Review Day

there are no spoilers in these reviews

How I Met Your Mother, Season One:
This is one of Rebecca's favourite shows, and we started watching it over Christmas after finding it bundled very inexpensively at Costco. I see it as something of a Friends for the 2000s -- young, hip professionals in New York involved in zany hijacks and ensuing hilarity. There's a broad mix of humour for every viewer, and missing one episode won't ever get you lost on the plot. Overall, a good "don't-have-to-think-too-hard" funny show.

Final Grade: B+

Weeds, Season Three:
The third season of Weeds was better than the second, but not quite as good as the first. The plot is a little more dangerous without being intense in a Prison-Break way, which makes the show continue to work on the funny side. One particular highlight involves Kevin Nealon wandering around a church making up songs about the people he seems on his guitar. The season ended in a interesting, majorly-disruptive way, so I'm not sure how good it will be in the fourth season.

Final Grade: B+

Burn After Reading:
This Coen Brothers movie felt like a fast-paced Fargo, and the number of characters and intersecting storylines was never a barrier to understanding the plot. It's what you would expect if you enjoy their movies, and is over in just ninety minutes, which is the perfect length for this story. John Malkovich costars in his typecast "Malkovich is already a little crazy but gets even crazier" role.

Final Grade: B

Rayman Raving Rabbids:
Anna got me this game for Christmas. Like Wario Ware, it's a collection of zany mini-games, but it's more thematically cohesive than that game. Rabbids are a set of crazy rabbits with plungers (as seen on the cover), and the mini-games include tasks like shot putting a cow, slamming the doors of an outhouse, or shooting rabbids with plungers like the Wild West rail shooters from the arcades of the 90's. The game is hilarious, although the graphics are old enough to appear with distracting artifacts on my newer model TV.

Final Grade: A-

Lost, Season Five Premiere:
I can't yet decide if the premiere was a stew of genius or just a big mess -- I'll have to watch it again. There were plenty of familiar faces and scenes, which made the show interesting in a Back to the Future II kind of way, but there were also too many skips in time, and even more new actors to deal with (though one was fortunately dealt with in a red-shirt kind of way). I totally called the identity of the cloaked woman at the end though.

Final Grade: B