Between me and my brother, this morning:

Me: Check it out, aliens are actually real.
Adam: Damn... here's hoping he's sane. I wiki'd him and he's 78 so he may just be senile from all the age and space travel.
Me: Or maybe he has a CRYSTAL SKULL??
Adam: More likely, yes.

It wasn't until a few days ago that I actually registered the full measure of my disappointment about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I was tooling around indianajones.com, there were some video clips from the movie on there, and I just sorta gawped at it. Good lord in fuck, why on earth would anyone ever do a thing like this. It's amazing that three Star Wars prequels couldn't make me hate George Lucas, but this one did it with one computer-animated gopher poking out of a dune hill, and took down my teenboy love of Spielberg with it. They're freezing Lucas in carbonite over in Japan in officially sanctioned product now; can we get desk-sized ones on this side of the Pacific?

On a much lower scale of disappointment is the X Files sequel. For years I have been crying "The world needs Fox Mulder!" so I guess I'm getting what I paid for this weekend; in the post-Batman orgasmic high it barely mattered to me at all that this movie was even coming out, and the results bear out:

I genuinely do: I want to believe. I want to believe in aliens and psychics and fluke men. More than that, though, I desperately want to believe that if the Man is being a scary, lying sonofabitch, there's a couple of methodical, deadpan FBI agents out there with flashlights and cell phones and a drab mid-size sedan, patrolling the highways and biways of middle America / Vancouver with a dogged (Doggett?) interest in figuring out just what the hell is going on. Maybe not solving, maybe not saving, but at least seeing. I believe in The X Files.

Rest of the review is here.

Now utterly unsure of what the hell I'm supposed to go do with myself, I'm going wander around the city and try to find new gods.