Eastern Promises gives us a glimpse into Russian organized crime in London and what happens when an innocent person gets wrapped up in its seedy existence. Amazing visuals and beautiful acting make Eastern Promises worth seeing.

Anna Khitrova (Naomi Watts) is a midwife in the maternity ward in a London hospital. A young pregnant Russian woman who speaks no English is brought into the hospital and delivers her baby before dying. Anna makes it her personal mission to find the family of the child, no matter where it takes her. Her first and only clue to the mother’s identity is her diary, written in Russian. Anna first brings the diary to her uncle, who is so disgusted by the content, he refuses to translate the contents for her. Discouraged but not giving up, she brings the diary to a local Russian restaurant. Semyon, the owner, agrees to translate the diary for her. Anna doesn’t know that he is the head of the local Russian mob. When she leaves the restaurant she meets Nikolai Luzhin (Viggo Mortensen), the cleaner for the mob. When they realize what is in the diary, Anna, her uncle, her aunt, and the baby aren’t safe.

Eastern Promises is to the eyes what crème brule is to the tongue: smooth, sophisticated, and delicious. The cinematographer Peter Suschitzky and director David Cronenberg jumped head first into a modern film noir style that grabs the audience by the eyes and doesn’t let go. There is exceptional attention to framing in most of the scenes, but it is the use of light that constantly caught my attention. There is lighting conspicuously meant to draw your attention to one particular part of the scene, and lighting that does it more subtly. The lighting conveys the right mood without the intention of the lighting being dreadfully obvious.

Seth Gordon, director of The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, a David vs. Goliath documentary about two men competing for champion rights to the classic arcade game Donkey Kong, opened up about his new film, its process, and his future.

“My favorite place is Fun Spot [an arcade featured in The King of Kong]. Family reunions were in New Hampshire. I burn in the sun, so my family would leave me at Fun Spot. It is a family place and they would give tokens for grades. I would think about it all year. I met Steve Wiebe [one of the main characters in the movie] four days after they had been in his garage. At first I thought he was too vanilla but after I met all the players, I wanted to do the project. It took a year and a half.”

When asked what the response of the featured people to the movie, Gordon indicated the results were unsurprisingly mixed. Gordon said, “Steve Wiebe loves the movie. He has practically memorized the movie.” The enthusiasm was not shared by Billy Mitchell who, according to Gordon, has launched a smear campaign against the film but all reports indicate he has yet to see the film. “Billy has said he feels it is unfortunate that this one moment in time is what is captured and what he’ll be remembered for.” Gordon believes that Walter Day (Chief Scorekeeper of Twin Galaxies, the official scorekeepers of video games) has come around to see sides of Billy that he had not seen before. Steve Sanders, Billy’s sidekick, of all the featured people, has most completely accepted Wiebe.

There’s only one reason to buy House, M.D. – Season Three on DVD — it’s one of the finest shows on television right now.

The show centers around Dr. Gregory House, played wonderfully by Hugh Laurie, a brilliant infectious disease specialist with a not-so-great bedside manner. Dr. House, who leads a team of young doctors at Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, typically uses unconventional methods to solve the most allusive of medical mysteries.

Watching Season Three, which included guest appearances by Kathleen Quinlan, Joel Grey, John Larroquette, Charles S. Dutton, and Dave Matthews, left me wanting Season Four to start right away. It is an emotional rollercoaster for the characters and the audience. All of the storylines are interesting and fantastically written. Hugh Laurie is phenomenal as Dr. House. The supporting cast — Lisa Edelstein, Robert Sean Leonard, Jennifer Morrison, Omar Epps, and Jesse Spencer — has made me cry at some point in every episode. House deserves every Emmy and Golden Globe nomination and win.

Season 3 — which consists of 24 episodes — is entertaining enough, so ho-hum to downright annoying special features aren’t a selling point for this 5-disc DVD collection. There isn’t much in the way of extras, though probably more than most TV show DVDs offer. There are alternative takes, a commentary track, blooper reel, a deeper look at one of the episodes, how props work, a music video, and a look into the production office.

The Invasion is about an intelligent alien bacteria that modifies the essential nature of humanity without changing its physical nature. The Invasion attempts to teach us something about our essential nature but instead teaches us about our nature to be suckered into a dull movie.

A shuttle crash brings with it an alien parasite that enters the human population. Dr. Carol Benell (Nicole Kidman) is thrown in the middle of the outbreak when her ex-husband, a doctor for the Center for Disease Control, Tucker Kaufman (Jeremy Northam) visits their son, Oliver (Jackson Bond). While Oliver is visiting his father, he and Carol get separated and Carol has to try to find him in the middle of the outbreak. Her and her colleague, Ben Driscoll, (Daniel Craig) set out to find him. The only way to move through the ever transforming sea of the infected unnoticed is to pretend that you have no emotions.

The first twenty minutes of the movie is director Oliver Hirschbiegel‘s attempt at showing how emotional, individual, and human we all are in our everyday lives. On her walk to work, Carol is confronted by examples of emotions running wild in the street. Women are crying, loud conversations come from men shouting into their cell phones, and there are obvious acts of love between mother and child. There are so many acts of emotion that you wonder if they let the mental patients out of the hospital. It gets nauseatingly obvious that Hirschbiegel is trying to make a point, he might as well have used giant red pen.

On behalf of Geeks of Doom, I recently participated in a press conference call with Noah Bean, star of FX’s new hit show Damages, a psychological thriller centered about a high-stakes litigation case. Bean’s character is David Connor, the fiancé of Ellen Parsons, a junior associate at the law firm; he’s also the brother of the firm’s potential key witness in a case against a billionaire CEO. In the interview, Bean tells us about working with the show’s star Glenn Close and gives his thoughts on his character’s untimely demise, as well as drops a few hints as to what we can expect for his character in upcoming episodes.

Question: What were your thoughts on joining the show where you know your character end is dead and that then potentially resulting in you not having as long as a run as other characters, and I say potentially because we have no idea what’s going to happen?

Noah Bean: Once we started shooting it, I was like, “Darn it, this stinks because,” it’s so great. It’s just gotten better and better and better, the show as we’ve continued shooting. So it’s a little bit of a bummer, but I think it’s going to be sort of fascinating. I think the guys, our writers and our creators, have got some really cool storylines that are going to kind of build up to the end of the season and then like you said, I think that we’ve all kind of got no idea where this may go. So who knows? “¦ It’s kind of a bummer, but the same time, it’s exciting.

Q: [Were you told] during the audition process whether or not David would be dead? Did you find out then and how did that affect the way you prepared for the role?

NB: Yes, I knew even before. The script that I got there was some slight changes from the earliest draft that I got before I auditioned. But David was definitely dead in the bathtub in the end. So it was a slight disappointment, but at the same, it’s just so cool to be kind of a lynchpin in this story. And to as the season will go on, I think we’re going to get closer and closer to that moment and what happened and why it happened and who did it, to know that you would be kind of a real intricate part was exciting and more, so than maybe the disappointment of knowing that your days are numbered.