Brad's Week In Dork! (2/17/13-2/23/13)

Blaxploitation Month never really happened.  I'm starting to wonder if I have these epic movie marathons in me anymore.  My brain is just so scattershot; right now I can't seem to focus on one particular concept or idea - I want to jump all over the place.  Oh well.  I cranked out another batch of Jim Brown flicks and I think I'm gonna continue with the man well into March.  Dying to rewatch Dark of the Sun, Black Gunn, and Slaughter.  And I've been youtubing his final martian showdown in Mars Attacks over and over and over.  The man is just so supremely badass.

But the most fun I've had this week, and the program that has kept me from rabbit holing into the Blaxploitation genre, is David Milch's Deadwood.  I have been downright giddy lavishing over the first season with The Wife, and I cannot begin to describe how lovely it is to be married to someone who appreciates the word "cocksucker" as much as I do.  Huzzah, I say!  And to witness The Wife's transformation from an Ian McShane hater into one of his proud, dirty flock has been a great reward.  We've also been picking away at LOST & the last season of Supernatural, but it's Deadwood that has really stuck in her consciousness.  And that's beautiful.

A Good Day To Die Hard:  Yippee Ki-Yawn.  That pretty much sums up my feelings for this fifth and hopefully final entry in the Die Hard franchise.  I really loved the silly, smiley trailer as well as the general concept of Papa McClane devastating the USSR - I mean Russia (so awesomely 80s!) as a means of reconnecting with his 007 son.  And Jai Courtney is pretty much a spot-on spawn of Bruce Willis.  He's got the head cock, the smirk, the general blue collar attitude.  However, director Stuart Moore just sucks the life right outta the action.  A Good Day to Die Hard is nearly 90 minutes of continuous (PG-13 clothed in R) violence, but the camera pathetically mimics the Paul Greengrass style with too-tight closups and never-settle editing.  The result is a snooze; I checked out ten minutes into the initial bumper derby car chase and never got back into the story.  I opened my eyes for a couple of F Bombs as well as Cole Hauser's pointlessly brief G-man.  So if Willis can't score with his go-to Die Hard franchise, Schwarzenegger & Stallone might as well hang up their icons.  Time for these beasts of the 1980s to reevaluate their twilight years - you can't go home again, move on, find new parts to play.

Deadwood - Season 1:  When does Deadwood become my favorite thing ever?  I'm talking books, movies, comics, tv.  Deadwood reigns supreme in my heart.  The first episode directed by Walter Hill is a bit of a clunker.  It's not terrible tv, but the actors don't have their characters just yet, and David Milch & company are still developing the outlaw nation setting.  It takes a few hours - Wild Bill needs to be executed so reluctant sheriff Seth Bullock can complete his hero worship.  The Dude has to reconnoiter the rim and shuffle (get chucked) off this mortal coil.  But once the pieces fall into place and the Shakespearean horror takes full bloody effect, Deadwood climbs to the top of My Favorite Things list.  We all know how much I love Timothy Olyphant's Raylan Givens, and the deep buried rage of Seth Bullock could very well be his great grandfather.  It had been far too long since I visited the Black Hills.  This show pretty much birthed my enthusiasm for Westerns.  Sure, Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven was the beginning, but I didn't understand that film until I rewatched it through the prodding prism of HBO's mesmerizing psycho drama.  And that Best Picture reexamination led to Glendon Swarthout's novel, The Shootist, and the obsession with oaters was complete.  The Wife doesn't quite hold the show in the extreme esteem that I do, but I was pleasantly surprised to see her fall hard for this foul world.  On to the second season.

Warm Bodies:  This was fun.  Cute.  I'm just so darn sick of the Romero knockoffs; it's nice to see a zombie film approach the genre from a different angle even if it is the Teen Genre (I can't believe it's actually become a genre).  Nicholas Holt narrates the film as our reluctant flesheater, his body returns to life after eating the brains of Teresa Palmer's boyfriend - the awkwardly eyebrowy David Franco.  While digesting a little knowledge his heart begins to beat again and the ultimate family friendly necropheliac film is born.  You gotta love how wonderfully prepackaged this sickie has been presented to the public and it's much better than it has any right to be, especially when you compare it to other teen hits like Twilight and The Hunger Games.

The Walking Dead Season 3 - "Home":  Definitely a stronger episode than the last, but the bad taste of "The Suicide King" is still swamped on my tongue.  It annoys me how no one at the prison is addressing how crazy brains Rick has become.  The man lost his shit last episode and when we find his crew again they're just arguing amongst themselves like usual, but not one brings up the specter attuned Rick - who wobbles away to shout at the woods.  The Governor & Andrea bicker as well, & the crybaby dictator launches a meek attack on the prison.  I dig his Trojan Horse assault, but this war better reach epic heights before the season ends.  I hate to continue comparing this show to the comic book series, but where are Robert Kirkman's balls?  That man loves to punish his characters but AMC seems scared to create no-turning back scenarios.  Weaksauce.

Savage Wolverine #2:  Still fun.  But I want more Frank Cho Shanna and less Frank Cho Wolverine.  But since this is a Logan title I guess I just have to accept that as an impossibility.  A new guy (ugh, more ladies please Frank) shows up with some techno force field, but the mystery doesn't deepen it just gets more foggy - I have no clue what's going on or why I should care.  But I'm sticking to it for Frank's She Devil, and I'm thinking she's going to have Logan wrapped around her thong - I mean, finger, in no time flat.

Captain America #4:  Unless something drastic happens, this is the last time I write about Rick Remender's Captain America.  I'm going to keep on reading cuz I love Cap so much I will torture myself with horrendous plotting.  The first page reads: Eleven Years Later.  Captian America still has a Zola living in his chest, and that makes the parenting of his clone baby a little difficult.  I guess I can appreciate how balls out bananas this title has become, but it's just so damn stupid.  And ugly.  I'm no longer amused with JRJR's renderings, all his beasts look the same and his kids are a bunch of balloon heads.  I'm done with this Marvel Now horror show.

Nova #1:  I don't know anything about Nova - only that he belongs to a space corps that looks pathetically similar to DC's Green Lantern Corps.  But I've enjoyed Jeph Loeb comics in the past, even the books in which he's partnered with Ed McGuinness.  Sam Alexander is a bratty teenager living in a dirt heap of a town reminiscent of The Last Starfighter's trailer park hell hole.  His lifetime has been filled with his father's stories of space war and he's sick of it.  But when pop goes missing and Rocket Raccoon appears at the end of his bed, Alexander is given the chance to suit up.  A fun enough intro, I'll keep going.

BPRD 1948 #5:  I'm not sure I loved this mini as much as the previous BPRD prequels - I'm gonna need to read it as a whole before I pass judgement.  But right now I can confidently state that I enjoyed the tiny moments with little Hellboy than I did the big plot with Professor Bruttenholm.  The kid's B story regarding his appearance is some of the most heartfelt storytelling to come out of the Mignolaverse.  Anyone who has ever asked "What are those goggles on Hellboy's head?" should look to this miniseries for their origin.  Artist Max Fiumara perfectly captures the sadness behind this moment.

Saga #10:  Gah!  Brian K Vaughen why must you keep killing off my favorite characters in this book!?!?!?  If you're not careful I'll jump ship cuz the main Romeo & Juliet couple are not enough for me to keep reading; it's the crazy alien beasties that I really want to explore.  The moment Prince Robot or The Will are gone so will I.

The Split:  Easily the weakest movie adapted from a Richard Stark novel (this time out it's The Seventh), The Split nevertheless has one of the most fascinating casts ever assembled.  You've got Jim Brown up front as the Parker stand-in.  Ernest Borgnine, Jack Klugman, Warren Oates, and Donald Sutherland bickering amongst themselves as Brown's goon squad.  Gene Hackman is the local law enforcement.  And James Whitmore is the psychotic outsider threatening their big score.  That is one hell of a cast.  So why does The Split fail so miserably?  Well, it's boring!  And lifeless!  And so damn frustrating.  Brown & Borgnine do have a pretty badass brawl in the middle of the picture and the cast makes it worth a watch if not a purchase, but when this film should be exploding with character actor rage, The Split sputters to a climax.  A real Hollywood bummer.

The Slams:  This is a little bit better than The Split, but still not the exploitation classic you want it to be.  Jim Brown is arrested after a nasty little double cross heist and lands behind bars with an array of Roger Corman savages (this is brother Gene's production).  There he must fend for himself in the laundry rooms and the metal shop while big burly dudes try to pummel the missing million dollar loot from his memory.  Brown concocts an escape plan with his girlfriend and an outsider pimp, but the violence never gets as extreme as it should for this kinda picture - I feel like Gene Corman and director Jonathan Kaplan are attempting a more classic approach to this cheapie production when it should just throw itself into the muck of its setting.  Frankly, the poster is better than the movie.

Justified Season 4 - "Money Trap":  Jody, the dirtbag criminal with a weakness for airbags last seen in the first episode of this season, returns here as the cold blooded killer of Raylan's ex.  There is some Elmore Leonardy side story  involving a wannabe filmmaker and the ridiculously named Jackie Nevada but this Justified entry succeeds thanks to another classic climax confrontation.  Not to mention we get some serious Papa Arlo hate in the last few minutes.  This season is burning towards its climax but we don't feel any closer to the Drew Thompson mystery.  Still, it's nice to get a breather from the plot and have a moment for Raylan to showdown.

The Island:  The film starts off in the vein of a Friday the 13th slasher, with some rich yucks on a yacht getting hacked apart with a variety of cutting tools.  But this is as gory as it gets - The Island might be a part of the Scream Factory label but it totally belongs in the seafaring goofiness of Peter Benchley.  Michael Caine & his brat kid crash land on a LOST-like island; there they encounter a savage race of pirates led with despicable charm by the garish David Warner.  Caine takes five minutes to defend his groin from a muddy pirate lady but quickly succumbs to her nether regions.  Ah, romance.  This is just a weird damn film.  And Caine is the perfect lead for this nutter.  The man is the master of the agape stare and he can match sleaze for sleaze when battling prehistoric pirate villains.

El Condor:  "If my mother was a whisky cow the milk from her tit couldn't be any sweeter than that."  Oh man, Lee Van Cleef is a degenerate louse, goofily grimacing his way into our hearts while plundering for gold with calvary killer Jim Brown.  El Condor is a strange buddy cop Western with both Van Cleef and Brown playing for laughs and miraculously succeeding.  El Condor is peppered with fun bits of weirdo villainy and violence, as well as decent amounts of B Movie nudity.  Unlike The Split & The Slams, El Condor is a lost should-be exploitation classic - And a Western to boot!  So good it sent me running to that other Jim Brown cowboy classic -

100 Rifles:  Jim Brown is a Marshall down from America hunting the bandit smile of Burt Reynolds.  But once he finds his man, he also discovers the bosom of Raquel Welch and the next thing he knows he's wrapped up in a Mexican Revolution.  100 Rifles is packed with typical Burt Reynolds hijinks, but its more Sharky's Machine than Cannonball Run.  Everyone is happy to be committing violence and it's all for a good cause; we can smile along with our trilogy of leads, even when the tone jumps to the shockingly tragic.

--Brad

Matt’s Week in Dork! (2/17/12-2/23/13)

    I scraped out my penny jar and went out to see a matinee with Ben, Brad, and Paul on Sunday morning.  Five dollars.  Not too bad.  We saw the new Die Hard film (review to follow).  But what I really took away from it was how bloody awful the trailers were.  Scary Movie 6?  Holy crap, it looks terrible.  Like Donovan’s Reef, where you see where you know everyone must have thought they were being funny, but can’t for the life of you figure out why.  And then…the trailer for The Heat.  Good sweet crap.  It’s like looking in to the abyss, and knowing in your very soul that it looks back at you.  Every moment of the trailer was like having my scrotum wound up on a spinning wheel.  Only really unpleasant.  Anyway, I really don’t know how I got so many movies and such in this week.  Because I also did a lot of reading and some writing.  Not to mention some solid music listening time.  Whatever the case, it was a good week.

A Good Day to Die Hard:  Look, I’m gonna say something that will almost certainly earn me some hate, and I know frustrates the crap out of my co-Dork Brad.  I really like the first Die Hard film.  It’s a fun, silly 80s action movie with lots of cool stunts and stuff blowing up (though not even one of my favorites of that time/genre).  But I absolutely HATE Die Hard 2 in every way.  And I think the rest of the sequels are stupid, though mildly entertaining.  This new one is no different.  The script is crap.  The acting (most likely because of the script) is crap.  And yeah, it feels PG-13, because except for one bit of CG blood, the violence is very restrained.  But a lot of stuff blows up, and frankly, that’s all I expect from this series.  They’re not good.  Honestly, they’re not even memorable.  And I never find myself thinking, “I need to watch a Die Hard film.”  I think the only one of the sequels I’ve ever seen a second time was 2, and that was because Brad wanted me to give it another try (still didn’t like it).  Beyond the first one, they’re all pretty meh.  And so it is with this latest entry.  I had fun watching it, but in a week, I won’t remember it. (edit: this latter prediction was brilliantly prescient -Matt of 5 days later).

Destroy All Planets:  Gammera doesn’t think too much of aliens in their striped ball-rings.  Wacky fun ensues when two boy-scouts play havoc with a submarine.  Like some late Godzilla films, this one relies WAY too much on stock footage, showing large chunks of previous films’ Gammera battles in order to pad its run-time.  Clearly, a solid script would have been a bit more helpful.  Once the kids get on the alien ship, it gets a bit better.  Actually, everything that’s not monotonous stock footage is pretty good.  The aliens are freaky.  And it’s kind of horribly violent.  But it also finds a giant turtle riding a giant squid-alien like a jet ski, so all’s fair, I guess.

Attack of the Monsters:  “You’re dumb.”  Trouble makers are out looking for a space ship when they get more than they bargained for.  By this point, these Gammera films were pretty much goofy kids films.  None of the seriousness of the first couple is left.  And having the little kids as leads is rough.  The crappy marching music that plays continuously is aggravating.  I like that this one goes to another world, which makes for plenty of weird things to see.  This is another one of those movie from this era where people don’t seem to know the difference between various cosmic bodies.  In this case, stars and planets seem to mean the same thing.  I remember seeing a lot of movies that talk about going to other galaxies, when really they were talking about other star systems.  Seems basic, but I guess looking in books was too hard.  Whatever the case, untrustworthy space babes are always a concern when traveling between worlds.  Keep watch!

Mmm.  Brains!

Sally Hemings: An American Scandal (aka An American Love Story):  Entirely too made-for-TV.  Though the story of Jefferson and Hemings could make for a fascinating movie, this ain’t it.  Sam Neill is dashing (in a sophisticated intellectual sort of way) as Thomas Jefferson, and Carmen Ejogo is ridiculously fetching as Sally Hemings.  This had to have been a complex and fascinating love affair, as Jefferson was a complicated dude, and from what I’ve read, Hemings was quite a woman.  However, here we have Jefferson seeing a beautiful woman and wanting her.  I have to imagine if it was just a beautiful woman he wanted, he could have had his pick.  And while Ejogo is amazingly beautiful and seems to be a talented enough actress, there isn’t enough in the script to make her seem like someone interesting enough to woo Jefferson.  It comes off as, well as what it is, a Hallmark made for TV movie.  It feels a bit like a visit to a theme park, like all the surface is there, but the content missing.  The old age make-up is generally not good, mostly looking like people have lumps of clay splashed on their faces.  In the end, it’s a different look at Jefferson than one might be used to, though again, not a very deep one.  I feel like there was so much more that could have been done here.  Instead, what we get is one of those high school text book renditions of history.  A few dates, a few names, a couple of anecdotes for color, and done.  No heart or passion.  No dirt under the nails.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers:  “I don’t have any friends, Doctor Kibner.”  The original is a classic.  But this is one of those rare-breed, serious, and worthy remakes.  Starting on some distant planet, we see weird alien life launch into space, like plant or fungal spoor.  It eventually descends on our unsuspecting world in a rain storm, and the horror begins.  Right from the start, there is an unsettling, off balance feel to the movie.  Weird angles, suspicious faces, and creepy lighting.  Paranoia is whipped up with gusto.  This is a story archetype that is one of the fundamentals of science fiction.  Who can you trust?  Is the person you know and love really who you think they are?  Or are they something else, something sinister and alien?  On of the more obvious and frequent uses of the concept was in the anti-Communist films so popular in the 50s, but it goes far beyond that, becoming a timeless look at our fears of the Other.  We can never really know who someone is outside of ourselves.  And can we really know even that?  And this is 70s PG, so there is some strong language, some pretty nasty violence, and a bit of nudity.  It really isn’t a kid-friendly film.

Just Before Dawn:  The 70s weren’t quite over for the makers of this film.  Was there some kind of subconscious fear of rural life, or the ‘country’ that had infected city folk?  So many movies about the horrors of leaving the city were being made.  Right off, this has a dash or two of Texas Chainsaw.  But the way it’s shot actually reminds me of early Sam Raimi (remember when he was good?) and early Peter Jackson.  In fact, the very opening, looking down through the hole in the roof of an ancient chapel felt right out of Peter Jackson’s low budget horror days.  Greg Henry leads a group of young people into the mountains for some camping.  George Kennedy is the local ranger who warns ‘em not to go.  Them woods got the giggling fat guys in ‘em, and nobody wants that.  Not to mention all the twins.  And as The Slammin’ Salmon tells us, twins are disgusting, man (not my actually feelings, all you twins out there).  It doesn’t really cover any new territory.  This was all well explored country by 1981.  But, it still has a certain charm.  And while I can’t say I especially liked any of the characters, unlike most modern horror movies, I didn’t dislike them.  Plus, Deborah Benson is cute, especially when she lets her hair down.

Prince Valliant:  “Don’t bring in religion to confound me!”  The venerable comic gets a 50s Technicolor treatment, staring a young Robert Wagner.  Throw in Janet Leigh (good golly, but she’s lovely in this, and Debora Paget is nothing to sneeze at, either) and James Mason, and you’ve got something.  It’s Christian Viking VS. Pagan Viking in a duel for the hearts and souls of Scandia.  The locations are beautiful, enhanced occasionally with some pretty good mat paintings.  One thing that old adventure films have taught me is that I need to do more wandering/adventuring.  Because that seems to be the surest way to stumble upon beautiful women bathing, who will quickly fall in love with you.  It’s weird seeing King Arthur portrayed as an old man.  I just don’t think of Arthur as old.  He should have died in the prime of his life.  Whatever the case, this is very much in the style and spirit of those other vibrant and somewhat cartoony medieval adventure films, like the Errol Flynn Robin Hood.  It reminds me a bit of that sequence in Time Bandits when they meet John Cleese, and he’s in that ridiculous costume.

Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance:  “He’s mocked my dirks.” This is one of those films that explores the oft repeated cinematic mistake of screwing with your hired killer.  If movies have taught me anything, it’s that you should always treat your exceptionally competent and deadly help with respect.  If you have a great hitman (or woman) in your employ, and he or she chooses to retire, you give them a care package, a nice bonus, and send them a Christmas card every year for what you hope is a long life.  If your executioner does a fine job of taking some princeling’s head off, but it becomes politically embarrassing at a later date, you don’t take it out on him, you simply accept that these things happen, be honest, and move on (maybe take the executioner out to dinner at a nice place…nothing too fancy…just to show that everything is A-OK).  But don’t kill his wife, or threaten his kid, or sick assassins on him.  Don’t go to some mountain village and kill his master or have his brother shot in the street.  These things may seem like good ideas in the heat of the moment.  But they are not.  Anyway, the movie is pretty cool.  Very stylized, with extreme sound design and buckets of blood.  The violence is pretty extreme.  The duel in the sun drenched field is a nasty highlight.  There are some crazy dismemberments in this movie.  If Akira Kurosawa’s work was inspired by John Ford, I think these movies were inspired by Sergio Leone.

The Island:  “It is no fun in an airplane with a 400lb sow gone ape-shit.”  This movie is crazy.  Crazy.  Michael Caine is a stressed out reporter on a quest to find out what’s up with a bunch of missing boats.  He hires the greatest pilot ever to take him and his boy to the Caribbean.  In the meantime, some sort of nutty killer is roving the waters with a burning crown.  Oh, yeah.  Then things get weird.  I would actually avoid reading up on this movie before you see it.  Not knowing where it’s gonna end up is probably a lot more fun.  Overall, it doesn’t live up to the madness of its first 15 or 20 minutes.  But it’s oddly enjoyable anyway.  The violence in the opening is pretty extreme.  The rest of the movie tones it down several notches.  And the music?  That’s crazy and seemingly inappropriate.

El Condor:  Jim Brown and Lee Van Cleef are a dirty pair, out for loads of gold in this odd Western.  Van Cleef is ultra-goofy and spastic, which is odd to see.  And Brown isn’t playing suave, as he normally would.  Lots of killing and shooting.  Some very odd bits.  A bunch of good twists and turns and back stabbings.  Frankly, this was a far better movie than it seemed to be, and much more than I was expecting.  It was nice seeing Van Cleef in such a different role.  And though he gets more serious and more ‘smooth’ as the film goes on, Brown is a bit goofy in the beginning, too.  The women are lovely, and there’s a surprising amount of nudity for a movie of its time.  The violence is pretty nuts, too.

Doctor Who: The Trial of a Time Lord- Terror of the Veroids:  The first story to feature Mel (gah!) finds the Doctor and his companion on a space ship loaded with mystery.  Mel is this perky nightmare of frizzy 80s vacuousness.  I think I had tuned out of the show at this point when it was on PBS in the 80s, because my first memory of her was with Sylvester McCoy.  Dang, she’s aggravating.  Still, when the pod people start a rampage, things got rolling.  The overall story is not too bad.  It’s very Agatha Christi.  The whole season, with its trial frame story is kind of blah.

"I look like a what!?"

Branded:  This satire about advertising, politics, image, and business takes on a bedtime story feel, with a calm, mellow narrator.  Setting it in Russia helps capture all that crazy Cold War history, and the Orwellian boogieman of the State as God.  The speech about how Lenin created marketing with his propaganda to sell Soviet Communism, and how everyone else learned from that is pretty spot on.  There are elements of Brazil, and as one comes to expect in films like this, Kafka, and for some reason, I kept thinking about The Hudsucker Proxy, and by the end, Videodrome.  Like a good bedtime story, it features a weird, transformative quest of a hero who must find himself in order to battle great evil.  Will or can anyone understand the transformed man and the message he brings?  While this movie is kind of a smorgasbord of previously used ideas, it manages to take those ideas in some interesting ways.  Certainly non-standard ways.  Does the ending ring a bit false?  Yeah.  But again, it’s like a fairy tale, and fairy tales often wrap up in less than believable ways.  I can’t say that the film is any kind of genius, but for what it is, it’s pretty good.  In a way, it feels like all the things Cosmopolis wasn’t.

Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession:  A documentary about the ground breaking L.A. channel that helped bring movies of all kinds to viewers, presaging HBO, Showtime, and the rest.  Wrapped in that is the tragic story of one of the channel’s driving forces, Jerry Harvey, a mad genius.  The wide breadth of what the channel showed made it like a televised version of The AFI theater, or Criterion collection.  From trash to art, from foreign to simply unusual, it showed movies many would never otherwise see or even be able to see.  Sometimes giving movies that bombed a second shot at life, showing what would eventually be known as ‘directors’ cuts.’  Seeing this makes the movie lover in me so  hungry for a taste of all these great movies, and reminds me of the pleasure I receive in sharing my love of film with others.  Obviously, there’s though, as you know from the start that it ends in death, both for the Z Channel and for its tempestuous champion.  Jerry’s life is a depressing spiral that ended where all too many spirals end.  His passion for film and for sharing it was impressive.  But the man suffered from severe mental illness.  Interviews with actors and directors who had their work shown, as well as co-workers and personal friends of Harvey give a human side to the story, both on the part of those involved and those who were effected.  It was an emotional film, and you can see it raw in faces of his friends, who still can not fully reconcile the good times with his violent and ugly exit.

Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart at the River Styx:  “Gyaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh!”  Our strange heroes are back, eating dumplings and taking names.  This series of films features an especially bleak vision of feudal Japan, where danger lurks in every glance, life is cheap (if it costs anything at all), and everyone is unhappy like it’s their job.  Samurai films in general owed a lot to Westerns, but this series feels like it’s got more than a dash of Film Noir, not in visual style, but ugly human action.  Like the first film, this one features extremely disturbing use of sound design, and for that matter, its own visual language.  The film certainly reiterates that classic advice, I think it was from Aristotle, ‘watch out for crazy bitches.’  The cackling lady and her deadly maidens are not a group to run afoul of (or work for), ninja or no.  If I ever have a kid, I’m getting that stroller.  You can see pieces of this film in many other later movies.  What’s really weird though, is that this movie (trippy as it is) is much less trippy than the first one.  And as I sit her watching what I’m watching (the Three Storms just killed the Wolverines!), that mere fact speaks volumes.

    Started watching season two of Game of Thrones.  So far, so good.  Maybe a bit much on the sex.  I mean, it’s not the later books of Niven’s Ringworld we’re watching, right?  Still, I’m digging it.  And I like a lot of the new cast.  Hope they fare better than some of last season’s.

    I finally got back into Fraggle Rock.  Seriously, one of the best television shows for kids ever.  It’s the perfect blend of thoughtful, ethical, creative, funny, and stamped with that intangible Jim Henson genius.  And it’s not condescending.  I think that’s why I can watch it as an adult and still feel that wistful sense of childhood wonder.  If the stars shifted, water changed course, and the pressures of evolution ever let up, allowing me to have children, this is the kind of thing I’d want them to see.

    On Sunday afternoon I finished God is Not Great.  A solid read, if not my favorite Hitchens book.  Still, gets the blood pumping.

-Matt

This Trailer Tells You It's A Good Day To Die Hard

Five Die Hards.  Why not?  In a world with five (soon-to-be-six) Resident Evil films, eleven Friday the 13ths, seven Saw films, four Rambos, and five (soon-to-be-six) Fast & The Furiouses why can't John McClane have a never ending franchise?  And I didn't even really hate that last PG-13 outing even if it felt nothing like a Die Hard.  But now Mr. Yipee Ki Yay is killing terrorists back to back with his son Jai Courtney and its all going down in Mother Russia.  That's a long way from Nakatomi Plaza.

A Good Day To Die Hard is directed by John Moore, the man behind Behind Enemy Lines, the Flight of the Phoenix remake, The Omen remake, and Max Payne.  Yeah, I didn't like any of those films either.  But kick this up to an R rating and show me some serious squib action and I might start to get seriously excited.

--Brad