Knee-jerk review: "World War Z"

1. Let the record reflect that we are huge fans of Max Brooks' novel, upon which this movie is based.  It's a cleverly constructed book that pretends to be an exhaustive, non-fiction oral history of the "zombie wars." The format adds fresh spin to predictable genre tropes.  If you like zombies, go read it.

2. And Hollywood so loved the book that it ultimately decided to invent a new plot and avoid the Ken Burns vibe that made the novel so memorable and beloved.  That's showbiz.

3. That said, it's still a pretty good movie even if it has absolutely no business sharing the name of the Brooks book.  

4. It's not really a zombie film like 28 Days Later or Dawn of the Dead with those long sequences of screaming and running and gonzo, humans-versus-undead, gory fighting.  There's a little of that, true, but it's also rather tame and sanitized.  Which is in keeping with the film's cute little PG-13 rating.

5. Brad Pitt.  Yeah, he's a movie star.

6. In some ways, it's like a James Bond movie, with the hero globe-hopping (which does sort of jibe with the global sweep of Brooks' novel, we'll begrudgingly admit) to try and piece together an international mystery.  Brad Pitt even gets an attractive female bad-ass sidekick like Bond always seems to collect along the way.  It sort of worked for us.

7. But it was also a little hard to buy how the movie suggested that there's no one else in the entire world who's going to the trouble to do what Brad Pitt's character is doing.

8. Much has been made - well, we suppose it depends on what occupies your spare-time reading list as to whether you might agree with how much has been made - of the film's big production problems.  The filmmakers shot a huge ending in Russia, decided they hated it, hired a bunch of expensive writers to rethink the ending from scratch, then spent more money to shoot a new ending.

9. And damned if it doesn't work.  The third act involves a quiet, creepy mission deep into a medical lab that happens to be overrun with zombies.  It's the sort of slow-burn set piece you might see on one of the better episodes of "The Walking Dead" and it's a great contrast here to all of the huge, over the top action we'd been seeing for 80 minutes.  It may just save the whole thing.

10. Daniella Kertesz.  Yep.

11. At first we marveled at how skillfully the filmmakers shade Pitt as a resourceful, skilled hero.  He knows what to do and when to do it.  But then we started to notice he didn't make many mistakes, either.  Typically, audiences want flawed heroes.  That way, their adventure can transform them and make them into better people.  That transformation is where a lot of a movie's cathartic emotion comes from.  But we saw none of that here.  What does Pitt learn exactly?  If we squint and tilt our head just right, maybe you could argue that he's learning to see how the world is interconnected and how we're all a part of Mother Nature's brutal experiment.  Maybe.  Part of his final realization about the zombies connects back to an early talk he had with a doomed doctor.  But it's a stretch and we know it.  For the most part, he seems like the same selfless family man bad-ass all the way through.  Which diminishes the film's ultimate impact.

12. Is it just us, or did it seem like it was the Muslim celebration that caused such big problems for Jerusalem?  Discuss amongst yourselves the political and cultural significance of that filmmaker choice.

13. Can we please have a moratorium on using asthmatic kids and lost emergency inhalers as a plot point?

14. The opening 15 minutes or so feel pretty real.  To us, this is how American society would break down: quickly, with little media explanation and a lot of guns.

15. Poor Mireille Enos, a critically-beloved actress stuck for all of the movie pining away for her husband on a cramped Navy ship, waiting for him to call her.  If that weren't annoying enough to women everywhere, the story then has Enos make a selfish, bone-headed move that leads to the deaths of several people.  Women.  They're so silly!

16. The plane crash is nuts, just as you'd expect in a movie like this.  Of course it's just our two heroes who survive.  Of course the plane goes down close enough to their final destination that they're able to walk the rest of the way.  And of course Pitt's injury is just serious enough to allow him to lay some bloody, actorly grimaces on us, but not so serious that we ever fear for his life or so serious that he's sidelined from the action of the climax.

17. The US military ruthlessly disposing of all "non-essential personnel"?  Yeah, we buy that.  It's not personal, Sonny.  It's strictly business.

18. Check it out.

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20 years of radio in the summertime

Entertainment Weekly recently published a chart looking at the enduring relevance of the last 20 "summer songs."  That magazine loves lists.  Which is why we love that magazine.

1993

Tag Team's "Whoomp! (There It Is)" - There is surely no one who still likes this novelty song.  Even at the height of its infamous run, didn't people listen to it ironically?  We, in fact, dispute this as a summer song.  Billboard tells us the biggest hit of that summer was actually UB40's "Can't Help Falling in Love."  We hate that song, too, but at the least the punctuation isn't so ridiculous.

1994 

All 4 One's "I Swear"

Ugh.  Seriously?  The last gasp of the early-90s Motown-styled boy bands.  The far more memorable song for us from summer is Lisa Loeb's "Stay," which immediately transports us back to the grungy days of college and Generation X's collectively snarky coming of age.  We'd argue that two movies define us and our peers: The Breakfast Club and Reality Bites.  ("Stay" was on the Reality Bites soundtrack.)

