Sunday!

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

Related Post Roulette

30 Responses

  1. Glyph says:

    TV is in a lull, so I’ve caught up on a few movies.

    It Follows – disappointing, though I liked the score and shot compositions and the “dislocation” (it’s set in an indeterminate time, and you eventually realize that it’s Detroit, but for a while it could be almost anywhere in America). But I found the monster silly, and inconsistent or unclear in its “rules”. Just read Charles Burns’ Black Hole instead, it makes the same point much better.

    Blue Ruin – been meaning to catch this for a while, and it did NOT disappoint. Reminds one of Reservoir/Straw Dogs, and like Green Room, it’s a nastily-effective thing.

    Ex-Machina – I thought this was great. Tight little film. Surprised at some of the online commentary and analysis, which seemingly felt the need to take hard lines on things that to me clearly were meant to be left ambiguous.

    I need to figure out where I can catch Her.Report

    • Glyph in reply to Glyph says:

      Also, I’ve been hoping Mr. Robot S2 would recover, but it’s not looking good (acting, cinematography, and music/sound editing remain on point; but plot and story beat wise, the seams are showing). Esmail and Pizzolatto have become the poster boys for the dangers of failing to delegate at least some of the writing on the second season of your acclaimed and beloved cable drama.Report

      • Glyph in reply to Glyph says:

        (Esmail isn’t doing ALL the writing, but he’s doing ALL the directing and showrunning and STILL a lot of the writing, and the writing is where things seem to be suffering. Sorry for writing it unclearly, but the general sentiment is “biting off more than one person can chew on the demands of a TV shooting schedule”).Report

      • Mike Schilling in reply to Glyph says:

        That’s disappointing. I just started watching S1, and it’s amazing. One of the few computer-sciency shows I’m not constantly rolling my eyes at.Report

  2. Oscar Gordon says:

    Reading pulp fantasy novel because brain candy.

    Watched Eddie the Eagle, which was quite good, as long as you remember that it’s based on a true story, and not meant to be a literal depiction of events. Most surprising was seeing Taron Edgerton moving far awsy from his role in Kingsmen.Report

    • J_A in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

      Eddie the Eagle is quite a good movie, but the only part that is based on actual events is that there was (is, he’s not dead) really a chap called Ed, and he competed in some Winter Olympics.

      Most of the rest, including all of Hugh Jackman, is fiction. Which bugs me a lot.

      I wish the whole thing was completely made up, Carl the Condor has a good ring to it. But I hate that they take people that have lived I nteresting lives, worth telling, and then they ignore these people’s real lives and replace them with a completely made up thing.

      That is what made “Elizabeth” Into one of my most hated movies, and one of the very few I’ve walked out From the theatre mid screening (the Sixth Sense been another one, though for different reasons)Report

      • Mike Schilling in reply to J_A says:

        I remember Eddie the Eagle. He really was called that, and he got into the 1988 Winter Olympics as a ski-jumper even though he wasn’t really world class. He finished dead last in a coup events, but was so charming about it that the TV coverage fell n love with him.Report

        • J_A in reply to Mike Schilling says:

          I know. The real Eddie the Eagle even had for many years a minor TV career.

          But almost nothing in the movie reflects the real story of the guy, which is a good story on its own, which didn’t need adding Hugh Jackman and all the other made up stuff.Report

      • j r in reply to J_A says:

        But I hate that they take people that have lived I nteresting lives, worth telling, and then they ignore these people’s real lives and replace them with a completely made up thing.

        This kind of thing annoys me as well. I take it as reflection of the memoir having somewhat displaced the novel, which also annoys me. If you’re going to write fiction, just write fiction. The whole “based on true events” tag adds nothing but a kind of phony empiricism.

        Granted, I am likely swimming against the tide on this one. This is a particularly solipsistic moment in history.Report

    • Reading pulp fantasy novel because brain candy.

      Just started the tenth and final volume in the Malazan Book of the Fallen series. This has been a “reread in the proper order” undertaking. 3.3M words in all, according to Wikipedia.Report

      • You have way more patience than I do. After my reaction to volume 1 was “WTF?”, and fans told me that it really didn’t get going until volume 2, but I’d appreciate V1 more on the full-series reread, I gave it up for good.Report

      • Oscar Gordon in reply to Michael Cain says:

        Mine is Operation Arcana, a short story anthology of tales of magic & war (like applying magic to actual warfare, rather than just some adventures stumbling around).

        Some are pretty standard pulp, but a few are quite good. One, The Graphology of Hemmorage, had an interesting magic system, as well as a significant cost for usage.Report

  3. Saul Degraw says:

    Matt Y’s father wrote Fearless.Report

  4. Guy says:

    A bit more than a month ago I subscribed to the Short Circuit newsletter after reading it on Eugene Volokh’s blog (he posts the digest weekly). I’ve since found that federal judges are some of the funniest writers around. Just today, I was reading a case that had this marvelous little grammar spat:

    Middle District of Pennsylvania:
    …there is a two prong test for Second Amendment challenges…

    3rd Circuit (on appeal of, among others, that case):
    The United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania applied “a two[-]prong test for Second Amendment challenges”…

    Report

  5. Slade the Leveller says:

    I’ve never, ever read a book that was worse than the movie. We’ve all seen movies that were worse than the book. I can’t even begin to tell you how excited I was to watch the movie version of The Legend of Bagger Vance, one of my favorite books of all time. To say I was disappointed would do injustice to the word.

    I just finished rereading Earth Abides, an interesting mid-20th take on the fall of American civilization.

    Welcome back, @glyph .Report

    • I’ve never, ever read a book that was worse than the movie

      American Psycho I can personally verify worked better as a film – I’ve never read Jaws nor The Godfather, but I’m told they qualify also.

      Thanks!Report

      • Stillwater in reply to Glyph says:

        Jaws and The Godfather, certainly (Benchley can’t write; Coppola is a genius). The Hunger Games. The Mission. Empire of the Sun. Bridges of Madison County (the book was unreadable…). Sophie’s Choice (didn’t see that one coming, eh?). Lots of em.Report

    • Fletch, the book, was much worse than Fletch, the movie.Report

    • J_A in reply to Slade the Leveller says:

      Maurice, the movie, is much better than Maurice, the book.

      Probably because when E.M. Forster wrote it, even him, a homosexual, couldn’t really describe a homosexual relationship. The self doubt and the feeling that “this is bad, good people aren’t like this” oozes everywhere.

      By the time Merchant Ivory filmed Maurice, we already had developed a language to talk about homosexuality. The characters are closeted because ithe closet was a must then. But they acknowledge what they are to themselves.

      Perhaps (possibly) the film is anachronistic, and the book reflects the reality of a gay man in the 1920s. But it is too far removed (fortunately) from our current experience, even for a dude in his fifties.

      Anna Karenina has a similar anachronism problem. I’m completely unable to empathize with the feelings the divorce bring forth. Intellectually I know that is an accurate portrayal. Emotionally, I find the character of Anna totally stupid (I like War and Peace very much – have read it a couple of times from start to finish)Report