There isn’t much I can say about Skyfall that hasn’t been said by numerous other reviews, but I think there is a lot to be said about where this film fits in the overall Bond mythos.

Skyfall marks the 23rd film in the main series, and the 50th anniversary of the series. That’s a lot of history to haul around with you, and it seems that the filmmakers are ready to start a whole new history without actually rebooting the franchise. The film walks an interesting line between honoring and embracing its history, while also ditching large portions of it.

We see the return of Q, the introduction of Moneypenny and the return of the old style M office with the leather covered door and dark wood walls. Meanwhile we are bluntly told that gadgets such as the exploding pen are gone, and the Astro Martin with the ejector seat is a relic of the past.

And so is Bond.

If anything shocked me in Skyfall it was the fact that Bond is very much represented to be a human, and not some sort of superior being that was above failure. Unlike past Bond films, this isn’t so much about the villain and his plan for world domination, this is a far more intimate story that revolves around revenge against M (Dame Judi Dench) and Bond’s return to active service despite his injuries and age. Don’t get me wrong, there are still your action set pieces – including a real thrill ride of a motorcycle chase – but this is far more about who these people that are responsible for the safety of the United Kingdom as people? Why was Bond recruited originally? Is there any price M wouldn’t pay to keep that safety intact? Can you be in this line of business and keep your human core?

See what I mean? There isn’t some secret volcano lair. No one is trying to manipulate global oil prices. And, thankfully, no one is trying to start a war to sell more newspapers. (Yes, that was the actual plot of a Bond film if you haven’t seen them all.) Time and humanity are the villains in this film despite the extremely creepy performance by Javier Bardem as Silva. The villain in this particular piece was used as a metaphor for the other issues at play.

Yes … I just used “metaphor” in relation to a Bond film. That tells you how unlike previous films in the series this is.

Now, this has become the most successful Bond film to date, and that says a lot, but it isn’t without it’s issues. For instance, the character of Sévérine (Bérénice Marlohe) could have easily been done without. Yes, many Bond girls have been disposable over the years, but she took it to a new extreme and did very little to advance the plot that could have been handled by other means.

Would I recommend it? Wholeheartedly, but don’t go in expecting the Bond of old, this is very much the dawn of a whole new era. And I, for one, can not wait to see where we go with Daniel Craig for Bond 24 & Bond 25.

If you had told me back in the mid-1990s that I would be enjoying a movie directed by Ben Affleck I would have had a good laugh. Who would have guessed he would turn into a decent director?

Argo tells the true story of how the CIA attempted to rescue six Americans out of Tehran during the infamous hostage situation back in 1979 and 1980. After several different scenarios were tossed around, the seemingly insane idea of posing as a science fiction film looking for a shooting location was suggested by an agent named Tony Mendez, and the movie follows the steps the CIA took to make the back story sound legitimate, and how the events unfolded in Iran during the extraction.

Overall the film floats between comedic side moments – mostly related to the antics in the Hollywood portion of the back story – to scenes of intense tension as it seems the plan will be stopped at any moment from either our own side changing its mind to someone in Iran figuring out what is about to happen. The film quickly engulfs you and doesn’t let go until the very end where even the credits make you stick around as even more backstory is revealed through archival images.

All of that being said, and this is not a reflection so much on Affleck as on screenwriter Chris Terrio who messes up several dramatic beats with off-handed humor that seems strategically placed at points where he felt the audience could have used a breath. The humor doesn’t feel natural, but instead very forced to a point where you almost feel as if he went, “Whoa, it’ sbeen six pages since I had a lighthearted moment, better put one here.”

This isn’t remotely to say it’s a bad film, I throughly enjoyed it, but it is certainly not perfect.

Affleck may want to think about giving up on the acting, which would be a shame as I enjoy him, but his directing career is looking more promising with each new project. Lets see where he’ll take us next.

Tired of paying through the nose for razor blades? Dollar Shave Club may be just what you need.

