I went to see Blade: Trinity last night. Since there's an old adage about not saying anything if you can't say something nice, I'll grant that the explosions were neat, the vampire pomeranian was hilarious, and Dominic Purcell wasn't nearly as awful as I'd feared .

That said, the title role could have been played by a video store stand-up cutout of Wesley Snipes in the non-fight scenes and no one would have known the difference.

Jessica Biel has a promising career ahead of her as a stuntwoman. As an actress, not so much.

While I like Ryan Reynolds and appreciate that he packed on 30 pounds of extra muscle while simultaneously wearing pants sufficiently low-slung that we could verify his natural hair color, his running comedic commentary got old fast.

Kris Kristofferson, Callum Keith Rennie, and Natasha Lyonne were criminally underused.

Unfortunately, Triple H was not.

I applaud the choice of Parker Posey as one of the villains, saving $ on whitening makeup and the CGI to make her character look like a walking skeleton. But with all the stunt training everyone got, couldn't someone have taught her how to speak around prosthetic fangs? it's hard to be intimidated by a villain who sounds like Sylvester from the Warner Bros. cartoons. Ask Tweety.

Why bother identifying the Big Bad as Dracula if you're then going to contradict his origin, call him something else, and hire an actor who can only speak modern colloquial English with no accent? For that matter, why identify him as a vampire at all, since he seemed to share no common traits with any of the vampires we've seen in the Blade setting?

To sum up, the Blade trilogy was best in its opening moments at the Blood Bath rave to the sound of the Pump panel "Confusion" remix, and has been on a steady downward curve from the instant that sequence ended.

hops on the Jilli train

How did you know I'm wearing a skirt with a slight train today? You people have spy cameras set up in my house, don't you? I'd be worried about the blackmail potential, but since everyone already knows I take advice from a stuffed fanged bunny, I have no fear.

I can't wait to see Blade: Trinity. I'm helpless in its thrall, despite all the advance press.

Moi too.

Go to a matinee. Or better yet, sneak in.

Gerard Butler is/was a model?

He's not? I'd never heard of him before Phantom, so it's possible I've been misinformed.

Everything I've seen and heard of the filmed Phantom leads me to believe that it will suck enourmously.

Oh yes. I have every faith that it will suck beyond the telling of it. And frankly, having seen it twice on the stage, once with an impressive Phantom (and once with a pretty disappointing Phantom) and once with a Christine so impressive that the audience lept to their feet and started screaming and lighting lighters when she took her curtain call, I'm not sure I even want to see it on film.

I'm not kidding about the audience reaction to that one Christine. That was the night I saw with a poor Phantom, but nobody cared because Christine's performance was transcendant to an almost absurd level. I know it brought me to tears on more than one occasion.

I can't wait to see Blade: Trinity. I'm helpless in its thrall, despite all the advance press.

I am ita in this regard.

Gerard? No, he's a British actor...checks IMDB...has theatre on his resume, and since then has been gritty in cheesy action movies.

But I fault his film choices more than his talent -- he's been good in the crap (Lara Croft, Reign Of Fire, Dracula 2000) I've seen him in. Better than his surroundings, anyway.

Wasn't his first real public notice over that awful Attila TV miniseries?

I had trouble recognizing him as the same actor between Reign of Fire and DREKulaDracula 2000.

I own both Attila and Dracula 2000. Unrepentant love.