Karen and I went to see the latest Star Trek movie last weekend - Star Trek Nemesis and I must say I was a little disappointed with it. It wasn’t really a bad movie, it just wasn’t a very good movie. I have been reading interviews with cast members and other production staff for over a year and everyone of them gave it glowing reviews. The hype was that it was the best Star Trek movie ever, and that it was built on a solid story with lots of action and drama. I really got sucked into the hype and went to the theater expecting something spectacular. Unfortunately, it was anything but.

Don’t get me wrong, the story was OK, but much of it had been recycled from “Star Trek - The Wrath of Kahn” and other assorted episodes. And as advertised, there were a lot of action sequences but most of them seemed poorly choreographed and because of this were much less suspenseful then they should have been. It also didn’t help that the peek sequences in the action had been used as part of the commercials for the movie so I knew what was going to happen before it actually occurred. A great way to kill the suspense.

The movie also dragged somewhat in the beginning and could have been helped out by a little bit of judicious editing.

Written and Directed by Ben Younger
Rafi Gardet - Uma Thurman
Lisa Metzger - Meryl Streep
David Bloomberg - Bryan Greenberg

Casting can make or break a movie and in the case of Prime it definitely makes it.

Uma Thurman plays Rafi Gardet, a recently divorced women in her late thirties who is seeing a psychoanalyst to help her through her troubled times. The psychoanalyst, Lisa Metzger, played by Meryl Streep has a good relationship with Rafi and in some ways they appear to be more like mother and daughter then doctor and patient.
Rafi is somewhat depressed about the future and things appear bleak until she meets what she believes is the perfect man. The only problem is that he is much younger then her.

She continues to attend her therapy sessions, expressing her concerns about the age difference in the relationship and sharing with Lisa all the steamy details of her sex life. Lisa encourages her. Telling her that she deserves the best and that the age difference is not a problem. With her approval Rafi moves forward and things are going great until one day, Lisa discovers that the man that Rafi has been dating is her son. Then the fun begins.

As I said in the beginning, casting makes this movie. Uma Thurman is totally believable as the older women that …

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One of the unfortunate side effects of the Christmas holiday is weight gain. There is always so much good food to eat (and bad food too), that it’s almost impossible to escape the holiday season without gaining some weight. This year’s menu included rib roast, Italian style steak, Chinese food, pizza, banana bread, rum cake, assorted chocolates and many other dishes too numerous to mention. No, I didn’t eat these all at one meal. They were spread out throughout the holiday week so at any one time it didn’t seem like I was eating that much. But each item added up and when I stepped on the scale this weekend I found that they added up big time.

How come it takes forever to lose a pound, but you can gain a whole bunch of them in a week?

Anyway, it was time to pay the piper and I was determined that I would get the weight off fast. I decided to try something different this year. Years ago I tried out a diet that included meal replacement shakes. I bought a six pack of these pre-mixed things with the best of intentions, but after sampling the first one I decided it was not for me. It was pretty awful. The mixture kind of resembled a shake but was chalky and had a strange after taste that’s best described as a cross …

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I’ve been seeing a lot of advertisements for the new McDonald’s Fruit & Walnut Salad so today I thought I would give it a try.

The fruit in the salad consist of a number of apple slices with a handful of grapes thrown in for good measure. For some reason I expected more then this. It’s probably because they bill it as a Fruit & Walnut Salad so I expected it to have multiple types of fruit. I guess technically two type of fruit constitutes “fruit” but I must say I was a bit disappointed.

The quality of the apple slices were decent, nothing spectacular here; just average quality apple slices. The grapes were a bit on the tart side and did not have a lot of flavor, but this could vary from salad to salad so your experience may be different.

The walnut portion of the salad is a small bag (0.75oz) of Diamond Candied Walnuts. These were tasty, but again nothing to kill for. I’ve had better nuts on plane flights. They also add significantly to the caloric content of the salad, the small bag coming in at 140 calories.

As a dipping sauce for the fruit, McDonald’s includes a small container of their low fat yogurt. Since I really love McDonald’s yogurt, this was the high point of the salad for me.

With tax included, the Fruit & Walnut …

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Adam Sandler : Paul ‘Wrecking’ Crewe
Chris Rock : Caretaker
Burt Reynolds : Coach Nate Scarborough
James Cromwel : Warden Hazen
Directed by Peter Segal

I went to this movie with full expectations that it was going to be a total disaster but I ended up really surprised; it wasn’t half bad. Don’t get me wrong; this movie will most likely not be nominated for any Academy Awards, but it’s a fun movie to watch and worth a couple hours of your time.

This summer season has been filled with remakes and the 2005 version of The Longest Yard is a remake of the 1974 picture of the same name that starred Burt Reynolds. I had seen the original movie and really liked it. (although I was pretty young at the time so I liked just about any movie that had lots of violence and scantly clad women), but I had big doubts that this movie would live up to the original. Really, Adam Sandler, playing the part of a tough football player? It just didn’t seem like it would work.

But it did work.

Adam Sandler was able to pull of the part of Paul Crewe, an ex-quarterback with a reputation for point shaving who ends up being sent to prison after stealing his girl friends car and running from the police.

Sandler …

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