Announced back in March via the video you see above, the concept went viral when everyone started spreading the link around.  Cheap shaving blades?  Color me intrigued.  Although I started off shaving in my teens with an electric razor, I found I really preferred traditional shaving, but I despise how much it costs.  I even transitioned to shaving only once every one to two weeks to save money over going back to an electric shaver.

So, a dollar for blades?  I was in.  Except $1 (plus shipping) only got you a dual blade system, so I opted to go for $6 a month (plus shipping) for the four blade system.  There is also an option to go for a six blade head, but that just seemed like over kill to me.  Here are all the pictures of what my first shipment looked like.  (click through for larger versions)

In the first shipment you receive the handle for the blades, but future shipments will just be the cartridges. You can change your subscription at any time and you will receive a corresponding handle for the change. What I haven’t heard yet is if there is a way to request a replacement handle should anything happen to the original.

All the pricing in the world means diddle if the razors don’t work well.  I generally shave with Gillette Mach 3s, so I was using one more blade than usual, but I don’t expect that to make a huge difference.  To be honest, when I first started shaving with the DSC head, I thought, “Oh boy, this isn’t good, I can’t feel it doing anything.”  Turns out that was because it was doing such a good job.  This was quite honestly the closest, cleanest shave I’ve had in quite some time.  The blades may not cost you an arm and a leg, but they don’t adhere to the, “You get what you pay for” adage.

With the shaving out of the way, I do have one major concern: Travelling.  While this is a great system, I travel extensively for work, and if I should be between shipments, I could easily run out of cartridges while on the road, and since the handle uses exclusive heads, I couldn’t just run into a drug store and pick up new ones.  Switching exclusively to the DSC system would be a difficult effort for me, but it will still save me money in the long run as I can just buy some Mach 3 blades and save them only for when I travel.

I’ll have to do some more shaving with these to make sure they really are as good as I think, but from my first go with them, I have to say I’m both impressed and pleased with them.

If you do choose to sign up for Dollar Shave Club, I do request you go through this link because, yes, I will earn free months.  Yay!

The pseudo-horror film Red State may be the finest film director Kevin Smith has made, but also his most infuriating at the same time.

Set in the fictional location of Cooper’s Dell, Red State tells the story of Abin Cooper (Michael Parks) and his Five Points Church; a group so radical that even Neo-Nazis have distanced themselves from the congregation as we learn very early on in the film.  It seems that pastor Cooper and his congregation have come to the conclusion that it is time they hasten the coming of the Rapture, and help God to sort out the sinners from the faithful.  They lure the evil people into their fold with promises of fulfilling their carnal desires, and then take care of ushering these evildoers to their greater reward.

What appears above is the most simplistic explanation of the connecting thread of this film, but there are so many concepts circulating around the edges that you could never precisely do a summary of it without spoiling a ton of the story.  And that, sadly, is what keeps me from saying I love this movie as opposed to just liking it.

I am an unabashed fan of Kevin Smith.  Even since the first time I watched Clerks – his 1990′s ode to slacker/service industry culture – I have followed every move of this man’s career, and to this day I listen to hours of podcasts he produces each week, but even I can admit when things go slightly awry with his work.  Red State is an ambitious film filled with ideas, theories, proclamations and acting moments that will leave you amazed.  It is also the next to last film of Smith’s career, and that seems to make it suffer somewhat.  Smith was clearly overflowing with ideas he could base around the Cooper family, but instead of focusing on just one or two, he essentially ended up making three vignettes that were strung together and clocked in at under 90 minutes.  The frantic pacing of some scenes left you puzzled as other scenes were given a tremendous amount of breathing room such as Michael Parks fantastic sermon scene.  You would then speed through other story points to leap to another mesmerizing scene from John Goodman or Kerry Bishé.  Smith knew he had some fantastic material and talent on his hands, but he seemed unsure of how to fit it all into one neat little package without sacrificing other moments.

