"It was whiskey done it, much as anything else." So says William Munny (Clint Eastwood), a man of notoriously vicious and mean disposition, when asked how he killed so many men so easily in his younger years. Unforgiven deconstructs the myth of the western gunman, a character Eastwood himself played to such great effect earlier in his career.
This is a bleak film to be sure, one in which the kindest characters are inflicted with the cruelest fates. In westerns we typically see some rough form of justice meted out by the gunman/hero, and we cheer when the bad guys "get what's coming to them." According to Eastwood's Munny, "we all have it comin."

The Last Samurai is a movie that succeeds more than I expected it to in spite of Tom Cruise giving one of the worst performances of all time by an actor of his stature (and I’m not referring to his diminutive height here). I didn't see Samurai in the theater because I was repelled by its marriage of subject matter and star. And no, I'm not a Tom Cruise hater at all. I just had a hard time imagining him in a Samurai picture of any kind. And even my lowered expectations didn't prepare me for how laughably unconvincing Cruise is here as the adrift Civil War hero Nathan Algren. Cruise's performance is all the more frustrating because the man can be nothing short of brilliant when he wants to be (see Born on the Fourth of July, Magnolia and even Interview with the Vampire for proof positive).

Allen Perkins of Immedia is shown here with the new Allegria speakers from Sonics, a newish speaker company founded by the man who formerly founded and designed some highly regarded speakers for Audio Physic, Joachim Gerhard.

Not only does the sign say so, I'm holding a full production copy of Hitch on Blu-ray Disc right now! OK, it's actually sitting next to my laptop since I can't type and hold it at the same time.