop will reconstruct a seamless piece of lawn turf in the place of the garbage. You can get rid of a stranger who wandered into your frame without doing any cropping or resizing (provided that the background that needs to be filled in is not too complicated). You can even fill in gaps in a panorama shot (where you take a few photos in order to get an expanded range). Some of this would be possible already with older versions of Photoshop but would take hours; but some of the things you can do with this tool are simply magical.

Online Review Feature - another new thing that would be quite handy for the professional user, or for someone collaborating with others artistically, is the online review function. Basically it allows you to upload the latest version of your image and notify others it's there. They can then go into the image and post comments, both general comments and comments tied to specific parts of the photo, and then those comments appear ready to review and read by the original poster.

System requirements - a few people have noted that the system requirements are not available on this page. Adobe CS5 was designed to take advantage of the some of the most recent computer architecture standards and operating systems, so those who have a five or six year old computer should stick with an older version. Here are the requirements from Adobe's website, for Mac users of CS5: Multicore Intel processor (so no G4 or PowerPC); minimum 1GB of RAM; 2GB available hard drive space for installation and additional free space available during the installation (plus no case-sensitive file systems); recommended 1280x800 display with qualified hardware-accelerated OpenGL graphics card, 16-bit color, and 256MB of VRAM; Quicktime 7.6.2; a DVD-Rom drive.

Summing Up

This is not really a beginner's program. For those who want to just tweak exposure and color balance, stick with iPhoto or something simple. For slightly more complicated fixes, but with a smaller learning curve, stick to something like Photoshop Elements. If you really want to work magic with your photos, though, and if you're willing to put in some serious time trying things out (and going through the seemingly endless tutorials online) - or if you already know Photoshop or Elements and you know how much time it can take to do some of the fixes that the Content Aware tool can solve in seconds, you really ought to check out this latest version of Photoshop. It's pretty amazing.

The key insight of Anthony Weston's provocative and challenging book is that environmental values cannot be discovered merely by thinking about what we ought to do, but can only co-evolve with practices that reshape the boundaries between "us" and "nature," and thereby begin to enable the kind of mutual impact and reciprocity that give ethics its import and purchase. We cannot seriously propose a conceptual alternative to anthropocentrism, for example, in a thoroughly anthropocentrized world, in which our cities and dwellings have been designed to ensure that we do not encounter nature on terms other than those that we (humans) determine in advance. Weston offers an "incompleat" eco-philosophy, a philosophy that conceives its task as more practical than theoretical, and thus a philosophy of and for the future. It is, perhaps, fitting that the final chapter of his book addresses the question what implications space exploration should have for philosophical and environmental thought and action.

A central theme of several essays in this collection of his writings on traditional environmental ethics is to encourage what he calls "enabling environmental practices." The challenge for environmentalists and eco-philosophers, he writes, "is to create the social, psychological, and phenomenological preconditions -- the conceptual, experiential, or even quite literal 'space' -- for new or stronger environmental values to evolve". Examples of such practices range from the simple -- unplugging lights, gardening -- to the systematic -- re-routing roads, creative zoning to enhance the possibilities for encounters and interaction with the "wild" -- to more radical cultural and ideological changes -- such as the introduction of new holidays, or the establishment of "ecosteries" on the model of monasteries. Weston is impressed by the possibilities for human-nature interaction suggested by the work of Jim Nollmann, a musician-researcher who uses music in an attempt to create a shared space between humans and animals, making music with whales and monkeys, for example. Part of the problem, Weston argues, is that the ways we interact with animals and with nature already presuppose there is no possibility of a real reciprocity or communication between "us" and "them." This assumption, built into our practices, creates what he calls a "self-validating reduction": a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, in which the non-human world is diminished to the point of becoming dependent upon us. It's hard to imagine, for example, why a chicken that as a result of genetic modifications and farming techniques has become little more than a meat and eggs machine should deserve any kind of moral consideration. More "humane" treatment of such entities is "unrealistic" because the "reality" has been manipulated to match established human expectations and values. Faced with such situations, Weston calls upon the eco-philosopher to "embrace unrealism. We do speak for realities and possibilities that are systematically being driven into the ground or destroyed outright." To be "unrealistic," in this sense, Weston insists, is "part of ethics' very calling."