From a directing standpoint, this is is clearly his most mature film.  This is no longer the film school kid trying his hand at making a movie in a convenience store, this is a seasoned veteran who has grown up and acquired more faith in his own talents.  When he isn’t racing you from one scene to another, when he allows the actors to perform they’re craft, you are in for a treat that makes the entire film worth it.  All of the onscreen talent is at the top of their games here, and considering how the majority of them took next to no pay to help bring this film in on a budget of $4 million, it is all that more impressive.

As I watched the film, I quickly realized that there was really enough material here for three films, and Smith also seemed to realize it as evidenced by the fact the end credits are broken into three sections: Sex, Religion and Politics.  Perhaps if the film had even a slightly longer running time, or Smith had found a way to cut one of the three sections – Sex could have easily been trimmed to expand the other two – this would have been one of my all time favorite films, but instead I found myself just really liking it as opposed to loving it.

And that is where I need to clarify myself to you, the reader.  Despite everything I have said here, I still recommend this film, but as someone who has followed it’s creation from day one, I was left wanting more.  Going into this movie with no knowledge as my mom and dad, they both loved it, and both thought it was Smith’s best film to date.  As someone who is rabid in his love of all things Smith, I know what it could have been, and that just left me at the level of “like” as opposed to “love.”

Flogging Molly have returned with their fifth studio album, and the first released on their own record label, Thirty Tigers.  Is it a worthy addition to their growing discography of live and studio albums?  Yes.

Ever since I fell in love with Flogging Molly with their first studio album, Swagger, I have approached each album with trepidation.  ”Is this the album where they’ll finally fall apart and I’ll only have good memories to live off of?”  Each album has take two to three listens for me to finally make up my mind, but with Speed of Darkness, I was immediately in love.

The band finally starts to stretch its legs a bit creatively adding in new sounds (piano on ”The Cradle of Humankind”) and finally allowing fiddle player Bridget Regan to sing a duet with her husband, band founder Dave King, on ”A Prayer For Me in Silence.”

This isn’t to say that the entire album is a work of art.  For the first time ever, there may be a song I skip in future listenings entitled “The Heart of the Sea.”  This song sounds like it’s trying to go in too many directions at once, and it can never seem to settle on one.  Considering their body of work, and this is the first time I’ve ever gone, “er … no thanks,” that’s a pretty good batting average.  It may grow on me with time, but for now I suggest leaving it at the bottom of the sea.

One thing that has always been a recurring theme with this band has been the plight of the working man, and this album ratchets that up even a notch further.  It could be because King and Regan now live in Detroit, and in fact, the song “The Power’s Out” is all about the decay that now surrounds them.

There is something that can definitely be said about this album over their previous efforts, and that is that it is possibly their most accessible to the general public.  The sound has been softened slightly, but not to a degree that should anger long standing fans, only enough that I could potentially see new people giving them a try, and that is never a bad ting.

Enjoy their first single, “Don’t Shut ‘Em Down”, and make sure to pick up the album if you get a chance.

The trailers for Cowboys & Aliens has been getting movie fans all jazzed up, but lets just hope it’s a lot different than the comic book it’s based on.

I had heard of the Cowboys & Aliens comic, but passed on reading it when it was first released.  Now that I’ve seen the trailer for the film, I was far more intrigued.  I ordered up a copy of the hardcover re-release of the comic created by Scott Mitchell Rosenberg and gave it a read through.

I’ll save you having to read the rest of the review:  It’s horrible and should be avoided at all costs.

While the concept is intriguing, it’s obvious that Mr. Rosenberg has no clue what to do with it once he had the name.  The characters are extremely flat and lack any sense of motivation to their actions.  The plot, what there is of it, is extremely predictable and feels more like a paint-by-numbers work than anything approximating originality.  This may be the fault of co-writers Fred Van Lente and Andrew Foley than of Rosenberg himself, but whomever is responsible should feel shame at their name being attached to this piece of drek.

Luciano Lima’s art also leaves a lot to be desired.  His anatomy is very loose, and his designs for aliens, their technology and what they wear borders on the sophomoric.  His work looks like what you submit to an art school in hopes of going to get some training to improve what talents you have, and not the polished work one would expect from a published work.  It’s extremely flat, lacking in details and has no real sense of motion.

