I can say without qualification that Reach is one of the best console games I’ve ever played. The single player campaign is another compelling story told very well, the prequel to the original Halo: Combat Evolved. Not only does it look amazing and have a really, really good score, but mission types vary between objectives and style, so while there’s plenty of running and gunning, there’s also some vehicle stuff, including a space-fighter level that is completely tits.

The really shiny parts are on display in the multi-player. All of the old favorite game types have made a return, and many of the new maps are callbacks to old favorites. The ranking and matchmaking systems are much improved, despite having already been very effective, and you can even go so far as to pick the kinds of people you play with – if you would rather not play with 13 year olds that shoot you in the face 17 times in a row and then call you a fag, you don’t have to.

The best part of Halo is that the game never gets in the way. Because of the level design and community aspects brought about the evolution of the Forge and bungie.net, a real virtual society has built up across several generations of fans, and you can pretty much play around inside the Halo universe in whatever way you please, with as much or as little variation as you like. That’s a rare experience with any digital entertainment, and this edition’s sales and reviews indicate perfectly how well Bungie managed to pull it off.

Machete makes a coherent argument against the anti-illegal immigration zealots using the normal arguments – that America is a place for people to get a shot at a new life, that people are people, and that a great deal of work is done in our country for costs well below what they should actually be. Film director and writer Robert Rodriguez also paints an unflattering picture of politicians, Mexican cartel drug lords, and hyper-conservative border militiamen. This is a film with an agenda, a story that gives you the good guys and the bad guys in clear, certain terms and then makes sure that justice is served.

This movie is solidly built, well-edited, well-paced, and has a good score. The screenplay is well written. My favorite part of the whole deal is probably how happy everyone in the cast seems to be. For a movie that grew out of a joke trailer in GrindHouse, Rodriguez got some real talent for his picture, not the least of which is Robert De Niro, who in excellent work as the corrupt Texas state senator is afforded the rare opportunity to be something other than a tough dude from New York.

Another interesting thing about the movie is how plausible some parts of it are, despite how ridiculous the whole package is. With some of the political animosity flying around these days – and considering how the truly crazy only seem to be rewarded for increasing their levels of insane rhetoric and bullshit – I can absolutely see some things from this story ending up as news headlines.

Also, living in Texas for most of life, it is pretty fun to see things like a battalion of low-riders, en route to war with militiamen, rolling and grinding down the streets of Austin directly in front of the Capitol. I liked this movie quite a bit.

This piece of hardware presents a similar opportunity, because it is unbelievably awesome with no downsides.

This is the best keyboard I’ve ever used. Period. They have some crazy Precision Delicious technology for the keys and they feel amazing. No ghosted keys, great response. The backlighting is so awesome. The hotkeys and Logitech management software are wonderful.

In short: I came. I saw. I came.

We also weren’t sure what the name of the place was, since everyone seems to call it something different. Mr. Frosty’s? Frosty Root Beer? For future reference: Frosty Drive N.

Frosty Drive N is hell of quaint and yes old dudes talk to one another over the lunch counter like one of them just bought a steamer trunk for good old George Bailey.  The burgers are totally decent and anything fried is delicious. It also seems as if the last time they adjusted their prices was about 1989. At something like three bucks for burger combo, this stuff is priced to move.

Diana had some steak fingers the last time we went and they were way more well built than you normally find with an item like that. Even 20-30 minutes after we got our food, the steak fingers tender, not greasy, and still hot. The fries are good. The onion rings are terrific to the point of being unlike any onion rings I’ve ever had, and I eat an onion ring pretty much whenever I get the chance.

The real showstopper here is the root beer, though, and from what I can tell, they make their own. They serve it in frozen mugs made of thick glass, and everything involved gets so cold, the root beer freezes for a while. Not into a slush and not into a sheet. The root beer freezes into its own ice cubes.

Let me repeat that: The root beer freezes into its own ice cubes.

