I've been enjoying all of Philip Reeve's Larklight books and the third one, Mothstorm: The Horror from Beyond Uranus Georgium Sidus!, is no exception. The Victorian steampunky spaceflight thing is still hitting all the right buttons in my brain.

FuzzyCo grade: A

Transporter 3 wasn't quite as good as the first one, but it was leaps and bounds (and kicks and shirtless Jason Stathams) better than the second movie.

FuzzyCo grade: B

The House Bunny is a completely confounding movie. I'm confounded. The dialogue, plot, and acting is absolutely sub-par -- like if Animal House had had multiple direct-to-video sequels and we were now up to Animal House 9 and this was the shoddy phoned-in product. BUT. Except for Anna Faris. She's hilarious. She's stuck in the plot, of course, but her dialogue is miles above the movie and her performance is stellar. Did she write her own lines or something? I can't wait to see her star in something good.

FuzzyCo grade (The House Bunny): D
FuzzyCo grade (Anna Faris in The House Bunny): A

Jill Conner Browne is best known for her series of (non-fiction) Sweet Potato Queens books of "Southern wit and wisdom". Erica assures me that those books are delightful -- she certainly laughs out loud a lot when she's reading them. On our recent roadtrip we listened to her first novel, titled, unsubtly enough, The Sweet Potato Queens' First Big-Ass Novel. It's... a good first try, I suppose.

FuzzyCo grade: C

You know, I kinda gave Twilight some slack with a hand-waving "well, I'm not in the target audience" and then here comes Devilish to show the folly of that. Because it's aimed at the same target market - teenage girls with an interest in supernatural stories - and yet it's actually good.

FuzzyCo grade: A

Gary Hustwit's Helvetica is a documentary focussed on the titular typeface - through conversations with designers, he illuminates both the history and evolution of the typeface and allows the designers to wax philosophic about issues in design. His new film, Objectified, takes the same approach to the much broader topic of industrial design. Because the topic is so much more general -- in a Q&A after the showing I saw last night, Hewitt said he set himself some arbitrary limits of no clothing or shoes on one end and no architecture on the other -- the philosophizing goes much farther afield. But it's still a look at a field that it's very easy to let fade into the background of our modern lives, even though the results of industrial design affect us every day. And it doesn't hurt that it's beautifully shot and the score is delightful.

The showing I saw last night was a one-off sponsored by AIGA Chicago, IDSA Chicago, and Coudal Partners (the latter to whom I owe thanks for tickets). The film will be back for a week of screenings at the Siskel Center in June.

FuzzyCo grade: A

Since my last experience with vampires was so soppy, I felt like a good ol' bloody violent vampire movie was needed. 30 Days of Night fit the bill. Based on a graphic novel (that I've never read), vampires descend on the northernmost town in Alaska to take advantage of the titular polar night. It's a really good entry in the "realistic"* genre of survival horror. Scary, affecting, and the ending really came out of nowhere (except, in hindsight, perfectly foreshadowed). I was really impressed.

FuzzyCo grade: A+

* I know, I know. I mean, given the notion that there are vampires it proceeds realistically from there. My only quibble in that regard was that there was an ill-defined number of vampires that seemed a little high sometimes.

I'm still not quite sure what to make of Happy-Go-Lucky. I enjoyed watching it, so I suppose it worked or something. But what does Poppy's endless optimism mean? And is it terrible that I sympathize with the quiet book store clerk at the beginning of the movie who just wants to be left alone?

FuzzyCo grade: if you like movies where not much happens and people talk a lot, like Erica does, you'll like this movie. I still don't know where I land on it.

I was of two minds about Role Models. Everyone sleep-walked through the plot: will these two differently-damaged men come to actually care about the boys their court-ordered community service hours have them mentoring? If you think they won't, I have a bridge you may be interested in. But there was enough flat-out nonsense going on in the dialogue, especially from Jane Lynch, that it redeemed the movie for me.

FuzzyCo grade: B-

Soul Bubbles is one of the funnest games ever. Srsly! It's probably in the platformer genre, but instead of controlling a little jumping Mario et al, you're a "Soul Herder" who blows on the titular Soul Bubble to navigate it across a dangerous world to safe rest in a Soul Cube. (How many times can I can say "Soul"?)

Said "blowing" is accomplished with the DS' stylus, not by actually blowing into the microphone. There was a brief awkward moment at the beginning of the game where you're required to blow into the microphone and I wondered if I'd be able to play this game on the train, but thankfully that was the only time that was required -- I assume to check off some Nintendo "uses special features of the DS" requirement.

Anyway, the game mechanic is both interestingly different and plain old fun. And the music and design is top notch. I loved it, can you tell? And hey, it's not just me -- it's won two Milthons and it was nominated for a BAFTA this year. (And hey, guess what else was up for a BAFTA -- Ninjatown, which I just found out had its story and dialogue written by my good friend Dan's brother, Robbie Q. Telfer.)

FuzzyCo grade: A+

The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death has a great noir vibe, a great center-piece -- the world of trauma cleaning -- and a suitably f'ed up protagonist. The only problem I have is that Charlie Huston does this thing where instead of perfectly normal quotation marks and "he said"s, he just uses long dashes and never attributes a line of dialog. Which is a real shame, because the dialog would just flow in a very natural manner, except that every 3 pages I'd run across a line where I'd have to pause and parse out the action to figure out who was saying what.

FuzzyCo grade: A-