There have been some rumors that the book was put together more as a pitch to movie studios than as any sort of serious work, and, if true,  it shows.  There is no passion here for the project, it is a culmination of people coming in, punching a clock and leaving when their shift is over.  This is not “art”, it’s filler.

The good news is that the footage shown in the trailer for the films bears little to no resemblance of the story in the comic.  The main character in the comic doesn’t have amnesia, nor does he wake up with alien tech on his wrist that he doesn’t know where it came from.  The Harrison Ford character isn’t in the comic at all.  And while there is a female that shares what looks to share one scene with the portrayal by Olivia Wilde, there are no other similarities thus far.  In short, the film looks to share only the concept in common with the comic, and, for once, that is an extremely good thing.

While I normally berate Hollywood for deviating from source material, this is one time I can honestly tell you that they are doing us a favor.  The original comic borders on being unreadable, it is just that bad.  While I am known for a harsh critic, my father actually picked up my copy one day without my knowledge and read it.  He is known for not having the most discriminating of tastes, and when he told me he had read it, I dreaded hearing what he would have to say about it.  His review was just six words, “What the hell was that mess?”

I’d say go for the movies, folks, but just the one time I would suggest you stay as far away from the original as you can.

The first season of The Walking Dead has come to a close, and … how is this show getting such high ratings?

[Spoiler warning from here on out]

As I said before, the show was diverging wildly from the comic book, and since that time I decided to watch it just as a TV show … and that didn’t help much.  So, going to a hybrid of comic book differences/judging it as a TV show, how did it do?

Moving Away From The Comic

Robert Kirkman, creator of the comic and Executive Producer of the TV series, has stated time and time again we wouldn’t know what caused the plague, but yet we got more answers in episode six than we have in the entire comic.  We also learned that the zombies are worldwide, another thing we haven’t learned in the comic series.  Mr. Kirkman told TV Guide that he approved of the changes, and that we’ll never know the whole story, but he liked what was teased.  Why he felt the need for this is beyond me, but it’s his to do with as he pleases.

The biggest problem I have with the changes plays somewhat into the TV problems also, but characters have had their entire personalities changed.  In the comic, Rick had leadership thrust upon him, and he constantly fights with his need to be a good leader and the fact he really doesn’t want to be.  In the TV series he just seems to be taking it on and not questioning it at all.

Andrea, my favorite character in the comic, seems whinier and just not nearly as interesting.  They also seem to have aged her somewhat which greatly changes some of her motivations and reactions.

The visit to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta pretty much told me will never see the lengthy prison story arc as it borrowed ideas from that section.  (specifically the quick conversation about all of the books)  I understand that this show is going to interject its own take on the overall story, but cutting the prison is like removing the middle section of a book.  Perhaps things will happen at a different location, but the location was almost like a character for a bit of the series, and I’m not sure how they’ll get around this.  (Plus, if they want to bring in the Woodbury crew, they have to put Rick’s crew in a desirable location)

Kirkman explained to TV Guide:

Nothing in the show is going to go down exactly the same way it does in the comic

[...]

One thing that’s very important to me is that no one comes into this television show having read the comic knowing exactly what’s going to happen. We’re always going to change things up and keep people guessing.

Fine, it’s your creation, but remember the comic is what drew us into the show.  Changing everything, especially motivations, makes it a lot less desirable to watch.

Shall I go into Shane/Lori?  No, I won’t bother because it would be an entire essay on how badly you’ve changed these characters.  I never liked Lori in the comic, and I like her even less in the TV series … thanks for that.

The zombies in the comic can’t run or climb, and you know what?  They’re more frightening than the ones in the TV series that can do all that.

As A TV Show: Stop Dumbing Everything Down

The TV show is doing a great disservice to its viewing audience by assuming they need everything spelled out for them.  In the comic book we never met Carol’s abusive husband, and there was no need to meet him in the series.  Talk about the abuse all you want, but seeing him being a jerk served no purpose but to take up time.

On the flip side, you drop in things and don’t explain why they leave.  You added the gang controlled retirement home, which I did actually find intriguing, and after Rick made peace with the leader, it just goes away.  Rick’s crew needs a new home with the destruction of the CDC, will these two bands join up now?  Sure that may be a season two plot point, but I doubt it since that discussion should have happened as soon as they made peace, and definitely before Rick got the idea to head to the CDC.  It was a fairly secure building, and with even more survivors it would have been even more secure.

You are also guilty of building tension and then giving us no pay back for it.  Go back to episode two and the whole sewer system bit.  Why was that there?  Nothing happened … nada … zip … zero.  Oh, wait, there was a zombie on the other side of a gate they couldn’t get through any way.  One or the other would have been fine, but both just felt like you were saying, “Oh, we haven’t shown you a zombie for a bit, here ya go, have one.”

Then you did the unforgivable in the finale … the ear whisper.  As soon as I saw Dr. Jenner whispering in Rick’s ear, I wanted to throw a shoe at the TV.

Talk about a forced tactic to bring viewers back and to try to create buzz. “Oh man, what do you think Jenner said?!? Did you see Rick’s face?!?” Just … stop. For the love of the audience, just stop. You aren’t Lost, we don’t need a bunch of mysteries. (“Where’s Merle?” “What did Jenner say?”) You hooked us, we’re coming back, just tell a good story, don’t force stereotypes down our throats (please leave Merle wherever he is), don’t try going the mystery route, just tell us a decent story about humanity.

Stunt Casting?

If the rumors about Charlie Sheen are true … screw you and your show.

Was It Worth It?

Personally, I can’t decide.  Vacillating between anger over changes to the comic and the audience being treated like third graders, I kept coming back, but it was with less enthusiasm each week.  The season finale set ratings records, so I’m obviously in the minority, but please, you can still save this show, just fix it.

Who’s up for a review of a game months after it came out?  I know I am!

Released last May, Red Dead Redemption (affiliate link) held no interest for me.  Many people referred to it as “Grand Theft Auto in the old west”, and considering I haven’t played any GTA games, and I’m not a huge fan of cowboy stories, I saw no way this game would be to my tastes.

Boy was I wrong.

After numerous stellar reviews, I picked up a copy on sale figuring that the reviews couldn’t be that far off the mark, and I was growing weary of first person shooters any way.  So, a game that most people say takes 70 hours to complete sounded like a welcome diversion.  It took me a while to get around to starting it as my work schedule is so nuts, but now I can’t put the game down, and I’m only about a third of the way through it.

You play as John Marston, a former criminal who has been retained by the government to go after a former crime partner.  While this is the driving force of the game, there is so much to do in the world that you sometimes have to remind yourself to get back to the main story.  You can set off on “stranger missions” which are little side stories given to you by random characters you meet, hunt bounties, hunt wild game, play gambling games such as Texas Hold ‘Em, clear out gang hideouts and on and on and on.

The graphics are top notch, especially considering the size of the world, while the gameplay is responsive and easy to pick up.  And most importantly, the story is engaging.  You want to know where it’s going, and what will happen next.  Unfortunately, I stumbled into a major spoiler while looking up how to do something in the game, and I’ll leave it out of this post, but trust me, you have no clue what’s coming towards the end.

Is Red Dead Redemption for everyone?  No, of course not, no game is, but I think you may be surprised just how many people it is for.  As someone not into this style of game, or even the setting, I can say it won me over, so I imagine it could do the same for a good number of you out there.

After reading the first 12 collected volumes of The Walking Dead, I was insanely pumped up for this TV series.

I should have known better.

Although I knew they had changed numerous things in the series from just the commercials, they are completely changing characters and their motivations.  (Spoiler warning from here on out)

Lets take Shane and Lori for instance.  In the comic series these two have sex once on the side of the road on the way to Atlanta.  Lori is racked by the guilt of leaving Rick in the hospital back home, torn with fear and she has sex with Shane just to feel something.  Although Shane wants more, Lori keeps the idea of her husband being alive in the front of her mind at all times.

