Garden State with Zach Braff and Natalie Portman. A wonderful, quick movie, and not just because I'm that much of a fan of Portman. To me it seemed deceptively simple, that is, without ostentatious acting and complex enough underneath to warrant a repeat viewing, like a novel where you miss things the first time through. I particularly enjoyed how the story repeatedly blossomed in scope from a single, well put sentence.

Moving Towards Stillness, by Dave Lowry. A fomer columnist for Black Belt magazine, Lowry put me off a bit in the first several essays of the collection by being so over the top Japan-o-philic, but as I got further into the book there was less of that and more thoughtful discussions of various concepts. One off the top of my head was just a pointing out that as much as the analogy of bamboo bending to survive where more brittle plants wouldn't is used a great deal, it forgets that the roots of each bamboo plant intertwine to support each other, making a strong foundation where otherwise the tall stems would just tip over. Or, an essay based around a statement by a famous potter, Shoji Hamada: "There are two kinds of people: those who make themselves the center, who live as though their ancestors lived only to create them; and those who make themselves as low as possible, consider themselves nothing in relation to the whole, live in order to protect and cherish what their ancestors lived or and who bear children in order to pass on that idea of protecting and cherishing. Most artists fall into the first classification. Most artisans in the second one."

Filthy, Gorgeous - because drag queens rule. I remember the interesting posit from that arts class I took that a crossdresser can be more masculine/feminine than the sex they're impersonating could be, because in not being that sex, they are able to understand it in a different way.

Kingdom of Heaven - looks to be the movie about the Crusades I've been waiting for; I just hope they show the Muslims in a fair light, that would be nice.