With our 2 for 1 movie coupon in hand we decided to go see this knowing full well that it was likely to be pretty bad. On arrival at the movie theatre we found out that the coupon was not valid for the newest movies out. So that was annoying.

Well, it was pretty much as bad as I thought it was going to be. The good: Some mildly amusing bits, some pretty good special effects. The bad: A serious lack of action and a lack of real emotion. Nicolas Cage plays Johnny Blaze, who starts the film as a boy who learns his dad has cancer and so sells his soul to the devil to save him. Except there is no real strong bond shown between the two of them, and when he finds out his dad has cancer he doesn't even look that bothered. He then grows up to be a stuntman who, again, doesn't seem that bothered that he is cursed by the devil, looking upon it as a minor annoyance to him rather than being wracked with pain and anguish about it. He needed to go on some kind of journey as a character, going from tormented soul to accepting his curse and becoming the Ghost Rider, but he just kind of stumbles through the film taking it all in his stride.

The latest crazy show that has taken our interest is Man Vs. Wild. It's a simple premise: Survival expert Bear Grylls (and that IS is his real name) is dropped into one of nature's many hostile environments and has to survive unaided until he can get back to civilization. Highlights so far have seen him eating ants, drinking the water squeezed out of elephant dung and pissing on his own T-shirt so he can use it to keep cool.

Apart from the ludicrous parts such as above, he does show some useful things if you ever were to get lost, such as building rafts and shelter etc. But the main reason the show works is that he's just a personable bloke, and for an ex-SAS soldier he's not the typical gruff bastard you see on these kind of things,which helps, as he's more like just a normal bloke trying to survive than some superman. He has the enthusiasm for what he's doing that someone like Steve Irwin had, but without getting over the top and annoying.

I asked for either this or Gears of War for Christmas, and got this - and glad I did cos its one of the best games I have ever played. Maybe being a huge comics fan helps, as half the fun of the game is the fact that you get to play as like 20 different superheroes (Wolverine, Spider-Man, Daredevil, Thor, Iron Man...etc.) against dozens of the famous Marvel supervillains (Doctor Doom, Galactus, Super Skrull, Loki...etc.) But on top of that, the gameplay is responsive, fun, long-lasting, with lots of replay value with things to unlock (like extra characters).

Over Christmas I have seen quite a few movies, and can't be bothered to review them all. So here's the quick versions:

• Night at the Museum : Surprisingly good, but basically a kid's film, it's like a funnier Jumanji. With Ricky Gervais in it - who as always is just himself, but bloody funny.
• My Super-Ex Girlfriend : Really fucking bad.
• Beerfest : Really fucking funny.
• Talledaga Nights : Alright, much worse than I thought it would be - nowhere near as good as Anchorman.
• Clerks 2 : Bad. Like Episode One bad, going back and revisiting something that used to be good, but just goes through the motions. Clerks 2 has the same level of dick and fart jokes, but none of the charm of the original - it's amusing in pieces but the once-clever Star Wars in-jokes and references have been replaced by not that funny jokes about Lord of the Rings that make the characters look old and bitter, and not witty and hip anymore.
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As the few TV shows I am currently watching have (mostly) gone into midseason breaks, I decided to try a show I had previously skipped: Jericho.

A nuclear explosion occurs in Denver, visible from the small town of Jericho. Communications are lost and the power is cut off, nobody knows what has happened - is it an accident? Terrorism? War? Gradually (very gradually) we learn more about what has happened as the inhabitants of Jericho struggle to understand what has happened and how they will survive the new, changed, world they are living in.

When the time came to reinstall Windows on my desktop PC a couple of months ago, I couldn't find my serial numbers for Microsoft Office. After trying the free download of Office 2007 Beta for a few weeks and finding it overcomplicated and needlessly altered, I suddenly remembered the open source alternative OpenOffice.

I had never tried it, but had always heard the name of it come up in discussions about MS Office, especially on Digg. It's basically a free, slightly cut-down version of Office. You get 6 programs, roughly corresponding to Word, Excel, Access, Powerpoint, Visio and ur... a Maths Formula program. And guess what: It's great! While it's missing a lot of the more advanced features, that's in some ways a bonus as it means everything is easier to use and less cluttered. It works well with existing Office documents and will save in Office format too, so you don't have to send stuff to people in a wierd format.

A great man once said "It's a kind of magic." That man's name was Christopher Lambert in the excellent movie Highlander. Today I saw another movie featuring a different "kind of magic". It was called The Prestige and here is my review.

It's pretty great. Not GREAT great, but it's a well acted, well directed, intelligently written film that outshines the majority of films that I have seen recently. There's just something classy about it that puts it a level above a lot of other, more generic films. I knew I wanted to see the film because after seeing the trailers, I knew it looked good but had no idea where the story was going to go or what the characters would be like. It really was going to be a mystery, and what a mystery it is.

The 3rd in my "terrible films with gun-toting women" viewing list - it was just as bad as the other two. With perhaps the most nonsensical plot of them all : In the future, people with a "vampire" like disease are treated as an underclass, kept in camps and generally repressed - there's some kind of cure/weapon/mcguffin that everybody is after and some stuff blows up and lots of people die in ridiculously staged sword/gun fights.

And that's it...avoid.

Probably the least horrible of my recent batch of bad films, Underworld 2 has some good bits and is generally less ridiculous than Aeon Flux and Ultraviolet but suffers from many of the same faults, leaving it pretty much a mess.

The film starts with a prologue which helpfully explains the plot that is about to happen, which kind of ruins the first two-thirds of the film as characters try and uncover the secrets that we have been shown upfront. I like to call this the "Tomorrow Never Dies" method of plot twists - the Bond film that starts with us seeing a "stealth boat" attempting to start an international war, which is then followed by an hour of Bond investigating the incident only to find out that...it was a "stealth boat" attempting to start an international war. Fancy that! It robs the film of half the suspense when your characters are trying to uncover a mystery that you already know the answer to.

With not much on TV at the moment I have been renting some really bad films that I hadn't got round to watching. Three of them are very similar sci-fi themed movies with "kick-ass" female action heroees: Underworld 2, Ultraviolet and Aeon Flux.

Aeon Flux is apparently based on a decent cartoon/anime series, but it's not something I have ever seen. This future apparently is a cross between the Matrix and Bill & Ted, with half the population walking around brightly lit cities with ridiculous "futuristic" costumes on, and the other half in brooding dark, Neo-wannabe leatheresque outfits.