"Summer Hours" ** (out of four): Olivier Assayas' artsy family drama is easy on the eyes, but good luck keeping them open.

"Summer Hours," the new release from French filmmaker Olivier Assayas, is far too dull for its own good. The film is set on the vibrant, sweeping countryside of France and deals with death, extensive art collections and siblings trying to mark their place in the world. These attributes all sound ace on paper, but the final product is a little too Norman Rockwell, not enough Salvador Dali.

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I know! I know! Let's put a giant shark... I mean a GIANT shark in a movie with, with, with a giant octopus! And then they fight each other! It'll be great, and we'll get some big name stars, too!

And it will go straight to the home video market.

Monkey News!

I know this sounds like Rudyard Kipling, but hand to heaven I'm not making this up. Well, maybe some of it I made up. I'll take a few creative liberties.

At the Institute of Greatly Endangered and Rare Species in South Carolina a beautiful friendship has formed. Suryia the orangutan had a pretty good life. The ape would roam the grounds, lazily eating bananas. A swim here and there. Maybe sneaking a cigarette and a brandy behind the work shed. A little wanking when no one was looking. But something was missing. A void. Suryia needed what we all need; companionship.

Enter a stray Blue Tick hound. The pup wandered onto the grounds and the orangutan ran over and made fast friends. Nobody claimed the dog, the Institute name him Roscoe and the dog moved in.

Monkey and dog are now inseparable. Suryia feeds Roscoe biscuits. They go for walks, take swims (the monkey wears a life jacket), have a cuddle and a spoon, play Scrabble and when they are really stressed, go for a ride on on the back of Bubbles the 27-year-old African elephant. They're thick as thieves. The best of friends.

Next stop for the buddies? Oprah. Seriously. They are headed to Chicago to appear on Oprah. There I imagine they will be presented with a new house, car and a lifetime supply of monkey chow and Chuck Wagon.

Heart warming, innit?

One last thing ... How do I get the digits of the babe riding the elephant with Suryia and Roscoe? Yowza. There's something about a woman in khakis holding a monkey and a dog riding an elephant. Call me, love.

NFL Quarterbacks weren't partiers giving beer bongs to hot drunk chicks and getting pictures taken with blacked out boners?  But instead.....

Tangible repeated processes in a visual form. Under the right circumstances, it can turn anything into a work of art. Take, for instance, the graphic above. It represents the positions of all shots from the NBA's 2007-2008 season.

(Visualize It via BB Gadgets via Charles Gallant)

Last summer a strange beast was found on the beach. A monster. Many theories were put forth. It's a rotting pig! Someone put a beak on a dog! Aliens left behind a pet! It's a genetic experiment gone nuts!

We don't know. Mystery!

Another potential Montauk Monster has been found.

The website montauk-monster.com was contacted by a couple who say they found another rotting monster corpse. The beast stunk to high heaven and is, of course, unidentified.

To me it looks like a fat guy in an Easter Bunny suit who has died from an aneurysm. Maybe. The most entertaining theory continues to be that these monsters escaped from the Plum Island Animal Disease Center. That's a winner. Mad scientists that talk like Bela Lugosi involved in government-controlled covert genetic experiments. We'll go with that. For now.

It takes a lot of courage to race a plane.
Same goes for the spectators watching a few hundred feet below. That's putting your life on the line.

This past weekend, our friend and Loyal 77 member EffenIdontcare did just that. He traveled to San Diego for the Red Bull Air Races.

I don't know much about air racing, but the name is a pretty good descriptor. So I asked Effen why he wanted to attend this event. His answer was simple, "Speed...These guys can come through the starting gate at up 230 mph! They are allowed to pull 12 g's!"

12 Gs sounds like a lot. And that's not just because I listen to a lot of hip-hop.
It's a number that makes my stomach churn a bit.
Imagine being there.

Effen says, 'The quickness in the movements of the plane to bank then level off, while going between the Air Gates, is unbelievable."

Damn, I'm jealous.

(Click here for From the Air I,II,III,IV,V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, Appendix, or Bonus)

We love us some sports here at YesButNoButYes. Hell, we even have friends who love sports and rub our noses in the fact that their knowledge and trivia of the genre is so vast that it makes us look like a three legged dog getting dragged through an obstacle course. And, it turns out, so do all of you, based on the number of responses we got to our last From the Air challenge. Never one to let a good thing die, we're exploiting this for everything we can. This time, instead of looking at satellite images of stadiums and arenas, we're going for the less traditional venues. Let's see if you can tell the venue and what takes place there.

"Angels & Demons" *1/2 (out of four): The team behind "The Da Vinci Code" returns to the ecclesiastic trough with this Vatican-based hooey that plays more like a Roman travelogue.

People love a good conspiracy - particularly when it involves the Church. And Dan Brown is only too happy to provide. Mr. Brown, of course, is the author of "The Da Vinci Code", the gazillion-selling page-turner in which resourceful symbologist Robert Langdon tracks down a centuries-old cover-up involving nothing less than (spoiler alert!) the bloodline of Christ. "Da Vinci" was made into a serviceable, underwhelming film in 2006 by Ron Howard, starring Tom Hanks and a hair-do which sparked its own conspiracy theories. Never one to pass up a good cash cow, the filmmakers return to the Dan Brown trough with "Angels & Demons", in which Langdon returns to uncover yet another church-based mystery - this one involving the Vatican.

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