1995 

TLC's "Waterfalls"

If it came on the radio tomorrow, we wouldn't turn it off.  And isn't that the ultimate compliment for a radio hit?  For the record, we'd also listen to the entirety of "Creep" and "Unpretty."

1996 

Los del Rio's "Macarena"

Aren't we all a little embarrassed by this one?  How did we, as a culture, let this happen?

1997 

Hanson's "Mmm-Bop"

Ditto this one.  Yeah yeah, the brothers are actually talented.  But let's leave the record deals to people who've been on the road, crafting their sound and paying their dues, not jamming in the carpeted basement playroom in suburban Arkansas or wherever they're from.  Billboard's charts for the summer tell us that two far more interesting songs bracketed Hanson's number one hit: Notorious B.I.G.'s "Hypnotize" and Puffy Daddy's "I'll Be Missing You."  But surely Entertainment Weekly is thinking that a summer hit needs to be frothy and fun, not dark and poignant.

1998 

Brandy and Monica's "The Boy Is Mine"

We remember this song sort of, but couldn't tell you what it sounds like.  At first we were going to wonder whatever happened to these two until we realized we really didn't care.

1999 

Smash Mouth's "All Star"

Not a number one hit, so says Billboard.  We find that hard to believe.  As we recall, this was one of those genuinely catchy, innocuous little songs that Corporate Radio decided to completely ruin by playing it on super-duper heavy rotation.  We can't listen to it anymore.

2000 

NSync's "It's Gonna Be Me"

Remember when Justin Timberlake was in a band?  Neither do we.  The better song, to us, from that summer was Vertical Horizon's crunchy "Everything You Want."

2001 

Destiny's Child's "Bootylicious"

There are a couple of good songs ("Say My Name," "Independent Woman Part I") out there from Destiny's Child.  This isn't one of them.  And not to be prudish, but that title is icky.

2002 

Nelly's "Hot in Herre"

We loved this song then, we love it now.  Not sure where Nelly learned how to spell, though.

2003 

Beyonce's "Crazy in Love"

Probably the strongest song on this entire list.  Still catchy all these years later and completely undated.  Who doesn't like this song?  When you hear that brass intro, who doesn't want to twist and bump and crank up the volume?  Uh-oh, uh-oh, uh-oh, oh-no-no.  It's amazing how Beyonce's career shot into the stratosphere once she left Destiny's Child, which is a testament to her own ambition and talent, as well as the importance of attracting the industry's best producers and songwriters.  It can be a self-perpetuating cycle at a certain point: the best songs and producer go to the most popular artists, thereby insuring their continued success.

2004 

Usher's "Yeah!"

We know we like it.  It's in our iTunes library.  But we must admit: we get it confused with Usher's "Burn," another hip-hop meets dance-pop number.  That's probably because we're so white.

2005 

Gwen Stefani's "Hollaback Girl"

Honestly, this one's a little overrated.  We were all so happy for Gwen to do a solo album, weren't we? Not really as solid as the stuff she'd been doing with No Doubt (though "Cool" is a silky favorite of ours) but decent.  The better 2005 summer song to us actually comes from that spring: the plodding, rather sinister "Candy Shop" by 50 Cent.

2006 

Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy"

Everyone loved this song, especially critics.  It's funky and distinctive, so we get why Entertainment Weekly would pick it.  And it was one of those odd songs that sort of came out of nowhere by some strangely-named group.  Everyone likes to be surprised.  But the song leaves us cold.  To us, Rihanna's "SOS" sounds more like summer.

2007 

Rihanna's "Umbrella"

A close runner-up to "Crazy in Love."  We had a love-hate relationship with this song.  When it first hit the radio, we really liked it.  Then they kept playing it and playing it.  There's no doubt this was the song of that summer.  You couldn't escape it.  We ultimately rejected it and formed a one-person backlash.  But eventually the song wore us down.  Even with that weird "ella ella" thing it's just too catchy, too poppy, too perfectly constructed.  We cannot deny its earworm appeal.  You win, Rihanna.  You win.

2008

Katy Perry's "I Kissed a Girl"

Look at that: the ubiquitous Katy Perry has only been with us only five years.  This was her breakout hit.  We remember well the scandalous sensation this naughty little song caused, which probably accounted for about 50% of its popularity.  The funny thing is, looking back, it's not even one of her best songs.

2009 

Black Eyed Peas' "I Gotta Feeling"

At this point, it's a little hard to be objective.  This was only a few years ago.  Who knows what song will best stand the test of time?  Lest you forget, 2009 was the year of the Peas.  For eleven weeks, their "Boom Boom Pow" was number one, then around July 4, it dropped out of the top spot only to be replaced by "I Gotta Feeling."  That song reigned supreme (we're totally channeling Casey Kasem right now) for another 14 weeks.  The Peas are usually fun, but they also seem completely disposable and unimportant.  Like cotton candy.  Sweet but evaporates.

