Films of the Moment: Grindhouse, Stranger than Fiction

A quick couple of reviews:

Grindhouse

Excellent. Quality films pretending to be bad films and ending up just quality. The "trailers" were all awesome. Rodriguez's film was spicier and funnier with a "deeper" plot (albeit easy to predict zombie film). Tarantino's Death Proof was... classic Tarantino. Death Proof felt a lot like a lost relative of Reservoir Dogs (excellent dialog with some great action thrown in the middle) with a little bit of Pulp Fiction thrown in (mostly as references). Tarantino's was better art and Rodriguez's was better pop-cinema. Ultimately hard to imagine a punchier peanut-butter-and-chocolate action film pairing. Some won't appreciate Death Proof as much as Planet Terror, but I have to say they end up being just about equal and opposite.

Stranger than Fiction

Excellent. The literary devices as literary device is a weird genre that actually speaks to me (yes, I own a copy of Adaptation), and its used quite well here. Will Ferrell's performance seems the most sincere, earnest, and unforced of any performance of his. Dustin Hoffman's character is hilarious and made me briefly consider switching to an English degree if I could take classes with his character. Maggie Gyllenhaal's performance was incredibly endearing. I'll save my commentary on what I thought of the plot for some other time, perhaps...

Deal or No Deal: Truly a Lottery

In case anyone cares: I just finished a 25-page paper in which I showed statistically that the banker has an impact on the results of a game of Deal or No Deal, but the contestants do not. I'll post a PDF or XPS of the paper tomorrow, perhaps. I primarily wasn't testing contestants, so it is possible that my random sampling of contestants was biased and there exists contestants for which there is a statistically significant difference and all of my participants just happened to be very equally matched. I'm a little doubtful, though.