Back in July 2007, I made the following post: First Alan Johnston, now Sami al-Haj and Bilal Hussein

They are both now out of U.S. custody.

Al-Haj, a cameraman for Al-Jazeera arrested near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, was released from Guantanamo Bay on Friday after six years in custody.

This Guardian story about al-Haj is fairly extensive.

On April 16, Hussein, an Associated Press photographer in Iraq, was released by the U.S. military. He had been held for more than two years.

Welcome back to the land of the living, gentlemen!

It's too late for my up-before-the-crack-of-dawn workdays, but if you're up at 11:55 p.m. tonight and in the vicinity of the Royal, check out Machine Girl.

From Now magazine:

The Machine Girl offers lunatic excess from beginning to end. Never mind that our heroine has a machine gun on the stump of her arm – this isn’t some cheap Planet Terror knockoff. It’s a revenge tragedy in the spirit of Lone Wolf And Cub, in the style of Evil Dead II, about a Japanese schoolgirl hellbent on revenge on the yakuza scum who killed her brother.

Not every shot and effect works, but director Noboru Iguchi’s creativity with deep-fried heads, a flying guillotine and much more easily outweighs his small blunders.

At CTV.ca, we had a poll today on which early summer movie a person might be most interested in seeing.

Of the 2,952 people who voted as of the time I wrote this, myself and 30 other iconoclasts went for Speed Racer.

Indiana Jones is likely to do big numbers, if this completely unscientific poll is indeed representative of the movie-going public