Stand By Me

Ahhhhh! Only seven minutes left on the clock (east coast time, of course). Got to make this count.

This one is a classic. One that I saw recently at the Sony store and had to add it to my collecting. In short: This was a great coming-of-age movie. I would rate it up there with The Sandlot, only instead of a story about a bunch of kids playing baseball it's about a bunch of kids on the search for a dead body. That's right. Apparently children in the '50s had some sort of fascination with corpses of their fellow peers. Anyways, even if you've never seen this film, I'm sure that you're at least some what familiar with it. After being spoofed on both The Simpsons and Family Guy, it's definitely made its mark.

Oh, shit! Two minutes.

Ummm. Tons of celebrities. Keifer Sutherland, Jerry O'Connell, even John Cusak.

No time left. HOWARD STERN! BUBBA-BOOYEEE!

The Girl Who Played With Fire

Edit! I wrote this on my phone last night, and it was filled with awful typos thanks to my "special" keyboard which picks words for me. I swear it works well most of the time. Anyway, my post is better now! Still short (as to not give away major plot details), but hey, who said posts had to be long.

Great book! This is the second in the Millennium series (I'm not sure if it actually has a series name, but this is how they are titled in my sort of legitimate ebook reader copy of this book). As I recently shared, I though The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo started off a bit slow. This one certainly did not. It begins where our main characters left off. Millennium magazine is doing great after publishing a highly successful book, and they have hired a free lance writer to publish another shocking expose. Lisbeth is traveling and doing her own thing (in the typical Lisbeth way). In her free time she tries to solve complicated math problems. However things take a turn for the worst when a murder hits close to home for all the characters. I don't want to give anything away because I expect Webber to read this soon but I highly recommend this book. It was a great murder mystery and you find out a lot more about Lisbeth's (dark) past. Good stuff!

Scrubs: Season 9

Over a year ago, I lamented the existence of a ninth season of Scrubs in my review of Season 8. I drew parallels between the series and Brett Favre, and I'll point out some erie irony about that later. Anyway, apparently ABC was just as skeptical as I was about a ninth season, as they burned off the shortened order of 13 episodes in the months of December and January, hastily ending the "should have been a full-blown spin-off" experiment without really giving it a chance to succeed. Fine. Scrubs veterans should recognize (from the DVD cover above) J.D., Dr. Cox, and Turk without a problem. So I'll just spend a few sentences on each of the remaining (new) main character depicted above. Starting from the upper left, we have Denise, the only "new" character who we've seen before (in Season 8). I liked her a lot but they kind of messed up her "cold as ice" hot-looking tomboy gimmick by writing in way too many issues and insecurities. Even though she was just an intern last year, she's treated like a full-blown doctor on par with the other three surgeon-masked main characters this time around. I thought Season 8 gave us a lot of great interns (most notably Aziz Ansari's awesome slacker character) and I figured Season 9 would turn those guys into the main characters. Instead, we have a lot of new ones. Just below Denise is her boyfriend Drew, who also happens to be Dr. Cox's new protege. Drew, in a word, is boring. He's on his second go-round of med school after falling on some tough times back in his first stint in the '90s. Because he's been there before, he's kind of like a veteran role model for a lot of the other students, much like Joel McHale does in Community. In fact, he even looks and acts like a poor man's Joel McHale. Below him on the cover is new main character Lucy, who, come to think of it, kind of looks like a poor woman's Amy Poehler on the DVD cover. The Lucy character just kind of spends the thirteen-episode season getting down on herself and then being inspired to keep doing med school. That actress was going to have a tough time replacing J.D. as the show's main character, sure, but I still think it at the end of the day either she or the writers could have done a better job making the character more likable and less hopeless and cliched. Finally, to her right is Cole. If you think Cole looks like a poor man's James Franco, you'd be on the right track - the actor is Franco's younger brother. How about that? Anyway, Cole definitely had the most growth over the season, starting out as a loathsome and unlikable hotshot before the writers toned him down into a general twenty-something idiot with a frat mentality. By season's end he may have been the character I enjoyed the most. So, kudos to Franco and the writers for making him work. Now, as far as the season in general was concerned, I don't think it worked. If you want to look at it as the last season of Scrubs then it was an utter failure, having stripped the main cast from Seasons 1-8 down to two regulars and three recurring members. If you want to look at it as a spin-off then it fails once again, as its not different enough from Scrubs to feel new in any way. At the end of the day, I think, as I've always thought, that this season never should have happened. But that doesn't mean I didn't have my fair share of laughs along the way. (It's still Scrubs, after all, and for any comedy to last nine years on TV it must be pretty decent.) Now, let me get back to the Brett Favre analogy I've been making for years now. Like Scrubs as a TV comedy, Brett Favre has lasted a hell of a long time as an NFL quarterback. But Scrubs kind of petered out with a shortened and forgettable season instead of going away on a high note. And on this exact day, Brett Favre may lose the starting job on the Vikings, also petering out after a shortened and forgettable season instead of going away on a high note (the NFC championship game). And I'm going to see the game live in person in like an hour or two. Will I really be going to see the end of that era on the same day that I saw the end of the Scrubs era on DVD after I've been comparing the athlete and the show for years? That's just downright erie. I suppose such a coincidence would only happen on Halloween.