How the hell do you even do that? How do you plan the physics or the hydrodynamics of a process like that? Like it isn’t enough that this is bound to be the best root beer you’ve ever had. The family secret just happens to be some sort of delicious soft drink alchemy.

Diana tells me that when she went for the first time a few weeks ago, the owner told her about how his family has owned and operated the place for three generations. I think that’s cool. I like a meal with a narrative.

Score: Frosty Drive N gets a 4.5 out of 5.

The writing and dialog are terrible. The action is incredibly macho and awesome.

I would write more, but that’s really all there is to it.

Score: The Expendables gets a 4 out of 5.

So let me save you the trouble up front: The Other Guys is really funny, and few (if any) of the truly great bits are in the trailers. I’m not going to explain anything about the plot, since you know what you need to know already from the promotional materials. I will say that I hurt myself laughing, and that this movie is two of my favorite kinds of comedy: a borderline surreal universe similar to Airplane!, and a movie that makes a larger point without ever getting heavy-handed or sacrificing humor.

I think the latter part is important because of Will Ferrell. He represents a rarity in the world of entertainment I actively consume in that I feel completely neutral about him. It seems like I hate half of his movies and skits, and then I laugh so hard at the other half of his work. Talladega Nights? Incredible. Semi-Pro? Deplorable. Old School? I may have peed a little during the streaking part. Elf? I hated myself at least a little for even renting it.

I think Ferrell is a performer who either works or doesn’t based on the context in which he appears, and it seems like if a studio puts Will Ferrell in their zany send-up of whatever, both he and the movie are intolerable. However, when he appears in things he or his close personal personals have a hand in making, the result is comedy gold. Observe this, from Ferrell and Other Guys co-writer / director Adam McKay:

This is sort of how The Other Guys goes, but without Pearl and with action sequences. I think maybe when Ferrell and McKay get together they just make good things that fit Ferrell’s performance style very well.  In fact, they work together all the time (Talladega Nights, Step-Brothers, Anchorman) and probably will keep doing so for the foreseeable future, especially now that FunnyOrDie.com is such a huge hit and Will Ferrell is so solidly where Jim Carey was 15 years ago .

The larger lesson at work here is economic, and the lesson embedded in the film’s crazy action sequences and dialog-driven comedy is like a puzzle that takes some time to resolve: Incredibly, McKay’s The Other Guys asks the viewer to think about the value of work. I promised up front I wouldn’t give anything away, so I can’t go into detail about how Ferrell and pals go about answering that question, but rest assured that the process is worth observing.

The only real complaint I have about the film is structural – the pacing kicks off at a brisk clip and then drags quite a bit in Act II. The last third of the movie feels much shorter than the middle third, and some of the stuff towards the end that vamps on buddy/cop movies is made up of sequences that usually appear in the first 45 minutes of the source material.

I think you could probably make this pacing argument about most comedies built like Airplane! and even about Airplane! itself. An issue like this has a habit of destroying the narrative of a film and would be unforgivable if the movie weren’t also very funny – but it is. Here, in proper context, I didn’t get tired at all of watching Ferrell and Wahlberg do their thing, but I did find myself wondering more than once when they were going to do their jobs and finally solve the case.

The Other Guys is a movie that sets out to be very funny and a little thoughtful and accomplishes both. Also, for what it is worth, there aren’t any weak links in the chain. Every player has quite a bit of comedy to dish out. Mark Wahlberg, Micheal Keaton, and Rob Riggle turn in particularly funny performances, providing a complimentary backdrop to Will Ferrell’s Will Ferrell.

The Hunger Games – both the name of the series and the first book – is mature work from someone who understands how to write within the medium. This is for good reason – Collins has been writing children’s programming for years, often to acclaim. In the first part of this decade she wrote The Underworld Chronicles, which was a very popular series, but it did not blow up crazy like The Hunger Games has, spending 60 consecutive weeks as a New York Times Bestseller with 1.5 million books in print in 26 languages and 38 countries.

(If you aren’t hip to publishing stats, both of those figures are ridiculous huge, like Stephen King big hit huge, and would be borderline totally insane if not for the phenomena that was HP and Ronnie the Fucking Bear.)

