In case you weren't already convinced that Karl Rove and Bill O'Reilly were duplicitous partisan hacks:

Clips like this are why I watch the Daily Show.

Gov. Sarah Palin officially accepted the nomination for VP tonight. Then she proceeded to tell at least 6 lies:

Factchecking Palin

Save Mister Rogers? Neighborhood | Be a neighbor!

Why Save Mister Rogers Neighborhood?
In June 2008, Public Broadcasting Service announced that it intends to soon change the way Mister Rogers? Neighborhood, the beloved children?s television program, is distributed to member stations.

PBS will cease transmitting the program as part of their daily syndicated lineup beginning in September. Instead, PBS will provide member stations with a single Neighborhood episode on weekends. This unfortunate decision essentially silences the special nurturing voice of Mister Rogers in the daily lives of today?s children.

This is really a shame. I know some people bag on the show but it really taught me a lot as a kid. It's also what got me into music and encouraged my imagination and creative spirit. If you want to learn more about the importance of shows like this, listen to the man himself:

There you go. If you can spare a moment, send a letter or email or two and help today's kids enjoy the show we grew up with.

As they say, you win some and you lose some. It simply isn't true that the arrival of fall brings the best movies of the year. I've been disappointed with a couple of the late-summer/early-fall offerings, and this one has to be one of the most disappointing movies I've seen this year. Starring Alan Rickman as a wine shop owner who decides to put on a blind wine tasting competition between French and Californian wines, Bottle Shock turns out to be mostly about the Californian wine makers. The ones featured here are an emotionally unbalanced group: Jim Barrett (Bill Pullman) and his hippie son (Chris Pine, who will hopefully better as Kirk in the upcoming Star Trek movie) who box each other every time they have a disagreement - which mus happen often since they've got a ring set up next to the vineyard, an abnormally clean-looking hippie girl played by Rachel Taylor who is a love interest for a couple of characters (although I wouldn't say any of them actually portray love in this movie), and Freddy Rodriguez as part of two love triangles - one with the girl and one with Barrett's wine making career.

The opening credits alone got me worrying. They were filled with alternating sweeping shots and closeups of vineyards. It was very cliche and also irritatingly edited, and it was accompanied by overly generic wine-country music. The same shots are used periodically throughout the film, and to me they were very annoying. Regarding music, either my theater's sound system was rigged incorrectly or this movie actually tried to drown out boring dialog by inserting a loud soundtrack. Music was also used to try and make scenes more exciting than they actually were. It was a crutch for a poor script, and not a very good crutch considering how each piece of music seemed all too familiar to this type of movie genre.

Little to zero character development is made while all of the characters go through the motions of Bottle Shock's plot. Rickman's character is busy tasting wine and actually disappears from the majority of the movie. If he had been in it more, at least his charisma would have carried the film, but oh well (Dennis Farina is wasted in a bit part as well). Barrett is having trouble getting his wine to turn out properly, so he's angry all the time. His son doesn't care much for work, but when his father is running low on money, he realizes he needs to be proactive about saving the family business. He gets money from his mom to pay for some barrels, has a fight with his best friend (who is making his own wine on the side as well as getting into bed with the girl - I think she actually sleeps with him because his wine is that good!), and ultimately saves the business and mends all wounds by the end of the film. From that description, one might think that his character goes through a lot of change, but it's all very one-dimensional. All of the characters are very one-dimensional, especially the angry Barrett, who is redeemed only by a scene at the end when he realizes his business has been saved.

The movie was so dull that I was actually thinking about leaving the theater about a third of the way through the film, but since I have only ever walked out of one other movie, I decided to stick with it. I will admit that the final third of the movie actually got things moving, but it was too little and too late, and I had already mentally checked out.

Bottle Shock succeeds as an advertisement for Californian wines--I almost went to BevMo! after I saw it--and it does capture a funny performance by Rickman, but in almost all other areas, it is a failure. While it doesn't exactly rival The Happening in its terribleness, it's still in contention for one of the bottom spots on my list for 2008.