House of Cards Season 1

I heard very good things about this show and decided to jump in... a year ago. It took me a full year to get through the first episode. It was boring! So was the first half of this season. Moreover, the show turns into a completely different show the last two episodes of the season. To me, this is a good show, but there are a few things that keep it from being a great one. Spacey's Frank Underwood is completely unrealistic. He talks to the camera like he's Zack Morris and a lot of other things that don't take me out of the show quite as much. His wife, though a main character, is completely uninteresting. The episodes themselves are engaging, but I just don't really care about any of the characters involved. Peter Russo, a congressman battling alcoholism, is the only character that seemed at all plausible. Perhaps that's because I have zero idea of what it's like to be in Congress, but I suspect it's not quite like this. Kevin Spacey is a great actor, but this show is just good.

The Lego Movie

I've heard from many people that this is an awesome movie. I was not disappointed. We follow Emmet Brickowski (voiced by Chris Pratt), a construction worker turned savior of the world, as he does all he can to stop the evil Lord Business (voiced by Will Ferrel). The movie is filled with lots of pop culture references, lots of references to old-time Lego stuff and enough action and heartwarming elements to entertain anyone and everyone. It's animated to look like stop-motion animation, which really works. There is a ton of cameos in here. I won't spoil 'em, but they never disappoint. This movie tells a cohesive story and that's more than can be said about many movies released these days. It won't disappoint.

The Hammer

I'm a big fan of podcasts. As such, I'm a big fan of Adam Carolla. He's an opinionated guy and I can relate to that. He sees things very black and white (me too!) and for that, I respect him. This was an independent movie he made in 2007. It looks independent (aka like shit). His best friend is literally a guy he met on a construction site in real life. He's hadn't acted before and hasn't acted since.

Anyway, Carolla stars as a washed-up Golden Gloves fighter who now works construction. Through a series of coincidences, he ends up participating in a few boxing tournaments that might lead to his participation in the Olympics at the ripe old age of 38. There's a love story thrown in there, too.

The movie is funny, but as a podcast listener, I've heard many of the jokes before. It's entertaining enough.

The Newsroom Season 2

A lot of my complaints with the first season were fixed in the second. Season One was too preachy in the sense that it took actual events and condemned much of the media for not covering them in the right way. The writers had the benefit of perfect hindsight and used it to make themselves look morally superior. It was annoying. I didn't need it in a fictional TV show. They eliminated that almost entirely in this season. Rather than be perfect, they made the cast anything but. This season focused on one monumental mistake that ACN made. The entire season is an investigation into how and why the mistake was made. For the first time, these characters were vulnerable. It was a much-needed change that took this show from being somewhat annoying to stellar TV. Jeff Daniels is incredible as always. He was the only reason to watch season 1 and he's a damn good reason to watch season 2. I understand if you can't make it through the first season, but if you can, you are rewarded with this season. Great. Watch.

Orange is the New Black Season 2

Season 2. It started a bit slow for me, but it became great pretty quickly. This year, there was an increased focus on all the characters not named Piper. In my book, that was a huge upgrade. We learned why many of them are in prison, we learned many of their true colors and we learned some disturbing things along the way.

The guard Mendez is probably one of my favorite characters and he wasn't as present in this season as I had hoped, but I can forgive that. I loved the redemption story arc for Red. The racial focus was at times annoying, but it ended the way it should have. The bitch assistant warden was a bitch. The transgender hairstylist was great. Crazy Eyes was crazy.

It's a good show. Watch it.

Orange is the New Black Season 1

Danielle watched this show when it first came to Netflix without me for the most part. I caught a smattering of episodes, but nothing substantial enough to justify going straight to season 2. I liked what I had saw, but I never got around to watching it again until very recently. Though I find the protagonist Piper pretty annoying (I think that's the point), most other characters in the show are super relatable. And that's what make this show - the supporting cast. We get to see flashbacks into each of their lives (although those flashbacks sometimes miss the mark) and can't help but grow attached. If more focus was placed on the supporting cast and less on Piper I would have liked the show more (don't worry, that happens in season 2).

Anyway, to back up, we follow Piper Chapman is a fish out of water in jail. She's an affluent white girl who ends up in jail based on something she did when she was much younger. We watch her struggle with the dos and don'ts of prison and with making friends. She gets in her fair share of trouble. But, she sucks. She's selfish. She refuses to admit what she did was wrong. She blames others. I dunno. She's a perfect example of what's wrong with a lot of society today.

The show is interesting. I'd recommend it. Season 2 is better.

Red Harvest

They say you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but what you see above is more or less what you get for 200 pages if you pop on in. Red Harvest is arguably the most famous and enduring work from Dashiell Hammet, a crime fiction author from the late 1920s and early 1930s. It's a gritty, hard-boiled mystery thriller that pits a cynical detective against a city full of crime and corruption. It's the type of fiction where men in suits and fedoras fire guns at one another across dimly lit streets at two in the morning. It's told with an economy of words, and entire bar fights can happen within a paragraph or two. I would call it a stereotype example of early 20th century mystery fiction.

I liked it! It was a quick, easy, and engaging read that just made me want to stand around on a rainy street corner with a trilby pulled down low over my eyes and a trench coat collar popped up to hide the rest of my face. Maybe I'm smoking a cigarette. More likely, I've just crushed one out underfoot on the sidewalk. I'm either giving or receiving a vague threat to a gentleman dressed just like me before one of us gets into a car and drives off, head on a swivel. Obviously I've got my tommy gun and I'm ready to use it like I so often do. But first I've got to take my dame out to throw back some cheap hooch at a jazz club. I don't trust her farther than I can throw her, but have you seen the gams on that tomato? Anyway...

