With the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie breaking records this weekend I realised that though I saw the first one when it came out and remembered enjoying it, I really didn't remember all that much of it. After failing to rent a copy from the wonderful Blockbuster which cleverly had all of one copy of such a big film whose sequel was coming out, I saw it on sale for $10 at Target and decided to buy it.

"Pirates" is one of those films that is like Ronseal Quick Drying Woodstain: It does exactly what it says on the tin. It's a throwback to Indiana Jones and other 80s movies that managed to combine humour and action without becoming cheesy or camp like so many modern film. The cast is pretty good, if a bit unbalanced, with Jack Sparrow, the supposedly supporting character played by Johnny Depp easily outshining the less experienced acting chops of Orlando Bloom and Kiera Knightly in the lead roles.

Superman Returns is a good film that, with a completely rewritten last hour, could have been a GREAT film.

Let me start with the negative: The last hour of the film is poor for two reasons. Return of the King was a film which annoyed the hell out of me for refusing to end when it needed to. Superman Returns has a similar problem and at least twice the filmmakers have the opportunity to end on a great cliffhanger but choose to keep plodding on a good 20 minutes after the film has lost all of it's momentum. The other problem is the lack of a decent hero/villain resolution - it needed one more climactic confrontation scene to really satisfy.

This podcast is really funny. Anyone from England will know who these two are and can skip the rest of this paragraph. Anyone who doesn't know who they are will probably not be that interested, but here goes anyway: David Baddiel and Frank Skinner are two British comedians who have a long-running partnership presenting such shows as Fantasy Football, Fantasy World Cup and Baddiel & Skinner Unplanned in which they took the talk show to it's logical conclusion and just both sit there on a couch discussing whatever they want. They will always be linked with English football after their single Three Lions became the official single of England's Euro 96 campaign.

This Lost tie-in novel has been released without the usual big marketing push a novel based on a successful TV series would have. The reason being that the novel is not actually set within the "universe" of the show, it's conceit is that it's the last novel written by one of the survivors of the plane crash that began the series. Upon hearing that, you would probably wonder what point would there be in reading such a book as it wouldn't have much to do with the actual show. And you would be right.

Maybe future seasons of Lost will shed some light on how the book and the TV series connect, but I can't see how they ever will. Apart from sharing some names and some similar themes to the TV show (People with mysterious pasts, missing relatives, powerful and rich families, exotic locations, redemption, mysterious research companies, philosophical musings on the nature of destiny etc.) there really is nothing obvious to link the two works.

Let me answer 3 questions. Is it the best game ever? No. Is it as good as Half Life? Not entirely, clarification to follow. Is it ONE OF the best games ever and a must buy? Yes.

Half-Life was one of those rare games that came along at just the right moment and without reinventing the wheel, did pretty much exactly what everyone else was doing but improved it just enough and had the complete package to make people think it was revolutionary. At the time it came out it was just another one of many first-person-shooters on the market, but it's immersive environment and story, along with a couple of gameplay innovations, tied it all together in a package that was pretty much perfect. It went on to become one of the biggest games ever, and is one of the first games mentioned when people take about "the best game ever".

I had a lot of spare time on my hands a few months ago, and reading has always been a pretty cheap way to pass lots of time. Unfortunately, I had so much spare time that I was reading at least a book a week and so my cheap habit became quite expensive. One book I found to alleviate the expense somewhat was The Chronicles of Narnia, all 7 Narnia books and it was only $10! Given that the movie version of the first novel The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (LWW) was coming out soon, it seemed as good a time as any to reread these classics.

The books are presented in chronological order, not the order they were written, so the first book is The Magician's Nephew, which is set before LWW. Rather than write 7 reviews I'm just going to ramble about the series as a whole... All the books are much, much shorter than I remembered. I guess they were written for kids, which may explain it - but after seeing all the pre-film hype for LWW I think I had been fooled into expecting them to be much more epic. They are actually more like old-fashioned fairytales, than epic fantasies.

If you haven't seen and intend to see Flightplan, don't read this.

OK, according to the film here's the plan that someone apparently came up with to make $50 million dollars:

So we find a female flight engineer, living abroad, kill her husband and plant a bomb in his coffin. We then hope that woman decides to return to the US with her daughter the coffin is placed on the same flight as the woman and her daughter travel on. We further assume that nobody on the flight will see the mother bringing her daughter onto the plane and that there will be no video evidence of the girl before she boards the plane. Assume that at some point the mother will fall asleep giving us an opportunity to take the child, and again assume that nobody else aboard will see this. Put the girl in the hold and put a bomb near her.

Whilst browsing for more reading material in Wal-Mart, I spied this book - whose existence I was completely unaware of until now. Being a massive fan of the show, I had to buy it.

Short plot synopsis : After a prisoner transfer gone wrong, Jack Bauer is alone in New York and wanted by the FBI, as he investigates a possible plot to shoot down airliners over the USA involving Islamic terrorists and ex-IRA arms dealers. The story is set before Season One, and before September 11. The government has recently set up the Counter Terrorist Unit (CTU). Many branches of the government including the FBI and CIA do not see the need for the new agency and so CTU has a struggle to operate effectively without their co-operation.