David Mamet on poker and politics.

Anyone remember the article in Film Comment some years back accusing Romanek of outright thievery for lifting ideas and images from famous painters, photographers and other artists in his videos? Guess there's no hard feelings.

War of the Worlds screenwriter Josh Friedman (no, the other War of the Worlds screenwriter) has a blog. He's already blogged a WGA arbitration story, for which I'm always a sucker, and promises to write about his experiences working on The Black Dahlia, finally coming to the screen via Brian De Palma and based on one of the best books I've ever read.

I'm not normally one of those readers who loves to read elaborate pans of bad movies, but this Ebert review of Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo had me LOL for some reason.

I spent an awful long time trying to make this work as a full-on CSS layout, but CSS is stubborn. I knew I wanted the key image in the page to be a big graphic with type burned in. I knew that I wanted vertical nav-style bars on either side of it. And I knew I wanted the thing to fit comfortably in an 800x600ish browser window. But it's a hell of a thing to try and get CSS markup to conform three columns to precisely the same length, and as I was reading up on absolute and relative positioning in an effort to wrestle a relatively minor display discrepancy between Firefox and Internet Explorer to the ground, I realized that using a nested table, rather than CSS, would solve the problem elegantly. And then I started to wonder how a great big table would handle the niceties of my three column layout and, bam, the whole thing fell into place in an evening.

The page still boasts quite a bit of (messy) CSS mark-up, and I plan to work on it as a continuing project. The rest of the site is full of ancient HTML pages that could use a good facelift so maybe I can brighten up the joint -- even if I never get around to figuring out a relatively simple way to serve all the reviews dynamically (or at least offer dynamic listings from a reviews database that can enable complex searches while still linking to the static pages).

If you know anything about page design, you'll note that I'm not a particularly elegant HTML coder. Rather than using screwdrivers and tiny chisels, I'm the guy hitting the blasted thing with the flat side of a hammer over and over again. But I hope you get some pleasure out of the enhanced imagery. And if you can think of any ideas for regular non-review content to fill that big gaping hole at the bottom of my middle column, please let me know.

In other news, I picked up my PSP this last week and wow what a unit. It is first and foremost a games system, and it does games very well indeed. (My favorite so far is Lumines, which takes Tetris to a not-so-obvious next level, although the real jaw-dropper is THUG 2 on a handheld -- complete with fully interactive 3D virtual worlds and killer soundtrack (Rancid, The Ramones, Handsome Boy Modeling School, etc.).)

But what really proves that this thing costs Sony more than the 250 bones it'll cost you is the video playback capability. The bright LCD screen is to die for, and the quality on the bundled Spider-Man 2 disc — encoded at full DVD resolution, then resampled for the PSP's somewhat lower-quality display — is just phenomenal for a portable unit. (This means I can stop compressing MTV2's Subterranean to death just so I can watch it on the train on my little Clié.) And while I'd very much recommend against watching something like House of Flying Daggers on a handheld game system, I'm already thinking that if it proves to be not too difficult to rip DVDs to this thing (yes, you need an expensive and proprietary-to-Sony "memory stick" to do that deed) with the commentary track instead of the main audio, I may be able to catch up with my supplemental viewing on planes and trains instead of springing for a portable DVD player.

Jackie Chan ain't getting any younger. So it's understandable that he's toned down his bone-breaking stunts in favor of bank-building Hollywood fare. If you missed the experience of seeing his elegant, inventive stuntwork on a big screen with an appreciative audience, or just want another dose of solid martial-arts action, you could do a lot worse than getting out to a theater and catching a screening of the furiously choreographed Ong Bak: Thai Warrior.