2010 

Katy Perry's "California Girls"

We had a fondness for this song until we had a daughter of our own and started reconsidering the lyrics about Daisy Duke shorts and bikini tops.  These California girls are surely up to no good.  Shouldn't they cover up and stay indoors?  And what's all this about popsicle sticks?  It that what we think it is?  Even so, anything with "California" in the title is almost by default a summer song.

2011 

LMFAO's "Party Rock Anthem"

A strangely catchy song that got completely overplayed.  The words are all about party rocking, but the song itself feels very tame and manufactured to us.  The sort of things parents might approve of, which makes it uncool by default.  For 2011, we'd choose Katy Perry's "Last Friday Night" or Pitbull's "Give Me Everything."  (As an aside, "Give Me Everything" is perhaps one of the greatest pop-dance songs ever composed - if you study it like we have, the structure is genius in the way the song shifts tempo and mood several times; it's like three songs in one, each one better than the last.  Radio perfection.)

2012 

Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe"

We get this one.  A fun, fizzy song from a newcomer (and a Canadian to boot; you how they're all so very nice and polite up there) that caught everyone by surprise.  Plus it has that nostalgic sort of vibe of summer parties where you flirt with the opposite sex, but not in a dirty way, more of a chaste Disney Channel, rated-PG sort of way.  Our three-year-old liked to sing it, in other words.''

What summer songs do you like?

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Knee-jerk review: CBS' "Under the Dome"

1. The Stephen King novel was about 1000 pages.  We read the hardback.  It was like propping a cinder block on your chest.
2. Typical King novel: crackerjack premise, a sprinkling of pop culture references, lots of italicized internal monologues, small Maine town under strange external threat, the brooding antihero against the megalomaniacal villain (get it? we're more dangerous than any monster) plus a completely insane sidebar character who adds another level of conflict, and then a ending that sort of, kind of fizzles because there's no way to satisfactorily resolve these sci-fi premises.
3. It's fun to see an adaptation of a book we read.  But it's also a little tedious because we feel so far ahead of the plot.  Even if the show changes the details, the broad strokes are there, the main characters are there.
4. Jeff Fahey.  Awesome, though that beard is icky.
5. Our favorite thing: giving the abusive, crazy Junior part to a baby-faced actor Alexander Koch, who seems so charming and easy-going at first glance.
6. Cow getting cut in half.  Yeah, that was pretty cool.  So was the semi crash.
7. But better was the more low-tech gimmick of showing how neither side of the dome could hear the other.
8. CBS has been touting writer Brian K. Vaughan's resume.  Honestly, though, we would tread lightly at invoking "Lost," a similar people-trapped show that was exciting and cool until suddenly it became a source of unending frustration, drawing you in mostly because of the time you'd already invested and leading you to hope against hope that you would eventually get a unified, cathartic ending.  (Spoiler alert: there was none.  Purgatory?  Really?)
9. It worries us that this isn't a limited-run miniseries, but more of an open-ended series.  All the more incentive to stretch things out... and out... and out.
10. Hollywood should remove from its  bag of tricks the bit about the kid with the disease who has to have medicine or else he/she will die.  So very tired.  It feels like something that was maybe fresh on a 1970s episode of  "Dragnet."
11. There's something sort of cheap and cheesy about the whole thing, another reminder that the big television budgets now go to pay cable.
12. It's in our DVR season pass list, so we guess we'll keep watching.  Not a very ringing endorsement,  huh?

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Driving through the 80s

Before the Cheese Fry's corporate relocation to Texas, we embarked on an important mission to visit the Southern California private homes that were used as exterior locations in three of our favorite iconic 1980s movies.

The farthest trip took us all the way out into hot, dry Simi Valley.  That's where the Freeling family lived in sleepy Cuesta Verde in 1982's Poltergeist.

Here's the picture we took:

And now a still from the movie when the subdivision didn't have so many white camper pick-up trucks ruining scenes.  And we thought the house imploded ("You moved the headstones but you didn't move the bodies!") at the movie's conclusion.  Hollywood, you fooled us again.

Our next trip took us to the outer reaches of Burbank, which filled in for Hill Valley in 1985's Back to the Future.  It's the power lines that give this one away, don't you think? Here's our shot taken on a slow drive-by.  This seemed to be a slightly sketchy neighborhood.

Very hard to find a good still off the internet for some reason even though this is where Doc Brown uttered the line "Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads."  All we could find was this dusky shot from one of the sequels.

Tujunga, California, shoved up against the mountains, is almost as far out as Simi Valley.  This place doubled for Elliot's suburban house in 1982's E.T.  Here's our shot, taken while standing brazenly at the foot of the driveway.

