MEDIA MONDAY
What have you been reading, listening to, watching?

Why I Like The Dixie Chicks
Nice article in Time Magazine (cover story) about the Dixie Chicks and their new album. You have to watch an online ad to get to read it for free, but here are my favorite snips:

"I'd rather have a smaller following of really cool people who get it," says Maguire, "who will grow with us as we grow and are fans for life, than people that have us in their five-disc changer with Reba McEntire and Toby Keith. We don't want those kinds of fans. They limit what you can do."
...
Maines says she's not looking for more battles, but she won't shy away from any either. "Everything was so nice and fine and happy for us for the longest time," she says of their pre-Incident days. "It was awesome to feel those feelings again that I felt in high school: to be angry, to be sure that you're right and that the things you do matter. You don't realize that you're not feeling those feelings until you do. And then you realize how much more interesting life is."

The writer says it will be the best adult pop cd of the year, which ordinarily would make me run the other way...but I'm looking forward to supporting them by picking it up. Not overly crazy about the first 2 albums, but think Home is a great bit of song-writing and arranging. That they've decided not to go crawling back to mainstream country fans begging forgiveness, with so much at stake, says something about their character.

Weekend Box Office
1. Davinci Code
2. Over the Hedge
3. Mission Impossible 3
4. Poseidon
5. RV

Looks like Davinci did some serious worldwide damage in box office, despite the bad reviews. I've actually seen more positive reviews lately (though usually involving something of a back-handed compliment), but coming more from reviewers who hated the book. AO Scott wasn't terribly fond of either.

To their credit the director and his screenwriter, Akiva Goldsman (who collaborated with Mr. Howard on "Cinderella Man" and "A Beautiful Mind"), have streamlined Mr. Brown's story and refrained from trying to capture his, um, prose style. "Almost inconceivably, the gun into which she was now staring was clutched in the pale hand of an enormous albino with long white hair." Such language — note the exquisite "almost" and the fastidious tucking of the "which" after the preposition — can live only on the page.

So, I know some of you have seen it already. Give a thumbs up or down in comments and identify yourself as follows: read the book and liked it, read the book and didn't like it, or haven't read the book.