I kinda think that they should have just cut their losses and gone straight to video or DVD or Netflix or whatever the preferred straight to distribution model is.
Because if it makes more than a buck and a half, I’m going to eat my hat.
Which is why I hope to catch The Expendables 3 because I prefer to keep my “I can’t believe they made this” beliefs well within acceptable parameters.
So… what are you reading and/or watching?
Jaybird
Jaybird is Birdmojo on Xbox Live and Jaybirdmojo on Playstation's network. He's been playing consoles since the Atari 2600 and it was Zork that taught him how to touch-type. If you've got a song for Wednesday, a commercial for Saturday, a recommendation for Tuesday, an essay for Monday, or, heck, just a handful a questions, fire off an email to AskJaybird-at-gmail.com
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on Youngsters Make Merry at Evanston Country Club Christmas PartyHester Walrath (1898-1971) went on to attend Northwestern University, marry a businessman, and have…
on Open Mic for the week of 12/16/2024So the "CR" of 1500 pages, given to members 24 hours before the vote, and which did all kinds of thi…
on Open Mic for the week of 12/16/2024Do you not understand the irony of speaking positively about banning political parties in the same b…
on Open Mic for the week of 12/16/2024I suppose we could blame the townspeople for not showing up the umpteenth time the shepherd boy crie… on Open Mic for the week of 12/16/2024A small backlash? If the election were held today they would be the 2nd biggest party in the Bundest…
on Open Mic for the week of 12/16/2024I have no idea why pointing out that Na.zis were elected legitimately is relevant to this discussion… on Open Mic for the week of 12/16/2024No, I'm pointing out that you find 'Trump is Hitler' more absurd than 'These people are Na.zis', so…
on Open Mic for the week of 12/16/2024The local paper referenced this work, partially paid for by the feds, this morning. Some of the phas… on Open Mic for the week of 12/16/2024And I will, again, point you that you are the first to mention Hitler, You sure about that? Maybe re… on A Note from EmHe's one of the AIs. https://claude.ai/new I make him read my essays and then I argue with him about…
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I stumbled across a PDF of Edward Gorey’s The Unstrung Harp. I had forgotten all about Mr. Earbrass, the well-known novelist.Report
Crud, screwed up the link. Let’s try again.Report
“Let’s Be Cops” is not a movie I would ever see but I think the articles suggesting that this might not be the best week to release it are kind of trying to hard. The release date was probably decided weeks if not months ago and so where the arrangements with theatres. The current events of this week are well beyond the control of anyone involved.
My Murakami book should arrive on Tuesday. Yesterday I picked up “The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan from the Library”Report
NICE BOAT, dude.Report
I’ve been reading a book on the history of the North American fur trade for weeks now. Slow and tedious but kind of fascinating. I desperately need a few novels to grind through but have nothing in the hopper. All of the spy/thriller series that I read are between releases. Help!Report
I’m reading something similar: a history of the salt trade and its politics over the millennia. I guess animal pelts were often shipped on the same transports as salt, because salt was needed for preserving the skins properly.
Does your book talk at all about how the fur trade changed the ecology and even the topography of the American Southwest? I’ve heard that when beavers were absurdly plentiful before the fur trade started in earnest, their dams helped to regulate the flow of water in otherwise-dry regions, thereby enabling a much more abundant array of plant and animal life than exists today.Report
The book is still on the east coast at the moment so I’ll keep you posted when it gets that far west.Report
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Nature_(novel)
It’s supposed to be fantastic. And spy/thrilerish is what the Doctor does.Report
I’m making my way through “Stuffed and Starved” by Raj Patel, which has blurbs on the back from Naomi Klein and Michael Pollan, and is pretty much exactly what you’d expect from that description. Lots of good detail on the history of different food regimes and regulations and interesting stuff about the enduring influence of colonialism on the world food system, but with weird Marxish prescriptions sprinkled throughout.
I’m also reading “De Los Altos”, a Spanish-language novel set during the War of the Cristeros in Mexico in the 1920s. But my Spanish isn’t very good, so it’s taking a while for me to get past the beginning where people are just wandering around the desert fighting and hunting deer.
I’m also thumbing through “Salt: A World History” by Mark Kurlansky, whose “Nonviolence” was wonderful in every respect. “Salt” is a little drier (hey, it’s a desiccant!), but I’m definitely learning a lot from it that I wouldn’t have thought to investigate otherwise, which is one of my favorite qualities in a book.Report
Out of nowhere, I decided to watch an episode of Better Off Ted, which had me watching the last half of the first season and the whole of the second. Man, I love that show.
I finished 24, will now move on to the latest season of White Collar.
Knee deep in Turtledove’s Southern Victory series (second book, first one covering WWI). I like it okay, but it’s really had to follow in audiobook form. So… many… characters.Report
I’ve started reading Robin Hobb – just finished The Assassin’s Apprentice.Report
I’ve read some of the stuff she’s written as Megan Lindholm, but didn’t particularly care for any of it No idea how different her voice is between the two names.Report
The Gypsy was a surprisingly fun romp. I highly recommend it.
I don’t particularly care for her Assassins books.
