Our shiny new Room and Board entertainment center arrived yesterday morning. The delivery men carried it in and put it in its final resting place, and were even so kind as to put felt liners on our incredibly heavy TV's legs and move it onto the new piece. All this while Tara was harassing them incessantly. The new "media center", as Room and Board puts it, raises the TV a good foot and a half or so, and i think frames it better than the old stand and makes it seem bigger. The DirecTV, DVD player, and game consoles all fit nicely in the central area, and there are two drawers in which i've hidden the mess of game controllers and cables as well as a few game boxes and DVDs. Here you see a shot of the unit as Veronica puts it through its paces. Poor Dr. Greg Madden.

The night before, Geoff and Naomi came down from Sacramento. We arranged to grab a quick meal at the usual Red Robin, then, despite the collective fatigue of our group, head down to the Redwood City Century Theater for the 10:15pm showing of V for Vendetta. We had our choice of seats in the relatively downtrodden cinema, with only six or so other people arriving for the last showing. I quite liked the film adaptation of the graphic novel. The tendency of the Wachowski brothers to splurge on philosophical dialogue, so apparent in the latter two Matrix films, worked to great effect here, aided by Hugo Weaving's impressive turn as the masked terrorist V. Natalie Portman's English accent was workable, and did well to represent Evey Hammond's struggle to fathom V's message and motives.

The film makes a number of changes to the original story, none of which are too damaging. Perhaps the most interesting is the historical update the screenplay delivers, making references to America's failed war in Iraq. Roger Ebert remarks that one of the strengths of the film is that the viewer is never quite sure whether the story should be taken as a cautionary tale or a commentary on current events.

Of course, such subtlety is completely lost on the conservative bulldogs that pepper our nation's airwaves, who are now beginning to grumble over the "inappropriate" message of the film. Which is, in their estimation, "Revolution good. Terrorism good. Goverment bad.". Debbie Schlussel, a frequent Bill O'Reilly guest and conservative s@#t-spouter along the lines of Ann Coulter, has written a scathing review of the film in which she claims it all but celebrates Osama bin Laden while pissing on our troops in Iraq. The rallying cry of the right ... you're not supporting our troops! Schlussel goes so far as to claim that a "Coalition of the Willing" poster bearing a swastika seen in the film implies our troops are Nazis. No, just the people sending them over there. She also apparently endorses censorship of the Koran because of the violent history of radical Muslims. In her extended tirade of who did what to whom and why our government is definitely fighting the good fight, she completely misses the point of the movie, which is that an omnipresent government is unacceptable and that it is the responsibility of citizens to assign or remove power from regimes as they see fit.

A few final, non-political words on V for Vendetta ... first of all, what a friggin' great soundtrack! V occupies himself in his subterranean lair with a jukebox full of wonderful, now censored music, including Julie London, Cat Power, and many other great pieces of mood music. Secondly, i was very pleased with the parallels that were drawn between V and the Count of Monte Cristo, a comparison i don't recall being made very strongly in the graphic novel. V and Edmond Dantes are united in their obsession with vengeance, and their refusal to lessen their revenge plots at the urging of their loved ones. Something that the recent film version of the Count of Monte Cristo would've done well to remember.

Anyhoo, V and i went to see Belle & Sebastian and the New Pornographers at the SF Concourse Exhibition Center last night. We arrived for the last twenty minutes of the New Pornographers, then took stock of our energy levels and interest and left. We've both seen B&S three or four times and we both hate the layout and acoustics of the Concourse. I thought the NP were great in the short time and from the great distance away that i got to see them ... definitely worth checking out on their own. After leaving, we came home to have a takeout Mexican dinner, soak in the glory of the entertainment center, watch the increasingly formulaic American Idol, and play with our food-hungry and stranger-leery Tara dog.