The last issue of Playboy I bought featured a nude spread of Buffy The Vampire Slayer’s Charisma Carpenter. The next Playboy I buy will feature a nude spread of Battlestar Galactica’s Tricia Helfer.

The Third Season resumes in fifty-three hours, Sunday night at 10pm. The Best Show on Television picks up from the cliffhanger: Cylon forces on the Algae planet moving to take the temple; Starbuck shot down; Lee and Anders facing off, weapons drawn; Bill Adama poised and ready to nuke the surface, destroying the Cylon force and killing his own people on the planet, including his last surviving son …

Mike Yoder’s alien-inspired corridors and environments are awesome in their creepy atmosphere.

Tell me, if you were a Lego minfigure, would you down that without a high-powered rifle or a squad of troops in front of you?

(I wouldn’t!)

So imagine my surprise when I actually really enjoyed Laurence Olivier’s King Henry V, which I only put on my Netflix queue because I needed it for a take-home quiz assignment for my minimester course. Maybe it’s just the course — probably! — but I’ve really developed a fondness for this play, the final of a tetralogy beginning with Richard II, and continuing through both parts of Henry IV. I don’t think I’d ever realized that nearly every one of General Chang’s Shakespeare quotes in Star Trek VI came from this play.

To me, what was most fascinating was how Olivier directed the film. The film opens in the Globe Theater, and it’s as if the camera is a member of the production, panning around the audience, focusing on actors stepping onto stage, and then moving behind stage. When we first see Olivier, he’s backstage — he isn’t Henry V, he’s a medieval actor portraying Henry V. He gets his signal, steps forward towards the stage entry, coughs, then steps onto stage where he assumes the role of the great defeater of the cheese eating surrender monkeys. Eventually, the framework of the Globe steps away, as if we, the audience, are using our imagination to wipe-away the walls of the theater — something, in fact, urged by Shakespeare in the play when the Chorus addresses the audience. I particularly enjoyed Olivier’s delivery of the famous “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers, for he who sheds his blood with me today shall be my brother” speech (which is what I did the quiz - a speech analysis - on), where he tries to rally his battered, defeated troops into facing the French with the heart of a lion: and, in fact, they do, at the Battle of Agincourt. I’d like to see the Branaugh version, but it is out of print on DVD and unavailable on Netflix (bah).

The second film I saw was American Splendor, detailing the life of Cleveland cartoonist Harvey Pekar, whose comic can be described best as, perhaps, the “minutae of human existance.” It occurs to me that, were he a blogger, his blog would probably be a lot like mine — a lot of minutae, very little insight (although, perhaps his comic actually has a lot of insight and I didn’t pick up on that through the film). I enjoyed how the film was put together with the intermingled interviews and the intercuts of Paul Giamatti as Pekar with actual footage of Pekar. I probably won’t read the comic, but I’m glad I got to see the movie (even if I will probably never watch it again).

The third film, which I watched last night (and into the early morning) was Ghost World with Thora Birch and Steve Buscemi. Crap, is there anything Buscemi’s in that doesn’t kick tons of ass? The film is about life, relationships, and creepy older guys who like records (Dr. Mancini from my Rock & Roll class last semester would’ve loved the record-party debate arguing CD players versus record players, he’d side with the record players), and, look, hard to describe, but deep, and touching, and, um, yeah, a little creepy.