There is, of course, a danger here of falling into a naïve romanticism, and Weston does tend to speak as if the wild were basically hospitable and only dangerous because we have made it so. When Weston mentions that polar bears once appear to have lived in harmony with aboriginal peoples and suggests the possibility of more "hospitable" relations with the wild, it is hard not to recall the tragedy of Timothy Treadwell, whose ill-conceived desire to connect with and "protect" Alaskan grizzly bears by living among them led directly to his death at their maws and claws. Still, the challenges to environmental ethics and proposals for a practical eco-philosophy that Weston outlines in this book are both clearly stated and represent powerful and timely exercises of moral imagination. It's a worthwhile read. I learned a lot from it.

This manly medieval sci-fi and swords thriller hits most of the cliches you'd expect but manages still to feel fairly fresh.

An alien astronaut - who looks just like James Caviezel - crash lands on a strange planet, that turns out to be medieval Norway, on Earth. Luckily he has a gadget that can teach him the local Norse dialect in moments (and luckily for us the local dialect sounds just like English). Unluckily for lots of the locals, he's also unwittingly brought something with him on his ship, a predatory monster who quickly decimates a local village. As an outlander with strange clothing, the alien guy is immediately suspect in the plunder, and nearby warriors capture and torture him for answers. Before long, though, you just know he'll be hitting it big with the local beauty, and leading the Vikings on their quest to destroy the beast.

It's entertaining enough, though the characters are straight out of nearly every film of this kind you've ever seen. The wise king, the ambitious warrior who wants to live up to his own dead father's legacy, the warrior princess, lots of grunting fighters, the drunken comic relief, the romance that begins with a slap. Still, they deliver their lines well, and in spite of lines like "may Odin's blessings be upon you," John Hurt plays a convincing king, Caviezel plays a plausible space warrior pilgrim, and Ron Perlman steals every spare moment he's in as a raging rival warlord. The monster itself is pretty neat, designed to seem something like a hybrid of medieval dragon, alien and predator, with a tinge of the overgrown shrimp from the brilliant (and much more fun) Korean flick The Host.

Earth Days, by celebrated documentary filmmaker Robert Stone, begins with a powerful montage of United States presidents, beginning with John F. Kennedy, proclaiming the urgency of the mission to clean up our air and address our dependency on dwindling energy sources. Our future as a nation depended on it.

Of course, as we know, the urgency has not diminished (especially in the wake of the recent oil spill disaster) but the clarity of the vision has. This is signaled in the film as the final president in the series, George W. Bush, expressed nothing more than the need to reduce our dependency on foreign sources of oil. Even Ronald Reagan spoke with much greater force on the subject than that. In part, as this film shows, the clarity of the mission diminished as the clarity of our air increased. It was the success of early environmental pioneers like JFK's Secretary of the Interior, Stewart Udall and California Congressman Pete McCloskey, in the face of very obvious pollution in large American cities, that enabled subsequent politicians to diminish and ignore the challenges that face us in the coming days.

The film outlines the history of the modern environmental movement in America, through the eyes of several early activists who were inspired by writers such as Rachel Carson and Paul Ehrlich. The words of nine passionate and highly influential, still living, pioneers are supported by images of growth and change in America, as the effects of economic expansion and technological development on our ecosystem and way of life began to demonstrate that the American dream of increasing prosperity was unsustainable.

The style of the documentary is pretty conventional, but not preachy; it has a polished look that is easy to follow, edited and shot in the straightforward style of a PBS documentary. It would, perhaps, have been strengthened by the introduction of a few new voices, of those who have been inspired by the work of the pioneers of the sixties and seventies and are taking up the cause into the future. As it is, the film plays more like a piece of history with a message for the present than a contemporary call to action.

Still, the historical perspective is fresh, and the implicit message is powerful. The most important message of Earth Days is that awareness is a fragile thing. Activists harnessed America's growing awareness of environmental troubles to bring about a number of important changes such as the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act. Earth Day, celebrated first in 1970, brought people together across the world and raised a powerful awareness of environmental concerns within the United States. Unfortunately, some of the more radical predictions and confrontational techniques of activists, combined with their success in overcoming some of the most visible dangers and the success of industrial lobbyists in undermining their message, allowed conservative politicians to drive a wedge between the work of environmentalists and the concerns of mainstream Americans. The result was that for the past thirty years we have been losing some of the ground built up so deliberately through the sixties and seventies.

