Shane Buettner

Stepping away for a few days and returning to find the format war over is sort of like being in a restaurant, hitting the rest room, and returning to find your meal waiting for you. Time to dig in!

Few films are worthy of a movie about the movie, but director Terry Gilliam’s 1985 dystopian fantasy Brazil is among the legendary few. A flawed but inspired masterpiece, the film remains a Hollywood cautionary tale for the standoff between Gilliam and Universal’s then-chief Sid Sheinberg, who refused to release the film and even ordered a sappy, discordant re-edit that excised some 40 minutes from Gilliam’s original cut. In retrospect, the heavy-handed efforts of Universal’s “black tower” to wrest artistic control from Gilliam only underscored Brazil’s anti-totalitarian satire and unwittingly aided its underground success.

Bond is back, and he's a bad man. Yes, 007 has blond hair and blue eyes for the first time, but it's his character that takes on much darker tones here. His license to kill is his primary occupation, not a smart-ass tagline and Daniel Craig is almost feral under the cool veneer of James Bond. This remarkable and gritty new entry takes the series out of the realm of gadgets (no Q anywhere to be found) and special effects, and back into the realm of hard, breathtaking physical stunts, which is something director Martin Campbell, of <I>Mask of Zorro</I> fame, excels at. Even the theme song is grungy, being sung by former Soundgarden front man Chris Cornell. And it's exhilirating from the opening foot chase to the finale. Not only is Bond back, I can't wait for him to return!

<I>UAV</I> will be temporarily relocating its headquarters this week as Tom Norton, Fred Manteghian and I head to Denver to cover the 2007 CEDIA Expo. CEDIA, which is very focused on home theater, has in many ways supplanted CES as the big show in our corner of the industry in recent years. Coming as it does in the fall, ahead of the big holiday shopping season, many companies use CEDIA to launch significant new products.