And then here's a shot from the movie, when the neighborhood was so new there were no trees or grass.  Right or wrong, this movie imprinted in us what a happy family's neighborhood ought to look like: rolling hills, clean white pavement, identical cookie cutter houses lining the blocks.  We love suburbia.

Phone home, people.

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Six thoughts on "Rock of Ages"

We don't typically review movies we see on cable, but this one deserves some sort of response.  

1. We loved the candy-colored 1980s Sunset Strip vibe, especially a loving recreation of Tower Records circa 1987 (remember those walls of cassette tapes?).  But having spent many years commuting on Sunset Blvd, something felt off here.  The landmarks looked right, but the geography was all wrong.  Among other things, it looked like the movie was suggesting Sunset ran north and south instead of the proper east and west.  And stores separated by blocks looked here like they were sitting side by side.  So we did some research and found out... the filmmakers "recreated" Sunset Blvd... on a rundown intersection in Miami.  Fail.
2. This is a movie that needed to be 95 minutes, tops.  You get in, you get out.  No one gets hurt.  No way does this fluff deserve 2 hours and 10 minutes of your life. 
3. Alec Baldwin is horribly miscast.  Wow.
4. We're not sure why the whole Catherine Zeta-Jones subplot even existed.  You cut it out, what do you miss?  Maybe one nice gag at the end.
5. Why not play it more straight and dramatic?  The filmmakers layer on this goofy, half-winking campiness to everything (we think that's one reason why Paul Giamatti is so awful), probably cultivated by director Adam Shankman.  But it doesn't work.  It feels like no one had faith in the story and so decided to treat it like a lark.
6. The reason to see it is for the 1980s hair band songs, especially some clever "Glee"-style mashups.  We grew up with most of these songs, so it a lot of it was fun.  But while we might give a pass to including Quarterflash's bluesy "Harden My Heart," we have to draw the line at Starship's "We Built This City," a song that we think Blender magazine once called the worst song ever written.  It's a song about not selling out.  The irony runs thick.

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Our five biggest posts ever

Among the many interesting-but-useless tools that our kind host service Blogger offers is a measurement of post hits.  Behold, below, the five most popular posts in our history.

1. September 2012, Knee-jerk review: CBS' Surivor: Philippines - We were thrilled to see 1100 hits for this topic and started looking for Mark Burnett's number.  And then we saw the poorly composed string of comments that suggest a nefarious spambot infiltration of some kind.  So... never mind.

2. May 2013, Knee-jerk review: Star Trek Into Darkness.  The 96 hits for this one seem more in line with the small, loyal Cheese Fry following.  We're vocal, some might say pathological, Star Trek fans and could imagine how our opinions on the matter might appeal to some and encourage aggressive link-forwarding.  Thank you.

3. May 2013, 176,248 miles.  The somber eulogy to our dearly departed Subaru hatchback attracted 69 hits.  We think it's a universal story of frustration ("I'm still driving this thing?!") and admiration ("this thing is still running?!"), something that appeals to all of us who drove a first car right into the ground.

4. February 2011, Live blogging the 83rd Annual Academy Awards.  This drew 66 hits, a number likely inflated by the Cheese Fry's attempt to goose audience size by creating an Oscar pool contest and announcing it over Facebook.  People may have checked it out, but only six brave souls entered the contest.  It was our first and last contest to date.

5. July 2011, Green Grinch should be a Crayola color.  This post pulled in just 39 hits, a pathetic number that somehow still earns this post a top five spot.  What's sadder, that fact or the realization that this post contains little actual content?  We just posted a cool graphic we found somewhere else.  Tomorrow, we'll be posting a picture of whatever we first find on Google.

And here's a fun little chart graphing our sawtooth traffic ebbs and flows since 2007. 

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Gumfight at the OK Corral

Here's an obscure blast from our 1970s childhood past.  Who remembers these commercials for Hubba Bubba?

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Knee-jerk review: "Star Trek Into Darkness"