Wanted

Wow! I don't remember the last time (if ever) that I posted a movie on here. I never was much of a movie watcher. I didn't have many, and then I met Steve. As some of you may know, Steve has a small obsession. He has 100s! So I thought maybe there was something wrong with me because I didn't buy movies. So I started to buy movies. Problem was, I never watched them. I'm more of a watch a movie halfway through on tv type of gal. Many DVDs have gone unwatched! Including this one! I have a certain preference in movies. Ridiculous over the top awesome action movies. And I thought Wanted looked bad. ass. Enough with this anecdotal shit, on to the review!

I will give Wanted this. It had a plot. An ordinary man with an ordinary job gets pulled into a group of assassins. This group works based off a loom. Morgan Freeman interprets the loom into binary which he translates to letters which turn out to be someone's name. Goal: assassinate that person. It's fairly simple. Ordinary guy thinks his dad left when he was 7 days old. Ordinary guy finds out his dad was actually assassinated by a rogue member just mere days ago. Enter Angelina Jolie. Completely one dimensional character with back tattoos who helps him transition from ordinary guy to cold blooded killer in a matter of 30 movie minutes which could be who knows how many "real" minutes.

"I have tattoos"

From there, there are twists. There are turns. There are action packed shooting sequences. I did not think it was a bad movie. I thought it was ridiculous movie! Right up my alley. And now without further ado, the 5 most ridiculous parts of this movie (in order of appearance). You may not want to read if you don't want any spoilers on the movie.

1. The movie begins epically. A woman is shot. A man retaliates. To do this, he winds up (reads: runs back as far as possible) and then launches himself (reads: runs really fast) into a window jumps over a large gap between two skyscrapers, while shooting people in the head. And tumbles into a window on the other side.

"Look at me! I'm jumping through a window!"

2. Ridiculous car driving scenes. At one points a man is standing stationary on a road and Angelina Jolie (aka Fox) spins her car around and drives into him so that he lands in the passenger seat perfectly. In another scene, ordinary guy turned assassin drives his car onto Fox's car so that his is perfectly propelled into the air so that he can make a kill through a sun roof.

"I'm super cool"

3. Curving bullets. 'Nuff said.

4. Shooting through heads. Man, I wish I had a picture of this. In one of the final epic scenes of the movie, ordinary guy shoots someone in the head. Twice. Put his gun through his head. Then shoots other people through the other guys head. It takes human shield to a whole new level.

