Darn you, Gillette!

The only thing worse than a company who consistently comes out with newer, more expensive products is a company who consistently comes out with newer, more expensive products that actually work better than the previous versions. Darn you, Gillette!

Heck, I remember the days when I shave with one blade at a time. Then the revolution to 2, then to 3, then they skipped 4 altogether thanks to Schick, and now 5?! I happened to pick one up recently, just to see if it was worth the hassle of switching. It is.

But I still haven’t tried any of the powered versions. Just makes me too nervous to have multiple blades vibrating against my face. This will probably not scare the future generations who will shave with giant rotating drums covered with 100+ blades, but for now I’m good.

That is until we have the 6-blade razor.

TiVo back in black!

Good news for a Friday! TiVo won $73 million in a patent infringement suit against EchoStar. It’s all over the Web, but I read about it first on Engadget, so they get the link.

This is good news, since this might end up being a larger revenue stream than subscription services soon. There are a lot of DVRs out there that could be infringing…

Man on Fire

Grade: B

Distracting visuals keep this action flick from being outstanding.

The first act of this movie blows. Let’s just get that out of the way. It’s plodding, obvious, silly, and, worst of all, they completely waste Christopher Walken. I mean, how do you waste Christopher Walken? The filmmakers somehow figured out a way.

But what saves this movie is the second act. When Denzel turns on the heat, it burns. This isn’t comic-book violence shown onscreen like the Arnold moves of the 80s (dangling the bad guy over the cliff). This is intense, gritty stuff that will make even seasoned action fans flinch in pain. That’s impressive in this day to have that kind of impact. But it isn’t done just for violence’s sake–it feels realistic if over the top. But we’ve also been given enough of a background that even the over the top scenes feel plausible.

But what keeps the the movie from being great is all the visual crap the filmmakers dumped in our laps. Odd cuts. Strange lighting. Those are forgivable. But occasional captions, not just translating Spanish but even repeating some English every once in a while. It’s odd and it takes you out of the story, the cardinal sin of any movie. If that had been avoided then this could have overcome that lame first act. It might have even overcome the cheap ending that could have only been demanded by a test screening audience (it’s really, really bad).

But, oddly enough, it’s worth seeing for that middle act. Just don’t watch on a full stomach.