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.

Crashmo

About a year ago I played through the 3DS Virtual Console game Pushmo; here's its sequel Crashmo. I knew going into this that the basic gist of the game was the same- block-sliding puzzles with cutesy characters and lots of pastels; but the game isn't quite a sequel to Pushmo because the style of puzzle is actually completely different and requires the player to learn a different set of physics rules. The original Pushmo puzzles basically featured a large flat wall covered with different colored squares, and your little character Mallo could pull the blocks out of the wall, giving them depth. He could then hop up onto the blocks to pull more flat squares out of the wall, and eventually he could climb these blocks to reach the goal at the top of the puzzle. Crashmo plays a bit differently. All of the blocks Mallo pushes and pulls actually exist with a set depth; there's no wall to pull objects out of. Now when Mallo pulls a block out from under another, the top block will "crash" downward until it rests on the ground or another block. In this way Crashmo felt a bit less imaginative; a few more twists were added to change up the gameplay, but I've seen puzzles like this before because it so much more closely follows real-world physics. Pushmo had a more solid gimmick in its wall of bricks and its best puzzles had elegant solutions, whereas the solutions to the more advanced puzzles in Crashmo often looked like a random pile of blocks. Still though if there's one thing Crashmo did better, it cut out the fat; there's a steady difficulty curve that avoids Pushmo's glut of easy levels to start or its unneccesary nostalgia-trip puzzles shaped like old 8-bit Nintendo characters throughout the game. A new game in the series was actually just released for the Wii U Virtual Console a few weeks ago- Pushmo World, and while I don't even have a Wii U yet, I'll probably end up playing that when I do, if only for completion's sake- these games are fun time wasters but nothing essential.

Full Metal Jacket

It's tough not to consider Full Metal Jacket two very separate movies- its tone, setting, and all characters but one change abruptly halfway through. The first half is the iconic journey of a set of recruits going through boot camp which doesn't really seem to have anything to do with Vietnam at all. There's really only three characters of importance here- everyman Matthew Modine who's just trying to get through boot camp like anyone else, his drill instructor R Lee Ermey (who gets all of the movie's best lines) and the dimwitted private Gomer Pyle, played by a very overweight Vinny D'onofrio (that guy from Criminal Intent). For about an hour or so we watch Pyle struggle to keep up with the rest of the recruits and Modine is assigned by Ermey to personally help him through. This half of the movie was fascinating; boot camp looks as hellish as ever and it all ends with a seriously tense stand-off. After the boot camp segment, the movie flashes forward a bit and picks up with the least interesting of the three characters of the first half now fighting in Vietnam. The tension is still there for the most part with exciting battle scenes, and the whole thing is beautifully shot, but none of the characters are all that interesting or sympathetic anymore so it's a bit harder to get invested in the story. What's especially telling to me is that I recognized tons of scenes and lines from the boot camp half of the movie as they've been referenced repeatedly in pop culture; the only line I had ever heard from the second half turned out to be a Vietnamese prostitute whose lines were used in 2 Live Crew's single "Me So Horny." Still though, even if only for the visuals I highly recommend the movie.

Rose Madder

Okay, okay, here's the last Stephen King book I'll post for a while. Apparently looking back at all of his books, King described Rose Madder and Insomnia, a book I didn't like, as "trying too hard." I was worried that Rose Madder would suck like Insomnia did since the author so casually lumped them together, but thankfully I actually found it a bit better. At the very least, it wasn't nearly as boring. It's the story of Rose, a woman trapped in an abusive marriage to a crooked policeman, finally up and leaving but with little understanding of how to get by on her own. Of course since her husband is a policeman he is hot on her trail and out for revenge on the woman who would dare walk out on him. Most of the criticism of Rose Madder unsurprisingly came from the surreal way the plot would often shift to an ancient Greek setting; King has come up with plenty of great nightmarish settings on his own but fans were less enthused with him drawing from a more established mythological setting with goddesses and minotaurs. Personally I had no problem with this and thought it worked fine for the story. What bugged me was the inconsistencies with the villain, Rose's husband. Overall his arc takes him from your average abusive manipulator to complete and literal monster, but along the way he at times seems like the luckiest and smartest person in the world, or a complete idiot doofus who never would have made it in the police force. I know stories need conflict but it was already pretty entertaining just reading about Rose struggling to re-integrate herself with the outside world and build her life back up again from the lowest low; the sections where we see her husband work to find her just always felt kind of silly. I think it would have been more effective to just have him show up towards the end of the book without any other explanation aside from "he's good at tracking people down". Oh well. Fun fact, this has small ties to the last King book I read, Misery. It turns out Rose is a huge fan of the Misery series of books too!

The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds

This is already the fifth post on A Link Between Worlds in seven months, which means two things are true. One, blog readers have already heard multiple takes on this game and likely don't need another overview from me. Two, blog readers have more than likely already played this game, since roughly 98% of blog readers are the blog's own content creators.

I'll cut to the chase. I liked this game a ton and I just finished it off after delaying the final dungeon for a few days in order to get all of my weapons upgraded and find all of those pieces of heart. I've said it before, but one mark of a great, engrossing game is its ability to pull me in and make me spend as much time with it as possible. This was one such game, but then, so many Legend of Zelda games from this millennium fall into that same category for me.