So Suzanne Collins knows what she’s doing and the books are popular. A book’s popularity by no means makes it good, no matter the genre. (read: The DaVinci Code lololol Dan Brown lolol) In this case, though, the popularity of the books is an indicator of the quality of the writing.

The story follows Katniss Everdeen, a girl in her late teens living in post-apocalyptic America, now called Panem. Some bad shit went down generations ago and now a cruel, totalitarian government rules 12 districts from The Capital, a shiny, fortified citadel situated somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. Her family lives in the far-outlying District 12, a mining area somewhere in the Appalachians – her father died in the coal mines, and her mother works as what amounts to a folk-healing nurse. If not for Katniss’ hunting ability and her willingness to flaunt the rules, her family would starve, because pretty much everyone in their district is super poor.

In fact, everyone is poor everywhere except for The Capital. This would not be much of a story if that’s all there was to it.

The book’s name derives from the eponymous event held each year in which each District is compelled to send one male and one female child aged 12 to 18 to compete in a fight to the death. The Games are televised and watching the broadcasts is mandatory. The contestants are drawn at random, with each child having their names put in once for every year of eligibility – and there are some particularly sinister mechanical details in the system beyond that. For instance, a child can earn extra, meager government rations of food or fuel for their families each year by putting their name in the draw additional times.

This isn’t a new idea for a story – Stephen King’s The Running Man and The Long Walk covered similar ground, and way way back in the BC day you can find similar stories about Athens sending kids to get eaten up by the minotaur at the order of Crete. It is an old story, but it is one that inspires some very strong, basic emotions. You know a government has you by the balls when they can kill you at any time, but it is a special kind of sinister, total domination to kill your kids for sport.

The whole point of The Hunger Games is an exercise of power by The Capital over the Districts. The Games are a punishment levied against the Districts for a past rebellion against the government. District 13 tried to rise up and The Capital nuked it into oblivion, and now every year 24 kids are sent to an almost certain doom. The victor of The Hunger Games is elevated to freakish celebrity status: they are given wealth and opulence, but the government still exerts power over the survivors – they are forced to train each year’s crop of new contestants.

So that, in a nutshell, is the basis of the story. Collins’ telling of the tale is decidedly competent if not bordering on very good, but what really makes the book is the pacing. Collins can write action incredibly well, and the setup is totally compelling. These two aspects of the book combined with its ease of readability also make it a fast and satisfying experience. I never felt any drag.

The expert pacing is even more evident in Catching Fire, the second book. In The Hunger Games, the story is relentless action from start to finish. Catching Fire showcases Collins’ ability to deftly balance suspense and action in equal measure, which is an area where plenty of authors of more “serious” literature fall short.

I think the problems with these books are probably genre issues more than shortcomings with these specific stories. The characters are pretty thin, and the universe of the story is a bit one-dimensional. There’s also some hokey boy-girl stuff that feels a little forced and inauthentic, especially within the first-person context of the story. These criticisms might be a little unfair, being the comparatively small stuff that they are, but I have high standards – my YA measuring sticks are Harry Potter and Stephen King’s Eye of the Dragon.

So, if you enjoy books that are fun to read and good storytelling, you should get on this train. The third book in the trilogy, Mockingjay, will be out by the end of the month, so I’m not selling you a series where the last book is nowhere in sight. I enjoyed reading these books, and I’m looking forward to Mockingjay.

Score: The Hunger Games | Catching Fire gets a 4 out of 5.

Did you know that, while we rag on people plenty live and direct on this site, we also do it within 140 characters on Twitter?

oh god fail whale flu oh jesus

Consider our Twitter account both A) an alternative stream for review content, and B) a craven attempt to blaze another trail to Internet fame and approval from strangers.