1. Thanks, Paramount, for releasing it on our birthday.  Much appreciated.
2. In hindsight, we probably liked 2009's Star Trek reboot more out of nostalgia and an excitement that the franchise was finally getting another shot than out of a genuine affection for the movie.  Frankly, it was kind of a mess what with all of that time-travel nonsense and one extremely lame villain.  (We're a little forgiving only because it was an origin story and had to spend so much time getting everyone into place on the Enterprise.)
3. But this one delivers the goods.  Lots of action, some clever twists and turns, funny moments.
4. Dr. McCoy probably gets the short end of the stick here.  There's more to him than the crowd-pleasing wisecracks.  It even gets on Kirk's nerves.
5. Spoiler alert: never trust Peter Weller.  That is all.
6. Sure does seem like a lot of wasted space in that ship.  Look at the huge, roomy compartments and hallways.
7. Welcome to the rebooted universe, Klingons.
8. We obviously liked the many Wrath of Khan homages.  Fun, but not distracting.  The filmmakers spin the old mythology (and that 1982 movie's signature bits) in new and interesting ways.
9. We never have been a Zachary Quinto fan.  He seems a little smug and lazy to us somehow.  But it's hard not to like his Spock here, dealing with an angry girlfriend, fist-fighting a bad guy, engineering a classic Kirkian double-cross.
10. It seems like the strategy to restart a warp core is the 23rd century equivalent of us banging our faulty remote control on the tabletop. Seriously?
11. Speaking of which, warp cores seem pretty unreliable, don't you think?  They're always failing or almost failing.
12. Bruce Greenwood never fails to utterly mesmerize us.  Killer actor.
13. Hollywood, enough with the let's-destroy-an-entire-city-and-call-it-entertainment plot point.  Your villain doesn't have to kill thousands of innocent people for us to root against him.
14. We're guessing more captains break the Prime Directive than actually follow it.
15. Not sure if it's the writing or the performance, but Zoe Saldana's Uhura is one of the movie's strongest elements.
16. We're growing weary of the villain who anticipates the heroes' next three or four moves (and, in fact, seems to form strategy based on those next three or four moves) in a way that seems completely impossible.  These chains of cause and effect simply seem too shaky and unpredictable.
17. For a second there we thought they were going to go the ship-self-destruct route.  Please don't.  In fact, we forbid the filmmakers from ever considering that turn for any future sequel ever.
18. After all of the coy denials and fake secrecy about bad guy John Harrison, we were genuinely shocked by his real identity during the movie, then realized just now that the truth about his character has been sitting there on the IMDB cast list for who knows how long.
19. Some have complained that this feels more like a plot-heavy, action-first Star Wars movie than a character-heavy, drama-first Star Trek movie.  Maybe so (though we would point to 1991's The Undiscovered Country and 1996's First Contact, both non-stop thrillers with a similar vibe as Into Darkness).  But that probably bodes well for the next Star Wars sequel, which J.J. Abrams is directing.
20. Cable cars are still running in San Francisco several hundred years from now?
21. So the next sequel takes us onto the famous five-year mission.  Very exciting.
21. Definitely worth a look, people.

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Six remarks from a four-year-old concerning an old episode of "Star Trek"

1. "Hey, daddy, those look like your little people!"  Meaning our action figures.  Don't pretend that you don't wish you had some of your own.
2. "Is that a good robot or a bad robot?" He's bad.
3. "Daddy, what's wrong with his... (gesturing to her eyebrows)?  Why do they do that?"  He's an alien named Spock.
4. "What happened to the red men? Where'd they go?" They were vaporized, as must eventually happen to all Starfleet security members in red shirts.
5. "So the alien is good and the robot is bad?"  Correct.
6. "That robot hurt the boy [Scotty] and the girl [Uhura], right?" Right.

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Knee-jerk review: HBO's "Game of Thrones" (season one)

1. We can nitpick most shows and find flaws with the plotting or the pacing or the character development or something.  But it's sure hard to find any fault here.  It may not be our favorite show, but it surely ranks among the most well-made shows we've ever seen.  A peerless production from top to bottom.
2. We don't do pay-cable, but a friend insisted we watch the first season on DVD.  He called it "The Godfather with swords."  A clever description, but The Godfather and it's story of the Five Families was never this dense and complicated and layered.
3. At first we didn't think we'd like it.  This is a dank, seedy world where good is not rewarded.  But then it started to grow on us.  And we realized you can take comfort in what little moment of cathartic comeuppance the show does choose to allow.  Like the "golden crown."  If you've seen it, you know what we're talking about.  A completely deserved punishment.
4. Peter Dinklage knows what a great role Tyrion is and pretty much knocks it out of the park every time.  No wonder he won an Emmy.
5. It's shows like this that seem to keep European actors employed.
6. Female nudity is nothing new for an HBO original show, of course.  But there's quite a few shots here of the very rare full frontal male, plus a couple of rather extended, graphic, and noisy sex scenes.  If this show were released in theaters, in other words, it would probably be too hard for an R.
7. We knew going in what was going to happen to Ned Stark.  Even so, it was still pretty devastating.  Remember: he didn't even want to go to King's Landing.
8. "Winter is coming."
9. King Joffrey.  What a evil little snot.  We found ourselves often imagining gruesome ways to kill him off.  Even his horrible mother at times seems disgusted by him.
10. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau definitely has a sort of Han Solo swagger to him.  As villainous as he is, we find it hard not to like him, to try and find a reason to like him.
11. The casting of Sean Bean makes explicit certain genre parallels to the Lord of the Rings books and movies.  But the Tolkein stories feel mythic, removed from reality.  Those are fairy tales about a magical land.  The "Game of Thrones" stories, however, even with dragons and magic, feel much more urgent, more much connected to contemporary problems of politics and power and family.
12. We read a rather insightful appraisal about the "heroes" of the story, especially given the unexpected way Ned's character is handled.  While at first glance it would seem to be Ned's story - he's the one character truly working hard to be honest and honorable and just - the story is really about Ned's children.  All of the children, really.  How will this new generation handle the bloody conflicts their parents created?
13. That is one bad-ass throne. No doubt about it.
14. With death lurking around every corner, it's pretty safe to say that if you're still alive at the age of 30 or so, you're a pretty dangerous character with a finely-honed sense of survival.
15. Those swords look really heavy.  What kind of upper body strength do you need to swing those things?  This is the sort of thing we think about when we're watching the show.
16. Does this mean we have to start reading the novels?  They seem really, really long.
17. The most compelling character arcs for us would have to be two female characters.  There's Daenerys, the victim who evolves into a confident queen figure.  And there's poor Sansa who comes of age quickly and learns the folly of making husband-hunting one's only priority.
18. Indeed, while the show does have a sexist vibe to it what with all of the nudity and sexual assaults and prostitution, one could argue there's a point to it all.  In that world, women were either mothers or whores.  Trying to push outside those labels, as so many of the female characters are doing, isn't easy.
19. "Targaryen" is fun to say.  Mark Addy probably does it best.
20. What pops for us is all of the back-room politicking and scheming.  This part of the show seems so very universal.  What will people do to grab power and then keep it?
21. Who wouldn't want a direwolf available to run in from the shadows and bite the fingers off an enemy?
22. The only time you can sense the show's limited budget is when you start to realize all of the big battle scenes are happening off-screen somewhere else.
23. We have our money on the scary, hulking, scarred Hound having a heart of gold.
24. The season's biggest twists emerge from a variation of some tawdry supermarket tabloid expose about adultery and paternity tests.  It's those Maury Povich-like efforts to uncover who the king fathered or didn't father that spin the country into civil war.  It doesn't get any more contemporary than that.
25. "When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die.  There is no middle ground."
26. So yeah, we're going to watch season 2.  It's a pretty amazing show.
27. If you're curious how they did that genius main title sequence, here's how.

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Call it the Wooderson Effect

Vulture.com posted a fascinating series of charts analyzing the ages of Hollywood's leading men and their female costars.  The men get older and older, their co-stars stay the same age.  Matthew McConaughey's character in Dazed and Confused would approve.  Nothing like good old fashioned, institutionalized American sexism: older men are distinguished, older women need to stay indoors.  

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Lego genius

This is the sort of pop culture obsession we can get behind.  If it were us, of course, we'd probably create a Lego Starship Enterprise.

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Knee-jerk review: "Olympus Has Fallen"

1. Our first movie in theaters in months... and we pick this one?
2. Preposterous, pretty much from top to bottom.
3. We enjoy a good cheesy B-movie as much as the next guy.  But don't insult our intelligence.  At least try, filmmakers, to sell it.  This movie asks the audience to buy several moments that are 100% implausible, illogical, and ridiculous.  They sink the whole thing.
4. The sexism is also pretty uncomfortable.  One female lead is stuck pining for the hero, another gets the hell beaten out of her, and the other exists solely to vet the hero.
5. What's with all of the gunshots and knives to heads?  Ick.  The older we get, the less we enjoy this kind of brutal violence.
6. To glibly say, "It's Die Hard in the White House" doesn't clearly underscore how often this movie hits Die Hard's narrative beats.  It's more ripoff than homage.  There's even the hero-meets-the-bad-guy-and-doesn't-know-it moment.
7. There's surely some political/cultural point to be made about how this movie renders the American military so hopelessly inept and impotent.  Is that how some of us feel deep down after the morass of Iraq and Afghanistan?  Is that somehow in the zeitgeist?
8. Cerbeus.  Really?  No way to change the codes on something so powerful, huh?  If you say so, Olympus Has Fallen.
9. No way does a four-star admiral cooperate like that.  No way.
10. We have a feeling this movie was made sort of cheap, so we were looking for the effects shots and corner-cutting, trying to figure out how they faked DC and White House in Ontario or North Carolina.  It all looks pretty good, though.
11. So the bad guy's entire plan hinges on a decision by the President that simply couldn't be 100% predicted.  That is, if the President makes choice B instead A, the movie's over at the end of act one.  Like we said, don't insult our intelligence.
12. If you're a smart computer hacker, you too apparently can sit at a classified, complicated multi-screen workstation and nimbly control all aspects of the White House.  Monitor video feeds, seal off air vents, connect to the Pentagon.  It's easier than Windows 8! 
13. We especially loved the moment where the bad guys somehow hit a couple of keys and pull up satellite images of aircraft carriers in the Pacific open.
14. Los Angeles aside: we met a drunk Robert Forster at a party once.  Nice guy.
15. We begrudgingly admit that Gerard Butler has some good lines.  But one quip left a bad taste in our mouth, given as it was amid a pile of dead Secret Service agents.
16. We kept trying to imagine Obama, Biden, and Hillary Clinton in a similar hostage situation.  What would they do with a gun to their head?  Would they cooperate or take a bullet for the country's greater good?  Can they take a beating?  Biden probably could.
17. We can't recall another recent movie with this high a body count.  Wow.
18. We're going to give Rick Yune the benefit of the doubt and say that we hated his dead-eyed bad-guy performance only because we hated the movie.  But man is he a boring one-note villain.  Zzzzz.
19. Several times, a TV news graphic in the movie spelled it "Whitehouse."  One word.  This is that kind of movie.
20. Hollywood needs to learn that the F-bomb packs its best punch when used sparingly and when saved for maximum moments of drama and tension.
21. Okay okay, yeah, there were some cool moments.  We did like some of the twists involving the bad guy's ultimate goal.
22. Overall, there's a smart, complex thriller to be made about how bad guys overrun the White House.  This one, unfortunately, isn't it.  Maybe this summer's White House Down will be it.  Yep.  Same premise.  It's Deep Impact/Armageddon all over again.  Or is it Volcano/Dante's Peak?

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Attacking Echo Base

We've previously shared with you a crazy, in-depth look at the so-called "Endor Holocaust," an examination of the deadly consequences to inhabitants of Endor if a Death Star-sized moon exploded in its orbit as depicted in the final moments of Return of the Jedi.  Let's just say the Ewoks won't be celebrating for long.

And now comes a fascinating, detailed military examination of the Hoth battle from The Empire Strikes Back that looks at the poor combat strategy employed by Darth Vader and the Empire.  Genius.

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Knee-jerk review: "The 85th Annual Academy Awards"

1. We admire Seth McFarlane.  He's a self-made man, an artist who toiled in obscurity animating lame Hanna Barbera cartoons while quietly crafting the idea that would became the juggernaut "Family Guy."  His success was not handed to him.  We like that.  Yeah yeah, "Family Guy" never explored high-minded social satire like "The Simpsons," but it certainly can still be funny, cramming in more jokes-per-minute than just about anything we've ever seen.  The fact that so many of the gags are directed right at the pop culture nostalgia of Generation X makes it all the more appealing in that inside baseball sort of way.  If you get it, you're in the club.
2. We have mixed feelings about "We Saw Your Boobs."  Hmmm.  The juvenile side of us finds it quite hilarious, especially given the many hours we logged long ago (not now, of course, don't be silly) looking for naked scenes in movies.  But there's also a side of us that's a little offended, a side that doesn't like how the song reduces talented actresses' accomplishments to some fleeting nude scene in a way that simply can't be done in a similarly insulting way for male actors.  Then again, one could argue that this is the hallmark of a great gag: you laugh and cringe at the same time.  Extra credit for the convoluted time-travel set-up, by the way, which allowed Seth to do the bit while also openly acknowledging how inappropriate it is.  Extra credit also for stating what we all know to be true: Kate Winslet invariably takes off her clothes in every movie.

3. The Captain Kirk thing went on too long.  We're in agreement on that, right?

4. That's surely the first Smokey and the Bandit reference on network TV in since the 1990s.  "We're gonna do what they say cain't be done."  Aside: there is no obvious evidence of medical intervention on Sally Field's face.
5. A shocking win for Christoph Waltz and Django Unchained.   Wow.  Is it just us or is Waltz essentially playing the same character that won him the Oscar for Inglourious Basterds?  They sound... exactly... the same.  It's the same guy, people.  Guess you have to give the Academy credit for consistency.  They really really like whatever it is Waltz has been doing.  Maybe he should keep doing it.

6. Any acceptance speech that isn't just a list of names is a good one in our book.  We often wonder if the Oscars should somehow come with closed-captions so viewers at home can keep track of the agents, producers, publicists, and attorneys getting name-checked at the podium.

7. If there is any equal of our beloved filmmaker Steven Soderbergh, it's probably Ang Lee.  Both of them refuse to be pigeonholed in a single style, choosing instead to travel in a variety of genres.  Westerns, sci-fi, superheroes, thrillers, heists, fantasy, period drama.  They don't always succeed, but their efforts are always intriguing.  We could use more directors like this.

8. For these overviews of the Best Picture nominees, why can't they show a single powerhouse scene to really take us into the movie?  Why do we instead get these trailer-like montages?
9. Maybe Joss Whedon should have written the banter for The Avengers actors.  Awkward and unfunny.
10. We felt bad that the visual effects guy was cut off by the Jaws theme, especially since he was trying to talk about the fragile, hopelessly dysfunctional state of the visual effects industry.  But these people were surely all told a million times how much time they had and what would happen if they ran over.  If he wanted to preach about visual effects finances, he should have started sooner.  What if everyone were indulged and allowed to talk as long as they wanted?  Dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria.
11. How embarrassing would it be if the winner for Best Costume Design showed up wearing something really ugly?  Would the Oscar win offset any perception of fashion incompetence?  Could they still get hired?  These are the things we think about.

