I got a chance to play it a few times at lunch and thought it was a lot of fun! The idea is you put down tiles “domino-style” and try to build loops, competing against your opponent to finish them. It’s easy to pick up, plays fast (about 20 minutes), it’s cleverly strategic, and well balanced. I think young kids would have an easy time of this one, but adults will enjoy the brain-bending situations and risky strategies that come from trying to out-think your opponent’s next move.

You can play with paper pieces, but Louis’ set is printed on stickers and then stuck to fancy wooden tiles. Clever monkeys could do the same thing with some foam-core or cardboard and have a nice set of their own.

Tangled: Cute and Fun! Adrian and Sara and the kiddos lent us Tangled to watch while we were at the in-laws place, and it was pretty sweet! Super great animation and production design. Storywise, it starts out strong as a fish-out-of-water, escape-from-the-tower adventure and ends up becoming a sappy but weird romance – Fynn is literally the first man she’s ever met and she’s all bonkers for him. The soundtrack isn’t quite as memorable as in previous Disney franchises, but it was pretty good.

If I was keeping track of these things – and I’m not – I’d make note of another weird instance of Disney Princess movies being about escaping from your (usually awesome if overprotective) parents to hook up with some handsome boy (usually a criminal) you barely know.

Cowboys vs Aliens: An effective waste of time. Trapped on the flight to Winnipeg I finally got around to watching Cowboys vs Aliens. While it had it’s moments, it was mostly disappointing – the aliens flew millions of light years to steal our gold, fly around abducting people, and getting into fisticuffs with cowboys. The weird thing is that I’m totally open to watching an hour and a half of this, but there was so much garbage plot cruft piled on top – resurrecting alien ladies and gang politics and a delinquent son – and not a single pew-pew laser-gun high-noon standoff in the whole film.

Also – dumbest, aliens, ever – they use something like a nuclear strike on a bunch of cows, but run around punching the cowboys to death while barking like dogs. Intergalactic conquerors?

Crazy, Stupid, Love: Mildly Depressing Fun! Ryan Gosling shows Steve Carell how to be smooth with the ladies following a divorce that blindsides him. Caught this one with Natasha on the flight back home, and enjoyed the weird cocktail of depressing humour. It was pretty amusing considering the exceptional amount of time the main characters spend looking miserable. I have a slight beef with the way the film shakes it’s finger at the kind of adult relationships it portrays – almost like it’s working at cross purposes. This guy is divorced! I’m not sure the ex-wife who dumped him has any right to harangue him for spending time in the company of consenting women.

The cards are laid out in a 3×3 grid, and each one features a goal set of dice. You roll a set of five (everyone has their own colour), and distribute your dice on the cards as you manage to match up patterns. Sortof similar to Yahtzee, but with a random assortment of challenges instead of a scorecard, and a more competitive feel.

The cards have different point values based on their difficulty, and you get a bonus for collecting cards of the same colour that make a set. The trick is that your neighbors can bump you off the cards if they get a better match, so the competition for cards gets pretty fierce. The whole thing plays in about 30 minutes, and it’s really easy to pick up – but the scoring system is complex enough to allow for some interesting strategies to evolve.

My strategy – losing very badly, involves rolling lots of snakeyes when I don’t need them.

All in all a very fun game that I’m happy to recommend. GameCrafter shipping is a bit steep, but you get a heap of dice in the box and a set of goal cards – they’re slickly designed and easy to read. Great game for kids and adults to play together, and rounds are over quickly enough that you can squeeze a few in during a gaming session.

The series documents the life of Katniss Everdeen, a miner’s daughter in a dystopian future where the government annually selects children from the colonies to fight to the death in an arena as punishment for a failed rebellion. Katniss volunteers to save her sister, and gets pitted against 23 more kids who go on to brutally maim and murder eachother. It was shockingly up front with violence – a risky move for Scholastic Publishing that apparently paid off big-time. I don’t know how they’re going to present the arena scenes in the film coming out next year without going way over a PG13 rating.

Thematically it may be similar to the famously shocking Japanese movie “Battle Royale”, but it’s more character driven – we learn more than we often want to know about Katniss’ fear, failings and her increasingly pathological emotional boundaries while the tension constantly rises.

I’ve seen Suzanne Collins in interviews, and she looks like a nice person – but she seems to have a boundless capacity to torture and murder her characters. Given that it’s a story about government sanctioned killing games, it’s not spoiling anything to warn that predictably few characters make it through the entire series – it’s probably best you don’t get too attached.

It’s worth reading if you like dark science fiction. The first one was definitely the strongest, but the second book has some very cool ideas in it too. Meh on the third, but once you’ve read that far you might as well.

Our Idiot Brother: Sweet! Paul Rudd plays a chronically optimistic and naively trusting brother to a bunch of cynical sisters who are ignoring their problems, and as he couch-surfs through their lives he inadvertently destroys everything he touches. Not a really fast or deep film, but goofy and cute and sweet.

Happy Feet Two: Penguiny! For her birthday I took my god-daughter to see what may be the greatest dancing penguin film I’ve ever seen. There was actually less dancing than I expected, for a dancing penguin movie. I found the accents really difficult to understand through the first half, since you can’t really lip-read a beak. I can get behind puffins having an Icelandic accent, and even Robin Williams pretending (?) to be Latin-American given that some penguins live on the tip of South America. But how did that leader penguin end up with a Scottish accent?