The phenomenology of Outkast – their ability to rhyme on multiple levels while making the output accessible enough for even the incurious listener to gain a threaded understanding – has always been the product of incredibly smart writing and production genius. Big Boi’s latest album confirms any suspicion you’ve ever had that both of these dudes are incredibly skilled musicians. You already knew Big Boi is an awesome rapper. You’ve known that since the 90′s. What you didn’t know was that his singular vision could be just as sweeping and exciting – and absolutely just as deep – as anything he produced with Andre 3000.

This is a record built from an incredible array of styles. “Daddy Fat Sax” and “You Ain’t No DJ” are clean, lovingly-made odes to mid-nineties Southern hip hop, albeit with fancier production. “Follow Us” and “The Train” mark well-executed homages to Parliament. “Follow Us” has a pop hook big enough to land a fucking whale. “Hustle Blood” functions as both a rap song and an R&B tune, as does “Shineblockas” (with Gucci Mane contributing, of all things, musicianship).

And then there’s “General Patton,” which doesn’t sound like much of anything I’ve ever heard, and is totally awesome. It makes me feel like Big Boi is commanding armies of sharply dressed hip hop foot soldiers.

It is grandeur rap, if you can dig that.

The lyrics on this record continue Outkast’s tradition of continually advancing an incredibly sophisticated narrative philosophy, and here Big Boi marches straight from a general post-postmodernism to something that borders on objectivity, or even a sort of unified cultural anthropology. All manner of experiences are described here, in simple language or clear metaphor. The victim / perpetrator dichotomy found in earlier works is largely eradicated in favor of something eminently relatable – Big Boi moves beyond disparate context and deletes most of the probability for insincere, hyper-constructed interpretations by lyrically mediating the listener’s experience. This may be the first (intentionally) objectivist hip hop record.

The only thing missing from this record is Three Stacks, though I feel sort of silly in pointing that out. This is explicitly a Big Boi solo record. We know they made some tracks together, and it was only record label hissy fits that kept wundermusik like “Lookin’ For Ya” off this release. I can’t even believe that any label would agitate dudes like these. Look what they make! Why would you front?

You don’t have to get deep into the construction of a record like this – you could put it on at a party and people would have no choice but to get down. The fact that it is good enough to function like that while being so totally smart makes it something extraordinary.

Gasland is a serious tale told with a sort of helpless bemusement, and that makes me like it. Filmmaker Josh Fox understands that the forces at work are colossal: huge corporations largely exempted from government regulation extract natural gas from beneath giant swaths of the United States and, as a byproduct, contaminate the groundwater and wells and creeks and rivers and drinking water supplies of the surrounding areas. After receiving an offer to lease his mineral rights to one such company (and, ostensibly, not having much else to do), Fox takes off on a cross-country trip to see what effect natural gas extraction has had on the areas where activity is already well underway.

The results are predictable – the most popular processes and the adjunct variations destroy communities and make the citizens that live on top of the natural gas deposits ill, often terminally so. There’s little stomach or political will to stop it or even to regulate it. The stories are what you would expect, but they are also intriguing because they are so unvarnished, even by documentary standards. Any lack of ability Fox has as filmmaker aids him here, I think – he points the camera and shoots and lets people tell their stories and largely stays out of the way. This works really well.

I’m sure part of the reason the Spartan storytelling works is because each person he visits and includes in the story feels isolated and disconnected, as if they’ve been marooned in their own homes. What I’m getting at here is that this isn’t a happy story, but it is one that ought to be told. I can’t imagine getting up one day and discovering that my tap water is flammable. Any over-complicating “filmmakery” stuff would have made the story less clear, and I’m glad the narrative is as simple as it is.

The soundtrack is well thought-out and largely consists of bluegrass. Fox himself plays banjo from time to time, and it is pretty rad. The editing and pacing are perfect – I never felt lost or bored watching Gasland, even during some of the (totally necessary) overtly science-y parts.

Gasland is a movie for people that are thoughtful generally, and specifically about things like long-term consequences and costs versus benefits. The story is deceptively simple and Fox tells it well. I really enjoyed watching this movie even though the subject matter is a bummer. You can learn more about the project – and the hilariously paranoid propaganda reaction from the energy industry – at the film’s website.