In the television series we are treated to Shane being the one to keep saying, “Oh, Rick’s fine …” and then he and Lori sneak off for making out or having sex.  Lori has gone from a flawed human with one indiscretion to apparently the camp floozy.

That is just one change, although I feel completely changing a character’s motivations is fairly significant.  If that is all there was, I might not be so irritated, but we are swimming in new characters, completely pointless new scenes (please, the sewer scene from episode 2 was such obvious padding for time that it was actually insulting) and entirely new sub-plots such as Rick seeing a helicopter fly over Atlanta.

While I understand not wanting to do a slavish interpretation of the comic, the fact that series creator Robert Kirkman is involved leads to me being surprised.  If we’re supposed to treat this as a different imagining of the story, even that would be fine, but we’re you’re tell is … well … boring.  The comic is insanely gripping, and the TV series just feels like I’m moving from scene to scene with no real emotional connection to what is going on.

I’m not going to give up on it for the time being, but I’m certainly not looking forward to it each week like I thought I would. Do yourself a favor and pick-upThe Walking Dead (affiliate link) comic series if you want to see what it can be like, and you’ll instantly understand why this has been so disappointing thus far.

Have you ever sat down to watch a show you were looking forward to, and then discovered it may be one the worst things ever televised? That’s exactly what happened to me recently, and man was it dreadfully painful.

I’ve been running a bit behind in my TV watching as the week I was in Philadelphia was the big week for television premieres. I finally got around to $#*! My Dad Says, and I have to say it was the first time in a very long, long time that I can remember not even finishing a one episode.  Usually I feel compelled to finish what I start, but I just couldn’t do it with this show.

I normally enjoy William Shatner, but the writing of this show was just abysmal: Predictable, pedestrian, cliché and just about any other term you can think of for describing your worst nightmare of a sitcom.  While I worried about this show having a limited number of plots, I’m not even sure it had one.

The sad thing is, it’s getting decent enough ratings for networks to look at possibly making at least one other sitcom based off of Twitter activity.  Ugh.  Why?  One is bad enough.

How do you know a TV show has gone on too long? When your sixth season opens and we still haven’t met the character mentioned in the title.

I’ve given up on reviewing TV shows in general, but I have now just reached a point of anger with How I Met Your Mother. The concept was cute at the beginning that we would see Ted sitting down with his kids in 2030 and telling them how he and their mother met. As the show has progressed, the producers have informed us that Ted is telling this story to his kids in one sitting, but that story telling has now entered its sixth season.

Yes, that’s right, for six season Ted’s kids, and in turn the audience, have dealt with every little nuance of a seemingly endless story.  With each woman Ted meets and dates you get a moment of hopefulness that we have finally met her, but then we’re once again smashed.  We have clues to her identity (that frikkin’ yellow umbrella), but never any pay off.

I have mainly continued to watch due to my love of Neil Patrick Harris and Alyson Hannigan, but having seen the sixth season premiere, I just don’t know if I can take any more.  The main reason is that we have been pretty well led to believe the mother is the roommate of a woman Ted had one disastrous date with.  He ran into this girl at his usual bar, and she was talking with a blonde woman that Ted thought might be the roommate whom he has only seen the ankle of, and we spend the whole episode thinking that perhaps we are finally closer than ever before to meeting her.

Except, of course she wasn’t, and the eventual act of the two women kissing (apparently said girl realized she was a lesbian after dating Ted) was telegraphed so early in the episode that it was actually sad to watch it play out.

The writing of the series has become pathetic as they attempt to stretch out this never ending search for the mother, and this is mainly because I think they’ve come to realize that once we meet her, we just simply won’t care any more.  The title sets up the situation, and the mother is the MacGuffin.  Once she’s introduced there just won’t be anything driving the plot.  Sure they could show us the course of the relationship, but no one would care if they hit a rough patch because, well, you know, she’s the mother Ted is talking about in 2030.

It’s time to call it a day folks.  When people are making the videos like the one below, you know you’ve just gone too far.

***MAJOR SPOILERS***

Continue Reading ->