It should be noted that I am totally talking out of my ass with today’s comic. Although I am fascinated by the legacy that Tupac Shakur left behind and the many conspiracy theories regarding his death, I don’t own a single one of his albums and, at the end of the day, I’m just a lame white guy from Iowa who can’t really relate to what Tupac meant to the people he left behind.

Still, it’s fun to speculate on what happened to him. Kind of like wondering aloud if Courtney Love killed Kurt Cobain. There’s always going to be that part of you that wonders if life would be different if they were still around.

That being said, I’m usually more of a realist at heart. And that’s why MTV’s latest biopic offering to the Tupac legacy, Tupac: Resurrection smacks of grave-robbing to me. It just seems shady to be making a buck off his estate supposedly “in his own words”. Tupac narrates the film through interviews recorded before he was gunned down in Las Vegas back in 1996. It seems like it would be a noble thing to let a slain performer eulogize himself, but it doesn’t seem like it would take a lot of effort to cobble together a few sound bites.

I don’t know. That’s just me. Sorry today’s strip didn’t aim more up the middle, but I was really stripped for ideas.

I went to see Lost in Translation with friends for a second time at a different theater over the weekend. You might recall I had some difficulty seeing it the first time around. Things were better, if only slightly this time out. There were no boom mics in the shots, but the presentation seemed unusually dark. Either I’m just getting picky about it, or the only way I’m going to watch this movie as intended is when it comes out on DVD.

I also had a chance to see Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World on Saturday. I liked it. Russell Crowe does a good job and so does Paul Bettany. Crowe does his usual burly man thing, but Bettany was the real revelation for me. Far less creepy this time around. A very subdued performance that I enjoyed.

I think the picture will be nominated for a few awards come next year, but not all of it stuck with me. There’s a lot of old English nautical slang that went right over my head. There were a few scenes that I had no idea what was going on.

Language barriers aside, the movie script was very clever and it gave you a good taste of what life was like on these warships back in the day. You can’t help but watch the film and think of what a difficult life that had of been. Even though it is a work of fiction, they make you feel like this was something that actually happened. I thought that was pretty cool.

Not much else to report for now I guess. So I’ll just cap things off there!