5. I don't know if I should talk about this because it is one of the final scenes of the movie, and I wouldn't want to ruin this gem of a movie for all of you. So BIG SPOILER ALERT! I'm not going to give any context. But here's the deal. Ordinary guy stands in the middle of a circle. Assassins line the circle with guns pointed at ordinary guy. The option: kill ordinary guy or kill yourselves. One of the members decides that killing themselves would be the better more moral option. So, she takes #3 into use. From she curves the bullett so it curves around the entire circle, the bullet going through everyone's head, losing no momentum, and ends by splattering her brains. HONESTLY! This is so not possible! Not even the least bit!

And that's what this movie is like. Not possible! Not even the least bit! Highly entertaining though.

How I Met Your Mother: Season 5

As readers may recall, last winter I pounded through the first four seasons of How I Met Your Mother, a CBS sitcom that many (myself included) have called the best current show that still uses a laugh track. After seeing Season 5, however, I'm not so sure that praise is warranted. This batch of 24 episodes - the final six or so in particular - just fell really flat. This show has always been one where punchlines and immediate laughs can take a backseat to emotional character-driven storytelling, and for three or four seasons it did a great job playing that balancing act. Loads of laughs, and then a little bit of relationship drama. Funny bits with a sprinkling of character progression and maturity. But it all kind of falls apart at the seams in Season 5. The same cast is there. The same format is there. Something intangible just seems to be missing. There isn't as much progression toward any kind of resolution for any of the characters; Ted continues to date haplessly, Marshall and Lily spend yet another year being married with nothing to do, and Barney and Robin have a short-lived and ill-fated relationship. Wheels are spinning but we're not getting anywhere. And that'd be fine on most sitcoms because most sitcoms are about episodic conundrums and the silly fashion in which they're handled. (See: Big Bang Theory.) But despite its laugh track, How I Met Your Mother has never been a show that just churns out raw humor for the lowest common denominator. And when the long range story progression is absent, this show suffers. Remember, this whole series is ostensibly just one long-winded story about how a man met his children's mother. By the time the final six episodes rolled around, it looked like the writing staff was just hopelessly stuck, and perhaps even bored. Both the story and the jokes felt tired and meaningless. If anything, there was character regression as each of the five friends became less likable by season's end. Say what you want about Friends, but that show - which this one strives to be - took twice as long to ruin itself. Obviously, one bad season doesn't signify a total shark jump. but sometimes a slight derailing can lead to a woeful downward spiral. Five or six episodes deep into Season 6 (currently airing), I'm still watching How I Met Your Mother, but almost begrudgingly. I just think it needs to start taking some risks. All five main characters have grown stagnant and boring, and so has the show itself.

The War of the Worlds

In the spirit of the season, I have chosen to read what is perhaps the most infamous Halloween story of all time. I am talking not about this novel itself, of course, but about the October 30th, 1938 radio broadcast version by Orson Welles (not to be confused with author H. G. Wells) that turned six million confounded listeners into a panicked mob. Yep. The state of New Jersey was under the impression that Martians had landed and were destroying everything. I guess those poor greatly depressed bastards couldn't tell a fictional story from a news report. But that's neither here nor there. What's important is that even though The War of the Worlds was yet another late nineteenth century classic, I actually kind of enjoyed it. Like, maybe even a lot. What's extra pleasant about this surprise is that it never should have been a surprise at all; I really liked Wells' The Time Machine when I read it a few months ago. As was the case then, when I was impressed by Wells' concept of a time machine way back in 1895, I was equally impressed this time around by his ideas about interplanetary travel. Consider that the first man to enter outer space, Yuri Gagarin, did so in 1961, just 49 years ago. This book was published in 1898, a whopping 63 years before that happened. Pluto wasn't even discovered until 1930. NASA wasn't founded until 1958. It's easy to lose temporal resolution when thinking about the past, but guys - Wells was like, way ahead of his time on this one. He wasn't the first guy to tell a story about an alien invasion, but he did so with such attention to detail and then-scientific plausibility. I'm not saying the physics and biology were bulletproof - far from it. Back in those days, it was thought that Mars was red because of red vegetation growing on it, an anachronism that becomes a plot point in the story. But for over a century and right up to this day, many of Wells' original ideas found in this tale continue to inspire science fiction writing and, in some cases, real science. Robert H. Goddard, the father of modern rocketry, was wholly inspired by the fictitious space travel found in The War of the Worlds. But the best part about this book wasn't simply that it was an archetype-defining classic or a piece of scientific genius. What's most marvelous about it is that it's actually a really decent book. Like, well-written with deliberate moods and themes and a pretty enjoyable story. Just as Wells used time travel in The Time Machine to push an anti-industrial agenda, here he seems to take delight in drawing parallels between Martian conquest and European imperialism. So far, the man is two for two at totally impressing me. To recap, he's a science fiction icon who was always at the forefront of creativity in the genre and he managed to tell decent stories laden with political ideologies. What's not to love? Oh, and the now cliche but then clever way that this book ends just makes me hate the end of M. Night Shyamalan's Signs even more than I already did. When an author in 1898 can conclude an alien invasion story in a more scientifically sound manner than a screenwriter in 2002 can, maybe it's a sign that the screenwriter is headed for a terrible, terrible career.

Sam and Max Season Two: Beyond Time and Space

When I reviewed Sam and Max Season One last December, I said I was pretty underwhelmed with the game from a technical standpoint, but the writing was top-notch so I was going to give the second installment a shot, at least for completion's sake. Here it is, and my review is basically the same. The first complaint is the shoddy controls. The Wii would seem to be a natural fit for a point-and-click adventure, but it just didn't work too well. Often I would try clicking on an item only to find my Wiimote start bugging out and click something halfway across the screen. You need to click the ground for Sam to walk to a specific point, which led to a lot of unnecessary difficulty moving him around. I mean, everyone with a Wii has at least one nunchuck, why not make use of that analog stick, or even just the D-pad on the Wiimote itself? Second is the choppy graphics. When I want Sam to run to a point, I click the A button rapid fire, causing Sam to seizure his way across the screen, just barely starting into his walk animation before starting over again a fraction of a second later. I got small freezes all the time, and while none of them were permanent so I can't fault the game much, it's definitely an inconvenience. I realize it's the Wii, not exactly a processing powerhouse, but I've seen so much better. What's the source of these problems? Perhaps the unnecessary jump to 3-D character models. Or maybe I should be playing the game on my PC, where the games originate, rather than the Wii. But after all these complaints, why would I bother continuing with the series? That's no rhetorical question, because the answer is simple- the game did a lot of other things right. The dialog is plenty funny, probably more so than the first season. The plot is very well-crafted too. You might remember my complaints about how Partners in Time wasted its time-travel setup- Beyond Time and Space is so much better about this. You time travel in a few of the five episodes, and events that seem innocuous early in the season gain new significance when revisited later, producing some nice "A-ha!" moments. The puzzles themselves are pretty clever as well. Though a kid's t.v. show was produced out of the same source material, the puzzles here were definitely not child's play. The solutions were tough and often required me to take a look at a walkthrough, but it was pretty fun just to try giving the wrong item to people to see what happens. The game really shines with its completely optional conversations- the bizarre directions and wild tangents some of the dialog trees can take were always gratifying in the end, regardless of whether the story was moved forward or not. So yeah, the writing (the most important part!) here was up to snuff but the poor graphics and controls mean I can't really recommend a playthrough. You'd probably be better served by one of the classics, and so would I. I'm probably gonna eventually pick up the third season of Sam and Max, but before then maybe I can branch out to something along the lines of Monkey Island or Day of the Tentacle. I just wouldn't expect it this year.

The Hunger Games

This seems to be quite the popular entry as of lately, and with Kelsi recently finishing the trilogy - raving about it the whole time - I think it’s my turn to hop on the bandwagon. Considering both Stan and Webber have blogged about this book, I’ll keep it short - no rambling about the plot.

In general, I liked it. It was somewhat of an entertaining read and made itself out to be a real page turner, but I also think - in the long run of things - the book will easily be forgotten. The story seems to be a giant cliche. Every twist and action scene was expected, or - at best - unsurprising. If it was getting too quiet, then you knew something terrible was lurking around the corner. If Peeta was joining up with the bad guys, there was that gut feeling that you knew he was still good. And, in the end, you know our heroes will rise the victors. (I hope I’m not spoiling anything here, but for all of those who have yet to read this, I’m sure you would have come to the same conclusion.) Point is, the book’s predictable. And that’s fine. It’s similarly structured as any successful, commercial screenplay - which is, of course, the next place this guy is headed. It’s pulp, and it’s entertaining. Not only that, but Collins can paint some pretty bleak, violent scenes at times, then follow them up with some teenage Twilight-romance bullshit. No wonder kids are loving this.

Finally, not to nitpick, but I really could have cared less for the writing. It was bland, simple, and stale. Now, I won’t beat it up too much for it’s lack of poetry because this is a teenage novel; hence its location under “teenager” at the bookstore. It’s not trying to be anything that it’s not. It was made to shovel out an enticing story where - as unbelievable as it may be - young children duke it out to the death for the delight of a country on the brink of going under (a combination of The Running Man and Ender’s Game). Like I said, it doesn’t claim to be some triumph of literature. I’ll let the writing slide.

In the long run, I don’t know what’s more embarrassing: That I’m reading these books, or that I actually find myself enjoying them. I might not be able to bring myself to read the next two books during my lunch break... in public. But I’ll certainly dig into them before bed.

Friday Night Lights Season 4

Phew (*wipes brow), I finished this season in time for Friday Night Lights final triumphant return in the critically acclaimed last season which will unfortunately only be taking place on Direct TV. Luckily I have that!

So, I really can't talk much about this season because there are some big ol' spoilers, but as you can see even from the box cover, there are some new faces in the mix. These faces live in.... East Dillon. Who knew it. Dillon has a more diverse and gangster counterpart in East Dillon. Some of the main staples are still there. Riggins is as awesome as always. Slightly troubled, but still awesome. Julie is a senior and looking at colleges. Landry is only a senior (who knew) and then we have the new cast. Second row left, you have Vince a troubled kid with a heart of gold who uses football as his tool to get his life on the right track. Bottom left, Luke McCourty, star running back whose parents are very Republican and own a farm. Bottom right, we have Jess, who I can't think of an all encompassing storyline for. Her dad owns a BBQ place. Landry's on the box too! He's important now! Not featured on the box is another new character named Becky who is in quite a few storylines, especially involving Riggins. Front and center, we have Mr and Mrs Coach. The one constant (oooooooooo Lost reference!) in an ever changing show featuring people graduating from high school and the football team. This season brings a lot of change for them. Tune in to see how they handle it!

It was different. And you know what, I liked it. It stayed true to itself even with drastically different story lines. I have no idea what season 5 will bring us. I'm not allowed to back-blog that, so I'll just have to share my opinions in person. Sigh.

It's over!

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Onwards! So I am logging these in the order I finished them. I stink at posting right away. My one flaw.

Anywho, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has had a lot of buzz in recent days. I've heard a lot of people say good things about it, and I was excited to read it. Little did I know it was going to be a murder mystery, my favorite kind of book! Unfortunately, in my mind this book started off slow. There were two separate stories to begin with and I had no idea how they were going to converge. Each story had its highlights early on, but there was nothing that could keep me awake when reading at night. About halfway through the book, I think this book got really good. The stories converged and the mystery investigation really heated up. From then on I flew through the book. I came to really like the two main characters. However, I was not happy with how the very end of the book went. The mysteries and what not were resolved greatly, but the book left me wanting more.

So, what to do? Read the next one! I'm in the process, and happily, I can report that it involves some of the same characters we know and love.