From the monthly archives:

August 2009

Halloween 2 (2009)

31 August 2009

Rob Zombie’s Halloween 2 defies the traditions of the franchise as much as its predecessor embraced them in loving, squandered detail.  Almost universally among the sort of the people who dig slasher films, the verdict on the 2007 Halloween remake was that it would have been much better than it was if Zombie had solidly [...]

Read!→

Friday Cover Songs – Cage The Elephant, William Fitzsimmons

28 August 2009

My friend Andrew was talking up Cage the Elephant to me this week, and for good reason. They’re a solid band, and they sound White Stripes-y without sounding too White Stripes-y. If you’re into that, I recommend them wholeheartedly.
I used another William Fitzsimmons cover in one of my Project Mixtape posts; this twist [...]

Read!→

Why Horror Fails

26 August 2009

When thinking about why scary movies aren’t scary anymore, there are a couple of easy answers.  First, that they’re all bad.  Second, that the amount of craft that goes into their creation is so minimal that they can only maybe be effective by accident in many cases.  Or it could be a focus on the [...]

Read!→

Rampant Misspellings

25 August 2009

As one would expect, I saw the hell out of Inglourious Basterds.
I have mixed feelings about the film.  To be sure, it was entertaining and brutal and funny and it had sharp, sharp dialogue.  Christoph Waltz and Brad Pitt are flawless with the roles that they’re given, and the rest of the cast is…severely underused, [...]

Read!→

Did You Know…

24 August 2009

That PlayStation 2 8MB memory cards still cost $24.99?
I re-acquired a pS2 after losing mine in the Gaming Purge of 2008, and grabbed a few of the games that I’d been jonesing for in the past year and change – Persona 3 FES, Devil Summoner 2, Ar Tonelico 2 and Mana Khemia (also FFXII because [...]

Read!→

Friday Cover Songs: (500) Days Of Summer

21 August 2009

About ten minutes into 500 Days of Summer, I decided it was one of my favorite movies.  It is a decision I do not regret.  Scratch that – I knew it after those first three title cards.
It is not that it is a perfect film, not in the way that I consider Casablanca or The [...]

Read!→

Jefferson Reads: Jeff Somers’ Avery Cates Series

20 August 2009

I’m discovering that I’m rarely a fan of hard sci-fi, but do have a certain affection for the more cyberpunky bits of it (except, oddly, for the savagely dated Neuromancer; in fact, Gibson’s later stuff, which people don’t seem to like as much, is my favorite of his material). An even smaller subset of [...]

Read!→

Nerdly Advice Wants Your Questions

20 August 2009

Over at Alert Nerd, I’ll be running a weekly advice column starting next Tuesday.  If you have a nerdy question (or a good friend of yours does) on any subject, mail it to nerdlyadvice@gmail.com.

Read!→

Advice My Mother Gave Me

20 August 2009

I love my mother. She means well.
Sometimes, though, my mother says things that baffles me.  Once my mother asked me why I got home from a date at 5:30 in the morning, asked what I could possibly have been doing.  That’s the relationship I have with my mother.  She’s a conscientious meddler.
She told me recently [...]

Read!→

The New Zombies, or Shorty!

19 August 2009

We all know that zombies are played out right now, yes?
While they rehabilitate in limbo for a little while, let’s ponder what’s next for a second.  What’s the next big thing that will catapult any nugget of consumable entertainment into the withering lens of the pop culture zeitgeist for a few seconds?
I think it’s T. [...]

Read!→

← Previous Entries