There's not much about Red Harvest that felt overwhelmingly important, but it's a damn fun read that seems to have held all of its charm over the years, perhaps even improving with age. "A bullet kissed a hole in the door-frame close to my noodle," writes Hammett, for instance, in a sentence just casually dropped into the story to describe the beginning of a massive firefight. Fittingly, the nameless protagonist isn't himself an especially intelligent, attractive, or ethical man. He's just an outside agent in a corrupt little town, and he's stirring up trouble because, hey, why not?

The book's simplicity, brevity, and charm have me pining for some more Hammett, but I'm not ready to dump the rest of his repertoire into my backlog just yet. Check him out for some old-fashioned easy entertainment

The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret: Season 2

The second and final season of The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret was also just six episodes long, giving the entire series a twelve-episode, six-hour run time. You can bang the whole show out on a rainy weekend afternoon! Just saying.

The show lives up to its name, and things continue to get worse and worse for Todd Margaret in Season 2, even though he comes clean on a lot of his Season 1 lies in the first episode. I don't think it's much of a spoiler to say that one character on the DVD cover turns out to be a devious evil mastermind, one is kind-natured but ends up killed by Todd's idiocy, two are complete idiots posing as international businessmen, and one ends up in North Korea by choice. The first season was dark; this one is devastatingly blackened to the core.

Jon Hamm has a minor role, and so does Spike Jonze.

Anyway, I was a huge fan, but this probably isn't for everybody.

The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret: Season 1

I've been sitting on this post for a few days now - truly, guys, this isn't my style! - and I think part of that has to do with my utter inability to figure out what I want to say in this post. For starters, The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret was a two-season British-American twelve-episode series that aired on IFC from 2010 to 2012. I got in on the ground floor here and really enjoyed this show, but I also have no recollection at all of how or where I initially heard about it, and the second season was only just released on DVD, suggesting that very few people ever watched this show and that even fewer will remember it.

Now, normally, here's where I'd make some kind of sales pitch and tell you all to go check this one out. But it's long gone, it doesn't seem to have any cult following on the Internet whatsoever, and it's quite simply a dark, dark comedy that induces winces and cringes more than laughs or repeatable quotes. This isn't for everybody! I'd totally be down to lend you my copy if you're interested (or, better yet, to marathon through the three-hour season with any of you).

As for describing the central premise of the show, I'll let Wikipedia do the talking here.

The series follows an American, Todd Margaret, who takes a job running the London sales team for the energy drink Thunder Muscle. He has no experience with British culture, knows nothing about sales, and has only one employee, Dave.

The show's title is lengthy, but perfectly accurate. Todd Margaret is inept at sales and tone deaf to his environment, but more than anything he is a terrible liar. He tries to impress a crush by pretending he lives in the Palace of Westminster, for instance, assuming that it's just a very fancy apartment suite. Not only is he too stupid to realize what a dumb lie it is, but he assumes his crush - a British woman - will fall for the pointless lie. It's this mentality that puts him in a downward spiral as he gets further and further in over his head. And again, this show is dark as hell. Within a few episodes, beyond losing hundreds of thousands of dollars and routinely embarrassing himself, Todd inadvertently poisons several people, makes a mockery of a solemn holiday parade, and aids a terrorist organization.

The show's got David Cross and Will Arnett, and if you can get past the iffy British production value and a few accents, you may find it as addicting and darkly funny as I did.

Donkey Kong Country Tropical Free Wii U

I would just like to start by apologizing for my absence from the blog. I haven't been posting and I am excited to say that I have a re confirmed commitment to posting more often. Just because I haven't been posting doesn't mean I haven't been working on logging. I am currently playing more games than I can count and as of yet I haven't started a summer reading book but I intend to. Kara and I have been listening to the Harry Potter audio books because she has never read the series and that was a deal breaker for me. So what have I been working on most recently? Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze for the Wii U.

My Wii U has gotten limited use but Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze has been a bright spot for the system. I have been religiously chipping away at this game a couple hours at a time since I got it several months ago. I went with the download version, using my Best Buy points turned into a e-shop card. The game was almost 20 gigabytes and therefore took up almost all my available space on the hard drive. Beating this game has been a priority for me so that I could delete it and download Pikmin 3 and Super Metroid both of which I got as a result of getting Mario Kart 8.

When I initially booted up the game I was hoping and praying for some reminiscent game play like from Donkey Kong Country from the SNES. I was not dissapointed. This game is a good old fashioned side scroller. The difficulty was on par for Nintendo and I would describe it as a difficult game. There were few levels that took me less than 10 tries to beat and several that took me well over 20. Additional lives were easy to come by so having to hit the game over screen was not something I experienced. The final boss took me fewer than 10 tries but was quite difficult. Overall the game took me a little over 20 hours of play.

The highlight of the game was the HD. When I first started I waited several minutes before moving because I was convinced that the cut scene hadn't ended yet. The levels were so well constructed that in many cases hidden items were hard to find because of how perfectly they blended into the background. I think Nintendo did a really good job showing what they can do with a HD platform. I look forward to other first party titles on the Wii U. Now that DK is beaten I can delete the file and download Pikmin and I hope the graphics are on par with Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze.