So I’ve never seen WALKING DEAD, and they’re playing a marathon–and the barn chock full of zombies is the Best Surprise Ever.
Why does the old farmer have them locked up, and why feed them? Bizarre. Love it.
Barn full of walkers!
Month: October 2015
AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON in two minutes, using Legos
Love this. And it rings true.
AGE OF ULTRON was an expensive monster that didn’t scare of thrill me. And I adore Josh Whedon as a writer and director. The first AVENGERS movie was great.
It’d be fun to see a director’s cut on Blu-Ray, knowing that studio execs had heavy hand in the editing room. Show us what got cut, Josh–give us the good stuff you had to leave out.
DOWNTOWN by Macklemore is daring and different
Note: Macklemore uses a few bad words.
Macklemore is a Seattle treasure, a smart artist who figured out his producer, Ryan Lewis, is the secret to success–so he gives Ryan credit and co-billing all the time.
I’ve seen Macklemore’s old videos, before he partnered up with Ryan, and you could see the talent and imagination. It just wasn’t quite there. Ryan Lewis gave him polish and took him over the top.
Three things I love about DOWNTOWN:
1) Guest star goodness
Every video, Macklemore and Ryan find new guest singers.
This time, they brought in old-school rappers and made a star out of Eric Nally, who’s been around a while and for some reason never took off. He will now.
Ryan’s amazing at this. I’ve watched videos of other guest singers, and they sounded good in their original videos. Ryan made them sound like angels. It’s a gift.
2) Unafraid to be epic
Conventional wisdom says to keep your song short and radio-friendly. The longer the song, the less likely you’ll get played.
This video is long, different and daring.
Macklemore and Ryan Lewis aren’t afraid to take chances with music videos, to swing hard, knowing they’ll miss sometimes.
They’re also smart enough to take things that should be lame–like thrift shops and mopeds–and turn them hip. That takes talent.
3) Local gems
Macklemore travels around the Northwest to shoot his videos, this time in Spokane, where I lived for a few years.
Most of this is shot downtown. Spokane has a great downtown, including Riverfront Park, and I hear Macklemore used local actors, dancers and extras.
This is smart. Who wouldn’t be excited about a music video being shot in your town, and having the chance to be in it?
Verdict: Macklemore keeps coming up with excellent music videos. THRIFT SHOP and SAME LOVE are classics. This is another good one, well-thought out and executed. If MTV still played music videos instead of Jersey Shore marathons, they’d have this running all the time.
Why MAKE ME by Lee Child gets graded on a curve
I can’t count how many hardcover Reacher novels line the top shelf of my library. Lee Child is that good.
MAKE ME is his latest novel about Reacher, and it’s also good.
Not bad. Not great.
Acceptable.
Once again, our hero is (a) wandering the small towns of America only to (b) bump into a beautiful girl with a gun who (c) is investigating Some Crazy Problem Involving This Small Town.
This is also the plot of about 17 other Reacher novels.
The towns change. The nature of the evil plot changes. The women change.
Reacher never does
Lee Child is one of my favorite authors, the greatest living thriller writer, and Reacher is a great character. The brain of Sherlock Holmes shoved into the body of the Hulk, funny, smart and tough. A great hero.
HOWEVER: Child isn’t stretching a single writing muscle here. Don’t think he even had to warm up.
It’s as if the devil snuck into his bedroom late one night and said, “If I promise you riches and fame, the price being you have to write the same book every year—year after year, until you die—do we have a deal?”
If we’re grading Child against other thriller authors, he gets an A.
But we’re not. There’s a huge body of work, that top shelf full of Reacher novels already written. MAKE ME sits among them.
Not bad. Not great.
Acceptable.
There is proof that Lee Child can blow expectations out of the water, when he does feel like stretching those writing muscles.
One of the few first-person POV novels he did, THE ENEMY, slayed me with clever clues, revelations and twists. I’ve read it again and again. A great mystery, and the only novel featuring Reacher in the Army.
That’s not a coincidence.
No such thing.
I hope the next novel picks up the mold in Reacher’s big, strong hands and smashes it against the asphalt. That it doesn’t feature a beautiful girl with a gun and a badge who teams up with Reacher, sleeps with him, takes down the bad guys and disappears, like all the others.
I hope the villain is memorable and, for once, a match for the hero. I hope Reacher has to truly suffer, sacrifice and change to actually win.
I hope.
Verdict: MAKE ME gets four out of five folding toothbrushes.
Related posts:
Man Uses Raccoon To Start Breathalyzer Equipped Car, Raccoon Then Attacks Driver
Does it get any better than a headline like that? Click here for the incident report.
So this convicted drunk driver has to blow into a tube before his car starts, and he’s drunk. Shocking. What’s this genius do?
He looks for a sober buddy to puff that tube for him so he can drive off.
The nearest buddy happens to be a raccoon rummaging through his garbage. Grabs the raccoon, somehow gets the animal to blow on the tube and yes, the car starts, with the animal now unconscious. Maybe he squeezed it too hard.
So he’s driving along when the raccoon wakes up to gets his revenge, scratching and clawing our drunken genius, who crashes into a fence.
This story has all the classic hallmarks of weird news: drunken idiots (almost always men), motor vehicles and dangerous wild animals. The only way to improve it would be to add firearms.
Sadly, the San Diego Police report that this is an internet hoax.
HOWEVER: The way it spread so fast shows that the bones of this story are strong. All the elements you need are there, and there’s no fat to trim. It’s an urban legend that’s evolved into a perfect little story.
The Red Pen of Doom 