Playing this game also made me nostalgic for A Link to the Past. I will also add this much - Link to the Past remains criminally underrated by most of my friends. (And, as we've already covered, that likely means you, dear reader!) I understand that Ocarina of Time was absolutely incredible, and I'm not trying to take anything away from it, but I think so many of my peers overrate it specifically because it was their entry point into the Zelda series; there's one person I know who first played Ocarina long after its heyday, and it was met with less than praise and accolades. For what it's worth, A Link to the Past was my own entry point to the series, so there's a chance I'm a bit too high on it. Still, compare that game to the rest of what was out there in 1991, and then compare Ocarina to the rest of what was out there in 1998, and I think you could objectively say that Link to the Past was the more impressive game relative to its time. I'm not saying it was the better game overall - you could also probably argue that the original Legend of Zelda was even more impressive for 1986, and that game is borderline unplayable - but for me it's a shame that so many friends of mine either have no interest in it or played it without being very impressed. Oh well.

I wanted to end this post with a ranked list of every Zelda game I've beaten, but I'm way, way too internally conflicted to sort through that mess right now. Consider this an open invitation for someone else to do so in the comments.

The Leftovers

While reading The Leftovers, it was difficult not to compare it to Stephen King's Under the Dome - and not just because the two books have recently been adapted into television series. Each novel is about the aftermath of an unexpected and inexplicable tragic event. In Under the Dome, an invisible and impenetrable barrier appears out of nowhere around a small town in Maine, trapping a few thousand residents inside with no access to the outside world. In The Leftovers, a Rapture-like event occurs without build-up or warning, and two percent of the world's population simply vanishes without a trace. In both stories, the instigating event isn't really what matters; rather, the various ways people react to trauma and tragedy are what drive the stories forward.

Their similarities more or less end there, though. King's book is massive, bloated, and filled mostly with dozens of one-dimensional characters who fall neatly into bins labeled either "evil" or "stupid." The quest to find out where the dome came from and how to destroy it hangs around in the background as a C-story for several hundred pages before resolving itself in laughably bad fashion with a few chapters to go. In The Leftovers, the "how" and the "why" are never really explored in any detail. Something terrible and confusing has happened, people have reacted to it in a variety of ways, and we spend a modest 350 pages following four or five of them around and seeing what day-to-day life is like as they attempt to reestablish the things that matter in life long after they've given up trying to make sense of anything that's happened.

It should come as no surprise that I much preferred The Leftovers to Under the Dome, appreciating Tom Perrotta's reflections on the nature of loss and coping more than Stephen King's mad spiral of chaos and poor decisions. That's not to say, however, that The Leftovers was a perfect book. After an engrossing start, in which the various protagonists were introduced and their situational motivations were established, the novel lost a little bit of steam. Perhaps this was by design - start the book off with a climactic event, and the natural basic plot line could simply be society's slow return to normalcy. For about two hundred pages in the middle, I was wondering if the entire story was "building" to a non-conclusion. Ultimately, that wasn't the case, and I can't really say confidently that this book was an intentional anti-story. Plot took a backseat to characters, no question, but there wasn't enough deep introspection going on in The Leftovers to elevate the book as high as its initial premise may have warranted.

This wasn't a bad read by any means, but it was simultaneously too soft and vague to be a great satire, too plot-heavy to be a pure character analysis, and too open-ended to make for a well-paced or tightly wound narrative. In the end, it was a well-written book with some memorable and well-defined characters, and you could do a whole lot worse. The Leftovers was occasionally slow and didn't live up to every aspect of its potential, but it made for a quality summer vacation book. Now, let's see if the HBO series can build outward and stretch this 350-page book into something bigger, better, and deeper.

Tim's Vermeer

I had recently heard about this documentary and knew I had to give it a shot. Basically, Johannes Vermeer was a 17th Century painter who has painted some of the most photorealistic paintings in history. Through careful investigation, many experts have theorized that he used a camera obscura to project real life scenes onto his canvas, essentially creating a super complicated paint-by-numbers painting. I won't go into the evidence, but it's pretty convincing. However, many believe an even more complicated contraption involving optics was used due to the accuracy of the colors (whereas most paintings during that time had colors that weren't quite right, Vermeer's paintings looked like photographs). Tim Jenison developed a contraption using a simple set of mirrors that let him paint with both realistic colors and shading. Long story short, the results are astounding - a non-painter eventually creates a painting that would make Vermeer proud. Yes, he did not come up with the composition so he's not quite as impressive as Vermeer, but it's still crazy. The amount of time and attention to detail is a real testament to Tim Jenison's drive and commitment.

But anyway, I was super intrigued by this documentary and had to read all the criticism. That's what I do. Some of the reviewers of this film fancy themselves artists. So of course they are uncomfortable with a non-artist deconstructing how a painting is made. So naturally, they need to diminish what Jenison has done. "His results are impressive for an amateur" was a common sentiment. The amateur part was stressed over and over. Rather than be impressed by his dedication (the project took him something like two years), they just mocked him for having so much free time on his hands (unlike the movie critics who are doing God's work). And I won't go into the rest of the shit that pisses me off, but a lot of the reviewers seem to be trying to discredit him while simultaneously giving themselves pats on the back for pursuing artistry as movie critics. UGH.

But anyway, my only criticism is that the movie can drag sometimes due to its narrow focus on something that is painstaking. It's a documentary that's more about obsession than exploring the idea that some of the most famous painters in history could have used optics. And I guess that is to be expected because the theory that optics were used can never truly be proven. Also, I would have liked a little more on Vermeer. Did I mention that Teller directed and Penn narratted? Overall, I highly recommend this doc. His painting is something that you should really check out. But don't go look up a picture of it before you see the documentary. That ruins the fun.