Alternative reviews!

Beautiful cooking - local HK TV game show invites beautiful stars to cook hard core chinese dishes. Wildly entertaining show. The guests are all male and they have a trash can behind them in case they need to puke. It's all very sexually degrading, but you can't deny that the premise is funny. The next step is the have HK male stars demonstrate how to fix up stuff around home. But... back to the gals. The "Iron Chef" lookalike is extremely well done with tricky ingredients; not so much because the ingredient itself (octopus, sea urchin, anything that is slimy and in general repulsive in live form), but because, as I said, they are all alive to begin with. The starlet has to grab the incredient while it's moving, kill it, and then cook it. One of the best moments was when an octopus latched on and refused to let go it its tenticles. Another is when ALL the guest stars had to puke upon one dish. There's a negative score too, so the poor gal got -110 (max is +120) score. Good times all around.

Death Note - Japanese comic about a kid who picked up a notebook from the Death World in which he can write names and kill people. He battles a detective who is determined to arrest this kid, who slowly thinks that he is god (not capitalized intentionally) and that his deeds will lead to a better world by killing criminals. Very underrated at first but quickly gained a cult following. I shall not spoil the ending for you (not that you'd ever read it)... but the comic does raise a very interesting point as to what is right and what is wrong. The kid who plays god against criminals that police cannot pin? Or the detective, a kid as well, clasically Japanese, who thinks the very act of not using the justice system is criminal? In the end, I think the author has a pretty clear view of who can play god. In fact, the author questions the authority of god and whether god can ever exist. Good comic book. There's a movie coming out as well; I wonder if we can show that movie at school or something.