Word Wars -- Rriigghhtt

I don't remember my reasoning for renting this movie. In hindsight, I think I got it confused with "Word Play" which has to do with crossword puzzles. If you're not reading or listening to your iPod on the "L" then you're doing the crossword puzzle or Sudoku challenge in the day's issue of Red Eye.

"Word Wars" deals with the ubiquetious word game known as Scrabble. There were many a Friday or Saturday night in college spent playing Scrabble, and it was fun and certainly helped increase my vocabulary at the time. The idea that there are people who literally do nothing but study and play Scrabble is mind boggling to me, and "Word Wars" chronicles the lives of 4 "word nerds" as they get ready for the 2002 National Scrabble Championship in San Diego.

Okay. Most people who have been in my apartment notice first off that I have quite a few books. They are stacked all over the place and have such a range that I could run my own library if I were so inclined.

What is in my apartment pales in comparison to the amount of books, papers or anything with words on them that these "word nerds" collect. Dictionary upon dictionary upon dictionary. Books on everything from gastrointestinal disease to the particulars of mining to pop culture to philosophies I've never heard of from countries I didn't know that were countries.

The really nifty thing about this movie though is how it tracks each player's thought process, and the use of anagrams. As they move from city to city and player to player, the new location starts as a word that is an anagram of that destination. The players spout off random combinations of letters, things that they might get, and proceed, with in seconds, SECONDS, to generate anagrams and words that actually have meaning!

That was impressive. Made me want to go out and by a Scrabble game and see what anagrams and useful words I have managed to accumulate from the books in my apartment.

It is a little slow in parts, and just mind boggling that these people spend their entire lives studying Scrabble, literally traveling from compeitition to competition to earn money to survive until the next one.

The word knowledge itself is worth the price of renting this movie. You'll want to look through the dictionary and wonder why you never knew that was a real word.

Rating: G-$_G-$_G-$

The Devil Wears Prada

I'll admit I was a bit hesitant in seeing this movie. I read the book, and the book was hilarious. What could've been a really depressing book was a sarcastic, witty, humorous slant on life in a job that "pays the rent."

I was skeptical about such wit and humour being duplicated on the big screen, but screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna is able to get most of it. And the casting is supurb! Meryl Streep does an excellent job portraying the cynical, ruthless, control-freak Miranda Priestly. Her delivery is curt, business-like and very much like how I envisioned the character in the book. Anne Hathway as Andy Sachs is just as good, playing the naive-to-wise 20-something making her way to the Big Apple.

Emily Blunt and Stanly Tuccie both give excellent performances. Stanly Tucci, who plays Nigel, strikes that perfect balance between Miranda's confidant and Andy's mentor, placating one while encouraging the other.

Though there are some very memorable scenes in the novel that were left out of the movie, like driving stick-shift in Manhattan rush hour traffic in stilettos, while not knowing how to drive stick-shift, the movie still did an excellent job capturing other telling scenes.

The jokes didn't fall flat. The audience was laughing for the majority of the movie and there wasn't that sense of contriteness that was in the movie version of The Da Vinci Code.

For an up-beat, funny, hey-my-job-isn't-so-bad and it's not the end of the world type movie, The Devil Wears Prada is worth seeing.

Rating: G-$_G-$_G-$_G