content wise?

Word Wise and Content Rich, Grades 7-12: Five Essential Steps to Teaching Academic Vocabulary
$26.25
This book is a practical look at what works for teaching vocabulary across content areas.

Love Liza
$14.94
I am a fan of Philip Seymour Hoffman and indie films in general so this movie already had a lot going for it. Although the premise of the story and Hoffman's portrayal of it is extremely depressing, I found myself laughing uncontrollably at some of the situations the main character finds himself in. At times the story seems to be moving along slowly, but before you know it, the movie is over. This is one of those few movies that I have been able to watch multiple times.

P.D. James - Death of an Expert Witness
$29.98
It may just be me, but I found this excrutiatingly slow and very poorly directed. The plot is fine and the casting superb, but there is a low-budget feel to the direction that taints the overall effort. Dalgleish is investigating the murder of a forensics expert in a country-house lab. The interminable opening establishes that everyone in the cast is a plausible suspect. The cast includes such excellent actors as Brenda Blethyn and Barry Foster and Geoffrey Palmer plays the victim (who, by all accounts, deserved what he got). It all sounds good enough, but the lighting and the sound are wretched. In one crucial 'confession' scene, where lip and eye movement are essential, the characters are shot at a vast distance across a graveyard. When we finally come in and can actually see their faces, the laconic, pensive Dalgleish has turned away from the man to whom he is speaking. I get it that Dalgleish is a poet who has recently lost his wife, but he is also an investigator working amid a high body count situation. As others have noted, the result of the direction (and especially the fact that this is shot on tape, not film) is an appearance of utter amateurism on the part of gifted actors. At times the show looks like high school dramatics or small-town dinner theatre. That is a pity, given the quality of the novel on which the story is based. For me, this is a rental only.

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (+ Digital Copy)
$14.94
This is by far my favorite of Will Farrell's movies - even ahead of Anchorman. It's a great spoof on NASCAR and what is assumed to be the average mentallity of the NASCAR viewer.