I was already a huge fan of director Tarsem from some of his previous arty-fantasy films, so I knew what to expect: Eiko Ishioka’s absurdly overwrought costumes, hyper-stylistic filmwork and brain-melting settings. What blew my mind were the unexpectedly hyperviolent action scenes. There are a few showpiece action sequences scattered throughout the film, but the latter half throws open the violence floodgates. The gods show up to hand out their slow-mo head-smashing kung-fu while Theseus demonstrates that the not-pointy end of a spear is equally capable of performing a brain-ectomy when appropriate force is applied.

Storywise – it’s actually pretty decent, if you can get through the gore! Mickey Rourke plays a decent sadistic King Hyperion if just by being himself – a creepy, off-kilter muscleman. Theseus was mostly believable, and the rest of the supporting cast, including not-particularly-well-used sidekick Stephen Dorff, seem to be having fun with the characters and move things along to the next action sequence smoothly. I was excited to hear John Hurt’s voice narrating from the opening – I’ve been a big fan of his too, since his Muppet production “The Storyteller” captivated me as a kid.

Definitely not everyone’s cup of tea – but I shouted “OOHHHH!!!!” a lot while I was watching, and came out of the theatre feeling pretty psyched. Take that how you will!

I want to tell you how much I loved this book, but I have to admit that the pace was infuriatingly uneven – Weisman alternates between exciting depictions of collapsing cities to long boring musings about what kind of grasses are preferred by migratory birds. A few chapters of the cataclysmic failure of the highly explosive untended oil refineries along the gulf coast, followed by a leisurely paean about the kinds of trees that one might find in a bog.

When it gets going it’s bone-chillingly great – we’re all doomed! But feel free to skip chapters if the plight of the mastadons and his poetic descriptions of post-human Africa are going on for a little too long. Don’t miss his fascinating discussions about the Pacific Gyre filling up with plastic though, or the amusing unintended re-naturing of the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. Lots of very neat observations and anecdotes about the kind of engineering required to last even more than a few hundred years. (Your house will be long gone – and everything in it, save for a few titanium bits in your dishwasher and some connectors from your fusebox.)

On a topical note – in the book he describes a structural engineer’s warnings regarding the impending consequences of Istanbul’s sudden growth, up from 1 to 15 million inhabitants since just 1950. Since much of the explosive growth was accommodated by easing building codes and using lowest-bid materials to erect shoddy concrete multi-storey buildings, scientists predict that the next major tremor (due within 30 years) on the North Anatolian Fault which runs right through the city could collapse as many as 50,000 apartment buildings. We had a scary preview of what could happen this evening with the earthquake in Van, Turkey. And there’s little they could do to prevent it – there’s no way to bring a city of 15 million people up to earthquake code with the clock ticking. Scary.

“When an earthquake strikes Istanbul, its narrow, winding streets will clog so totally with the rubble of thousands of wrecked buildings, Sozen estimates, that much of the city will simply have to close down for 30 years before the massive destruction can be cleared away.“

Limitless – Pretty cool – A film about a guy who gets his hands on a drug that unleashes the full capacity of the mind, with the nasty side-effect that if you stop taking it, you die. It’s a clever premise, and the film is interesting, but it seems like a lot of the trouble he gets himself into would have been easy to prevent if he’d actually been as smart as he claimed to be. Borrowing investment money from the mob? Maybe the pills aren’t working for you, dude. Probably worth watching, I enjoyed it, but I didn’t feel like I’d had a brush with genius by the end.

Super8 – Really great! -A movie about some kids making a zombie movie would have been entertaining enough, throw in a giant monster, a military assault, and a totally rad train crash scene and you have a thoroughly entertaining film with plenty going on throughout. I really liked this one as much for the human story as the alien one – in fact the whole monster plotline feels almost like an afterthought.

An Idiot Abroad – Hilarious – Okay, technically a TV series, we watched a bunch of these back to back. Ricky Gervais sends his friend Karl Pilkington around the globe to see the wonders of the ancient world, only Karl’s not the world traveller type – he’s somewhat unwilling and entirely unprepared, and Ricky’s production crew make it all the worse by arranging kidnappings and mexican wrestling and horrible camel rides for him to participate in. I’m not sure how much of the show is a put-on (after the first few episodes he’s still looking bamboozled the moment he gets off the plane) but it’s good fun and Karl’s a good sport about going way outside his comfort zone.

Horrible Bosses – Hilarious but don’t think about it too hard – Natasha and I thought this bungled murder caper was hysterical,  but if you think for too long about how you’re accepting attempted homicide and sexual harassment as comedy it might hurt your brain. There’s an extremely clever plot twist in the film that could have made the movie brilliant if followed through to it’s logical conclusion, but it never gets there. The version in my head has a much more satisfying ending.

Hereafter – Very slow, but good! – Despite the exciting tsunami sequence at the beginning (like -right- at the beginning) this is an incredibly slow paced but excellent drama . It’s not in any hurry to get anywhere, so it leaves us with lots of well explored, interesting characters who experience all kinds of complicated situations resulting from their brushes with death. Recommended, but don’t expect a psychic thriller.

Get Him To The Greek – Not funny – I like Russel Brand and I like Jonah Hill, but almost nothing about this film made me laugh. Almost every scene setup followed the same formula – they do copious amounts of drugs and alcohol and get “crazy”, which was more sad than humorous. I would have missed nothing if I’d walked out halfway like I’d intended. Ah well.

The Trip – Hilarious – This movie is brilliant. Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon play fictional versions of themselves (meta?) roaming around on a restaurant tour of northern England, all the while annoying eachother with impressions of Sean Connery, Billy Connolly and Michael Caine over fancy dinners. Nothing much actually -happens- in the film, but you can imagine what dinner is like between two british comedians who are out to heckle eachother – unbelievably freaking hilarious. It’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, but I laughed my guts out – it was like so many hilarious dinners with friends. Good times.