Some people are surprisingly good at looking like multiple different people as they write. It’s hard to change your fist (some manage this feat — look at Anonymous), but you’d be surprised at how manifoldly different you can be while still being the same human.Report
I just signed up for HBO Go, which is an embarrassment of riches. My son and I are watching The Wire (first time for him), while I’m watching Silicon Valley. Silly and nothing like my experience of the real place, but funny enough. I also watched the first episode of Entourage, but am not motivated to see any more of it.
On the big screen, I took my daughter to Guardians of the Galaxy. It was somewhere between a meh and a meh-minus. If they’d kept the 70s pop up through the whole thing instead of falling back on faux John Williams during the (I guess you’d call it a) climax, it might have earned a meh-plus.Report
I saw it on Friday & laughed heartily. I loved the constant stream of 70’s & 80’s references. I will agree with Mike that switching to an orchestral soundtrack at the end was off. I’m pretty sure they could have pulled some 70’s or 80’s rock anthem out & used that just as well (Rush comes to mind, but I know there are other acceptable alternatives).Report
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jK-NcRmVcwReport
And there ya go!Report
Yeah, they seem to be going for this 70s-pop / soft-rock vibe, which…guys, not epic, and I understand the impulse to be something other than a Star Wars ripoff, that stuff is just Muzak to a modern audience.
And, seriously, you’re pulling music from the 70s and you don’t use “Blitzkrieg Bop” for an action scene even once?Report
a friend of mine turned me onto rick & morty, which i wholeheartedly recommend.Report
I watched a couple but got sidetracked by Review, which is kinda genius. I’ll get back to Rick and Morty soon.Report
Holy cow, I finished Review last night and it is AMAZING. The first couple are funny, but by the third or so, when they start making it clear there are through-lines to the madness (it’s not just a series of sketches), it gets great. If you have Amazon Prime you can stream it free.
FIVE STARSReport
Thank you @glyph been needing something new to watch.Report
This isn’t a spoiler, since they never address it in the show, but Andy Daly (who plays Forrest MacNeil) says that his character’s backstory is that he was a film reviewer who started falling asleep 30 minutes into each film, and so started plagiarizing other reviewers and got caught/fired.
This is what fuels his compulsion now, to see each of these life experiences that he is reviewing all the way through, to the bitter end.
A commenter on AVClub said it’s like the trials of Abraham, except with Twitter instead of Yahweh.Report
I’ve gotten deeply hooked on Continuum so that has been what I’m watching this week. Not even reading a whole lot though for me that means no more than 10 books a week :D. I’m in the middle of the deeply odd historical-kinda YA novel Kingdom of Little Wounds at the moment…. it’s exceptionally well written and I’m pretty sure I love it but it’s also kind of hard to read. Lots of bodily functions, many of them not functioning very well. Very literary in style. Appealing characters.Report
Burn Notice. It started with reruns coming on while the TV was basically background noise. Then I started watching on Netflix and am thoroughly enjoying it. It’s a nice mix between a problem of the week that gets resolved neatly by the end, and overarching plot line that gets advanced every episode (at least so far).Report
When you’re a blogger, you constantly have to find new subjects to write about. News, politics, music, even TV shows. Keep at it long enough, and the pickings can get pretty thin. But that’s what you signed up for when you first said “I want to blog.”Report
Chris is a huge fan. I enjoy it as well, though it did wear on after a while. And I never did like Jeffrey Donovan (Michael). The supporting cast really carries that show.
(I’m afraid I don’t quite know what @mike-schilling is getting at.)Report
It was my attempt at a Michael Westen voice-over.Report
Greatest scene in television history:
Report
I got my brother to watch it, and he watched the first few episodes and said, “You love this show?!” Then a couple weeks later he had watched the entire series. It is cheesy as hell, but about as fun as television can be.Report
I just watched one, in fact. Fi is trying to help a woman whose son has been kidnapped:
Fiona: Patricia, I want you to try something. It’s a relaxation exercise I do in situations like this. I want you to close your eyes and breathe deep. Picture a peaceful mountain stream, can you do that? Now picture yourself drowning the kidnapper in the stream. You’re taking a rock from the stream and raising it above your head, and with tremendous force you’re bringing …
Michael: Fi! Report
Marry me, Fiona.Report
Cheesy as hell but fun, yes. It’s my guilty pleasure.
Michael Weston has to be the least low key spy in the history of the business. I always suspected they burned him because he was a nightmare in real field work.Report
@james-hanley
That, or he was very good, but he’s been burned & he’s all out of sh*ts to give in that regard.Report
A friend of mine runs a regular D20 modern campaign. He says the show has provided both campaign material and character ideas. Several players have watched the show, and it…shows.
Lord knows Mike Westin and Sam Ax infected my character concept, but he was already an unrepentant pyromaniac with a love of specialty ammunition. I added quite a bit of Knowledge(Demolitions) to my character based on the show. And got to use them. 🙂Report
“When you’re a lawful chaotic mage …”Report
I’m looking at getting into blogging, mostly from the World of Warcraft side, but Mike’s advice above definitely isn’t lost on me…
That said, does anything else in the pop-culture world matter right now? We’re in the calm-just-before-the-earthquake phase, a moment that stretches to be endless before the cascade.
Five days. Peter Capaldi.Report
I just got done watching the 50th.
The forger did nice work, very nice work indeed.
… Moffat just had to hire Neil Gaiman for another episode, didn’t he?Report
Oh, and no suicides this time!
The taffer’s keepin’ the tricks to the screen.Report