I saw The Tuxedo today, the new Jackie Chan movie. Does it make sense if I say it wasn't particularly good, but I still enjoyed it? The characters were shallow, the tone of the bad-guy stuff was way too serious, it felt like huge chunks had been edited out, or nobody every bothered to fill in the holes in the first place, and there were some sequences (*cough* James Brown cameo *cough*) that felt shoehorned in from another, even worse, movie. And there wasn't as much action as there could have been, making this film more like Gorgeous than Project A. But, unlike a lot of American action heroes, Chan has the charm and chops to carry off a relatively actionless action movie, and Jennifer Love Hewitt was fun, too. Yes, certainly mostly eye-candy, particularly at first. But, as the movie wore on, I found myself smiling at her bitchy, snippy lines, which didn't come off like the usual tough grrl crap that we see in movies like, say, Ballistic. And while the main villain was pretty humorless, Peter Stormare's mad scientist character was more in line with the general tone of the piece.

So, bottom line: Not anywhere near as good as Shanghai Noon, and too weird to have the mainstream appeal of the Rush Hour movies. And HK purists are going to hate it just on principle, even though Chan has said he knows he can't keep making the kinds of movies he used to make. But I had fun.

And I heard the Madonna for the new James Bond movie, Die Another Day on the radio tonight. Not spectacular, but it'll probably sound just fine playing over a bunch of images of nekkid chicks.

When I went out for dinner tonight, I passed by the newly-opened Cheesecake Factory store. Apparently, there is absolutely no other place to get cheesecake in Las Vegas, so everyone in the city had to come to this cookie-cutter chain restaurant. Either that, or they were giving away free samples, plus drinks. (I shouldn't make fun of the folks flocking to the franchise food store, since I was getting dinner at Jason's Deli. And, now that I look at their menu, apparently Cheesecake Factory serves a great deal more than Cheesecake. However, can it really be line-of-at-least-thirty-people-out-the-door great?)