The moral is clear: in the face of new and obvious crises presented by global warming and worldwide growth in energy demand, those who care about the Earth must both move quickly and find a way to rally others from all walks of life to the cause. They must make clear that environmentalism is neither anti-American nor elitist, and that it should not pit liberals against conservatives or democrats against republicans. The powerful changes that took place over a few decades (and that have been undermined rapidly) show that change can take place. In spite of some repetition and a somewhat too deliberate pace, Earth Days is an important and timely film, that reminds us how quickly change can occur, for better or for worse.

I've been using Macs for years and thought I was pretty proficient. When I upgraded to my latest Macbook Pro, and to Snow Leopard, I thought it'd be nice to get to know the OS better. David Pogue lays it out clearly and well, and I found out things I could do that I never even considered and that have now become a part of my regular repertoire. First of all there are the shortcuts. For so many functions, it's just faster to key a command than to find it on the appropriate drop down menu and click. This book lays them all out according to the various tasks you might perform on the Mac, and after just a few days working through a chapter a day, it has literally changed my whole approach to Mac-based projects.

The book introduced me to several other Mac OS X features I'd never used, and never seen a use for, such as "Spaces," which is now something I couldn't live without. I do my browsing in one space and my video editing in another, and my word processing and spreadsheet work in another, and it's easy to shift back and forth between all of these tasks without cluttering my windows.

Highly recommended for new Mac users, or for veterans who, like me, have never fully appreciated the attention to detail and the range of resources available on the Mac OS X, especially Snow Leopard.

Ivy League scientists discover evidence of a vampyric virus and get a military grant to help find and study it. Right away, we smell trouble, and before long, but not before they had sufficient warning, a secret military unit is experimenting on death row inmates, who end up escaping with intentions to spread the virus and destroy the world as we know it. Enter Amy, the final test subject, a six-year-old abandoned innocent, who, unlike the others (called "The Twelve," though I count thirteen), doesn't turn into an evil blood sucker and may turn out to be the salvation of the world.

First of all, I should say this was a lot of fun to read, and it was hard to put down -- apart from a few drawn out digressions and bits of melodrama that dragged. I read it, late into the night, for several nights in a row. Cronin has a way with words, and, against the backdrop of a science fiction and fantasy premise, his story depicts a credible and realistic future. The characters are convincing and the situations unique and engaging -- it's both an intriguing new take on what seemed to be an overdone and worn out genre, and an exciting epic in its own right that even those who hate vampire fiction should find fun. In other words, it's guilt-free fun summer fiction.

Having said that, I think it might have been improved with a tighter structure, and the elimination of a few oddball elements. The story shifts between several different narrative perspectives, which adds to the intrigue - there is an omniscient narrator who sides with the point of view of one or the other characters, there are first person narratives written as if in an email or journal, and there are historical and military archives, that all combine to tell a story that spans a century - from the viral apocalypse to the point where a ragged band of humans with a messianic child in tow decides to do something about it. Most of what happens in between is omitted, and I almost think it might have been better to start near the end and compress the beginnings into a few flashbacks. On the other hand, I enjoyed most of it and apart from a few lengthy chapters I'm not quite sure what I'd want to drop.

A couple of other minor gripes: I was a bit thrown off by the seemingly supernatural elements in a story that otherwise aimed for roots in reality (at least, a science fiction reality, where viruses can make human beings live quite long and get some cool powers and dark desires). For example, there's a little girl who has a psychic connection with animals, even before there was a semi-plausible science-fiction explanation. At the very least it would be a pretty odd coincidence that the girl they picked seemingly at random as a young test subject happened already to have psychic powers -- but it might indicate that the author wants us to take seriously the various flirtations with theology spread throughout the story, suggesting there might be a divine influence here. I would also drop the odd invented expletive from the future: flyers, it's bizarre, and I couldn't figure out for the longest time that "flyers" was a word they were using somewhat like another word that starts with f, but with much less versatility. As far as I can tell, it almost always appears at the beginning of a sentence, as in "Flyers, Peter, can't you do something about this?" Flyers just doesn't have the heft or the weight of a real satisfyingly solid cuss word - assuming that's what it's intended to be. Still, the book as a whole certainly does have the heft and excitement of a blockbuster novel, where you can forgive a few excesses as long as it's thrilling and keeps you on the edge of your seats, caring about the characters and eager to find out what happens next. The Passage did it for me, and I can't wait for the next volume in the projected trilogy.

We take freedom for granted, as if it were easily understood and readily actualized. Genuine freedom, and not the empty and abstract ideal of freedom we take for granted, cannot in fact be realized except when a range of conditions are met. Fichte's groundbreaking study manages to articulate for the first time, just after the French Revolution, before Hegel or Marx (and even before Kant's discussion of rights), and of course long before Rawls, the terms in which rights and freedom can properly be understood and actualized in the modern state.

