Movies
Watched several movies this weekend, most of them at my friend Steve's 2nd Annual Halloween Horror Movie-a-thon. We watched

• The Lair of the White Worm. A very 80's movie (despite being based on a Bram Stoker story). Also very strange, but that's not surprising, considering that it was directed by Ken Russell
  
• Robot Monster (although we watched the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version). An awful movie, but how can you pass up the chance to see a film where the bad guy is a man in a gorilla suit with a diving helmet in place of the head?
  
• 28 Days Later An updated version of the zombie movie. I quite like it. The DVD has 3 alternate endings. I still like the one that originally showed in the theatrical release, but the "radical" alternate ending is pretty good too.
  
• Audition A very creepy Japanese film that starts out looking like a rather slow-moving romantic story. Don't you believe it.

So that was Saturday (which was also my 36th birthday). On Friday, I got together with several of The Usual Suspects (Harmony & Topher and Teena, who I met for the first time) to watch Sports Night. We got through 6 episodes. It's such a shame that this show only lasted 2 seasons. All 3 people now seem to be hooked on the show, and we plan on getting together again to watch more episodes, but I don't know just when that'll be.

On Sunday I volunteered at the Hollywood Theater in the afternoon (and I arrived too early because I had forgotten to set my clocks back). After my shift, I watched Melvin Goes to Dinner, which took a little while to grab me, but in the end I liked it quite a bit.

Books
I've got several graphic novels that are due back at the library soon, so I read those this weekend rather than Monstrous Regiment.

• 30 Days of Night by Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith, which I just can't recommend. It's a really great idea for a horror story (a group of vampires invade an Alaskan town above the Arctic Circle), but the execution just didn't work. This is me at my nit-picky worst, but I was really annoyed by a stupid mistake early in the book. On the third page, still setting the scene, there's a caption that says in Barrow, Alaska, the sun doesn't set between May 10 & August 2 and the sun doesn't rise between November 18 & December 17. I realize not everybody is as anal retentive as me and may not remember their high-school earth science very well (if they got it right in the first place), but it would not have taken much research to learn that in any place where the sun does not rise for a period of time in winter, it will not set for the same length of time in the summer, not nearly 3 times as long. Also bugging me was the fact that the period of night-less days is asymmetrical around the summer solstice, you know the longest day of the year and the period of sunless days doesn't even include the winter solstice.
  Okay, rant over.
  
• I also read Legacy: The Last Will and Testament of Hal Jordan by Joe Kelly & Brent Anderson. I quite liked this; it went a long way towards redeeming the character of Hal Jordan in my eyes. (You'd have to be an old time Green Lantern fan to understand what I mean by that.)
  
• Confessions of a Cereal Eater, v.2 by Rob Maisch, et al. Autobiographical stories. Okay stuff, not great.
  
• The Nevermen, v.2: Streets of Blood by Phil Amara and Guy Davis. Great, weird, kinda steampunkish noir story. Not sure what else to say about this. I love Guy Davis's art, and want to see him get a lot more work.