12. Very exciting!  Fifty years of James Bond... but then all we get is a long montage clip.  At the very least, shouldn't the six Bond actors stroll out on stage in matching tuxedos to thunderous applause?  Then we learned from Deadline's Nikki Finke that Connery hates the Broccoli family.  How petty.
13. It feels wrong to hear Halle Berry say "Pussy Galore."
14. Shirley Bassey is still alive?  Huh.
15. If you can't get the Bond actors, then the next best thing would have been to coax to the stage McCartney for "Live and Let Die" (best Bond song ever) and Carly Simon for "Nobody Does It Better" to hit the trifecta.

16.  At this point, stand-up comedy and sitcoms are just an amusing footnote to Jamie Foxx's career, aren't they?

17. The orchestra is up the street and around the corner in the Capitol Building.  Why? 

18. An homage to classic movie musicals... of the last ten years only... and one of which is up for Best Picture this year.  We liked the Les Miserables showstopper, but in general, this felt like a waste of 15 minutes.  It was pointed out to us later that the people who are producing the Oscars - producers Neil Meron and Craig Zadan - are Broadway guys who helped make Chicago.  Now it's starting to make sense, isn't it?
19. This goes without saying, but we'll say it anyway.  It is absolutely ridiculous what filmmakers can do with computer technology (even as they run effects companies into the ground - see #10 above).  It's easy to spot big tentpole effects of dinosaurs and aliens and nuclear holocausts, sure.  But the majority of the effects work that you see in movies is completely seamless and rendered so realistically and vividly that you'd never guess it was an effect at all.

20. We laughed out loud at the Von Trapp "They're gone!" gag.  Sorry.

21. As is often the case, Best Supporting Actress goes to the ingenue.  Oscar loves anointing cute young women.  Here, we get Anne Hathaway doing her "oh my gosh I'm so excited" routine yet again.  The realest thing about her acceptance speech is the weirdly craven moment she whispered "It came true" to her new Oscar.  We suppose we should all be happy for her, finally achieving her goal.  Doesn't she know you're supposed to pretend to be above it all and not want it that badly?  She really is like the annoying perky, hammy, isn't-it-swell? theater arts student.  That said, we can't fault her for her talent.  She has the goods.  Hathaway was easily the best thing in The Dark Knight Returns and The Devil Wears Prada is way underrated. 

22. Sit down,Harvey Weinstein, you're in the shot!

23. Okay okay, Adele's song "Skyfall" is definitely growing on us.

24. If Kristen Stewart doesn't want to be there on stage giving out an award, why is she there?

25. Stuntman (and member of the weird 1970s Burt Reynolds royal court) Hal Needham gets an honorary Oscar.  Big cable staple growing up: Needham's film Hooper.  No CGI back then.  You're really driving cars under collapsing brick smokestacks.

26. And now... "In Memoriam."  Or, that part of the show where you say "I didn't know he/she died!"

27. Here we go again with more Chicago love.  Good grief.  It was a great movie, yes.  But it was ten years ago and the show's now devoted two segments to reminding us about it.  Memo to Oscar producers: no one cares.  How about some random celebrations of Shakespeare in Love or Forrest Gump or while you're at it?  We saw a tweet that said the producers are making the Oscars into the Tonys so they can get a job producing the Emmys.  Zing!

28. Why is ABC making Seth do his own "coming up next" bumpers?  Could they not hire an announcer?

29. Quentin Tarantino is a polarizing figure, but count us among his fans.  That said, this is an unexpected win for him.  Inglourious Basterds was more deserving.  Does this mean Hollywood likes him?  It's his second Oscar for writing, so this certainly seems like validation.  

30. Jennifer Lawrence falls on the way up the steps, a humiliating moment that instantly mutes any Hathaway-ian criticism.  To us, Lawrence is like Sandra Bullock with more talent and gravitas, the cute-but-gawky girl next door who finds Hollywood politics rather amusing and any talk of her a sex symbol to be utterly ridiculous. 

32. Daniel Day Lewis wins for Lincoln.  You could have written it down back when Spielberg cast him two years ago.  That's about as stone cold a lock as Oscars give these days.  

33. We like the First Lady, but please get out of our Oscarcast, Michelle Obama.  We're trying to go to bed.  Enough of these gimmicky shenanigans.  Open the envelope and let's call it a night.
34. The more we think about it, the sillier it seems to have this many Best Picture nominees.  Five was a nice round number.  You get two critics' choice front runners, a populist box office hit, an arty indie, and a dark horse.  It made sense.  Now it's just this weird free for all.  Five one year, ten the next.  Stop the madness.
35. Argo deserved it.

Here's what we said about the 83rd Annual Academy Awards.  You know, the year The King's Speech won.  And the 81st Annual Academy Awards.  The year that Slumdog Millionaire won.

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