It's a difficult read, but incredibly rewarding for those who approach it in the right way, as a philosophical study of what really must be in place for freedom to be possible, rather than a political treatise on a certain dead guy's opinions regarding legal principles. Fichte himself marks out the difference in his introduction between reading a text philosophically and reading it idly: in the latter case, you read the text as an outline of something it is possible to think; to read this study philosophically, by contrast, is to read it to discover what you have to think, because its concepts have an object, namely the world we live in articulated in such a way that through these concepts its structure can be seen as if for the first time. In other words, to read a philosophical text like that of Fichte is to rediscover the reality one inhabits, and to grasp it in ways one hadn't been able before.

The familiar part of the argument is that freedom, considered as the ability to make a difference in the world, presupposes a world to act upon that is more or less predictable. But in a world with other people my free capacity to act upon the world and realize my purposes therein is limited and conditioned by that of others. So there is a need to establish laws and structures that we each freely endorse and that are enforced by a state power, defining precisely what is permissible for each of us and what are the boundaries that define where my property and my potentials stop and where those of others begin. Some of the implications are that property owners should have good fences to make their property limits obvious; travelers and those who write checks should carry identification cards, certified by the state, so that people aren't duped out of their livelihoods; the state should guarantee a living wage to those who are willing to work. So far, and if you read it only for this core argument and for the specific ways he spells out the application of this core argument, Fichte might sound like he's simply working in the vein of social contract theory, taking a bit from Hobbes and Locke and, especially, Rousseau and adding lots of details (some that would make liberals happy, others that sound downright conservative) and his own post-Kantian transcendental idealist spin.

What makes this text so revolutionary and exciting, however, is that it ties all of this discussion to a rich and powerful investigation of the very nature of human beings as free, and claims to deduce all of these details precisely from this investigation into the conditions for the possibility of free, rational, self-conscious individuality. What does it mean to be a free, self-conscious human being? It is not enough to move about and make some kind of impact on the natural world. Rather, to be free is to set and enact one's own purposes in the world, which requires self-consciousness or awareness of oneself as the one who will realize these purposes. He argues that self-consciousness as a free being is born only in response to a "summons" from another self-conscious, free being. I discover myself as a self in the world only in response to a communicative act on the part of another self, and the impact of this summons is the recognition that I am not alone in the world - that it is not, exclusively, my world - and that my purposes can be realized only insofar as I take into account the purposes of the others with whom I come in contact. Fichte is careful to remind us that the response to this recognition remains a free act, and there is no guarantee how it will turn out, but that the only response that is responsive to its content is the one that seeks to negotiate with the other how they are to divide up and share the space they inhabit. It will turn out that this negotiation requires their communal acceptance of the authority of a third party, the state, which can protect each of their rights from incursions by others. Additionally, this third party must itself be responsible to the people and there must be in the constitution an established procedure whereby state leaders are themselves answerable for offenses against right. This process of working out the demands of "right" is a demanding one -- but, to understand Fichte's text rightly is to see the ways in which the world we now inhabit and take for granted is to a large degree the result of carrying out something like the kind of logic that he so carefully outlines.

One of the arguments in the text, for example, is that a well functioning state would organize public space in ways that would, basically, make possible only those kinds of activities that are consistent with public safety in the context of the competing aims of the many who enter that space. An obvious example is the public transportation system, which is organized to a high degree, with signs, markers, indicators, policing bodies, etc. and only allows on the road those who have passed tests demonstrating competence at understanding that system of signs. Once in place drivers can do what they want and get where they want - can enact their freedom - precisely in ways that would be impossible without such regulations. The text serves as a powerful reminder not to take for granted the regulatory agencies that make possible the casual ease of our day to day operations. It also clarifies, to a degree that seems completely absent in most modern political theory, the importance of a mechanism in political constitutions that would serve to identify failures in its application. Even the parts of the text that seem dated - such as the discussion of marriage, which Fichte admits is not properly speaking a matter for state regulation - still carry a number of insights and are worth studying. It's a hard book to study, and one of those books that can easily be misread if read too quickly, but it's also a brilliant book that would reward careful study.

How come I'd never heard of the Kuchar brothers? They have had an incredible influence, and were part of the film underground in its heyday, celebrated by the likes of Jonas Mekas and screening alongside the likes of Stan Brakhage and Andy Warhol. Their films, for all their low-budget schlock-style filmmaking feel, nevertheless show a keen sensitivity to the ways that images work, and how they can be cut together and juxtaposed with music and sound to create feeling and impact. Yet they always continued, quite deliberately, to work with an ultra-low-cost vibe in ways that intensified feeling, and maximized the unusual, combining comic effect and naked self-revelation. It's strange stuff, but not hard to see why filmmakers like Wayne Wang, John Waters, Atom Egoyan, and Guy Maddin love their work and were inspired by it, even while they all moved closer to the mainstream. While Mike Kuchar's films seem to be a bit more artistic and serious explorations of erotic themes, George Kuchar's films are over the top cult classic style movies. He seems to combine something of the prolific inventiveness of a Lloyd Kaufmann with the gross-out sensibilities of early John Waters and a strong hint of guilt acquired from a Catholic upbringing. Still, it's intriguing stuff.

Apart from a few flourishes, such as the delightful 3-d cutout opening title sequence, the documentary itself is pretty conventional, combining talking heads with archival footage, as well as a depiction of the George Kuchar on the set with a class he teaches in San Francisco, creating his latest low budget wild affair, about a female Frankenstein-type character. Still, the subject matter is fascinating, and the brothers are both seriously out there and genuinely sincere and talented, and each has a unique auteur-vision that is clearly on display. Definitely worth catching for lovers of independent and inventive cinema, and for stories about unique American lives.

I won't repeat details of the film that have been admirably described in several other reviews. I will say, though, that the description of this film as a bloody, raw, existential revenge pic can obscure the fact that at the heart of this film is a very subtle and tender relationship that is destroyed by the pragmatics of life in a dog eat dog world.

Bennie is an undercompensated piano player (living in Mexico) who loves Elita, a local prostitute. He has to prostitute his talents to stupid gringo tourists in the way she must sell herself to get by; while neither seem fully satisfied, both are pragmatic about it, but only she seems resigned to her occupation. He can't ask her to quit and marry him because he can't afford it. There is also the chance that she would not want to be totally dependent upon one man, although she clearly does love him. He is no killer, just down on his luck, and jumps at the chance to make some money when he realizes that Alfredo Garcia is already dead and he can do what is necessary without hurting anyone. After all, the dead Garcia owes something to Elita, doesn't he? The problem is that he has no idea what he's getting himself into.

What I think is most unexpected and wonderful about this film is that it depicts the romanticism of Bennie and Elita in such a tender and thoughtful way (before shooting it down). He plays guitar while she sings. They speak longingly of a future together, that neither can really believe is possible. He is jealous of her relationship with Alfredo Garcia, but not vindictive, and forgives wholeheartedly. He sits nearby, touching her foot, while she crouches fetal position in the shower, weeping after she understands his plan. This is not bloody and brutal after the fashion of recent work such as The Devil's Rejects (which is sometimes compared to Peckinpah); the violence of the film stands in stark contrast to the simple tenderness of two people who can barely see a way out of their difficult lives but hold onto hope while they still have each other.

Ghost Dog is like a contemporary Spaghetti Western/Samurai flick set in the suburbs. It has the slow, mellow, easy pacing interrupted by moments of intense violence, the intriguing but elusive characters who follow their own mysterious moral code even to their death if necessary. It is funny, and even hilarious at times; it is political insofar as it plays with and criticizes racial and ethnic stereotyping; it has one of the best soundtracks of any films (done by the RZA of Wu Tang Clan fame); scenes are joined together by intertitles containing intriguing passages from the Hagakure: the Book of the Samurai, read smoothly by the Ghost Dog himself; it raises existential questions of how to live appropriately in the face of death and the collapse of the forms that give meaning to our lives; and, best of all, it stars Forrest Whittaker in the role he was born to play! That alone makes this a dvd worth owning at almost any price; and at this price I can't see how anyone who loves film does not own a copy.

On a personal note: when I took one of my classes (on American Independent Film) to the Sundance film festival a few years ago, someone asked me whether I hoped to see any stars. I hadn't really thought about it because I'm not that starstruck, I just like movies. But then it came to me: the whole trip would be worth it if I could meet Forrest Whittaker. And I did! He's a very big man, just as impressive in life as he is on film. We were at a party for one of the smaller satellite festivals and I talked to him for a while, and finally said: "hey, I really loved what you did in Ghost Dog." He just nodded a few times, and said, "yeah, that was a cool movie." Enough said.
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