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.

Let’s be honest: you either love Rush, or you totally hate them.  I have never met anyone who thought they were ‘okay’, and if I did, I would kick them in the butthole for lying to my face.  Thomas Dolby is ‘okay’.  Molly Hatchet is ‘okay’.  And Wings will always be superior to the Beatles.

Me?  I love Rush SO HARD.  I also love music documentaries.  This movie is basically Jewish Christmas for me.

I don’t know what that means.

This is a really well produced flick.  It packs a surprising amount of footage and information into it’s two hour(ish) running time.  You get a really good rundown of their career with all the major albums (2112, Hemispheres, Moving Pictures, etc.) and their lesser (everything post-’81, Caress of Steel) getting comparable attention.  It also gives a good overview of their personal lives, being raised by wolverines in the Canadian wilderness.  The most inexplicable and fascinating piece of footage is an archival film of Alex Lifeson telling his parents about his dropping out of high school.  I don’t know why in the world this was being filmed, but it’s a lot of fun to see one of the blandest rock dudes ever as a petulant 17-year old.

Lots of random rock dudes pop up to talk about how rad the band is, and it’s kind of cool, but I don’t know that I buy Billy Corgan creaming his pants over Fly By Night.  Most everyone else has some sort of logical link through their music, though.

Like most docs of this ilk, it serves mostly as a fluff piece, made for fans, but it also could function nicely as an introduction to the band if you or some other guy you know want to explore their ouevre.  Because chicks hate Rush.  That’s a fact.  The only women who like Rush are their mothers and wives, and this movie almost goes out of it’s way to reinforce that.  But honestly, I wouldn’t want to date a girl who was totally into Rush.  Or Slayer.  I know dudes who would/do, and it’s not a good scene.

I caught this on cable, but it’s also available right now as a DVD and Blu-Ray, with something like 2-3 hours worth of extra performance and footage, and I bet that’s pretty tits.  The main flick is so good, it even makes a case for mid-period/new wave Rush, that even the dudes in the band don’t like.  All in all, a totally worthwhile movie.

SCORE: Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage gets a 4 out of 5.

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.

Fuck all 20 of you.

Seriously, it’s 2010.  Get your shit together.

SCORE: Having a vanity license plate gets a 0 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, a while back one of my wife’s friends recommended this book to her, and said recommendation was then passed along to me.  Ordinarily, this is not a book I would ever even consider reading, but the wife seemed to enjoy it, and it’s rare that she will read/watch/listen to something and feel compelled to share it with me.  Our tastes in things just run completely contrary to each others.  She likes Janet Jackson and En Vogue;  I like Lightning Bolt and Miles Davis.  One of her favorite movies is White Christmas; I like that internet video of one kid hitting another in the head with a shovel.  So if she feels like there is some benefit I could take away from this, even with her very specific knowledge of my expansive catalog of dislikes, then I feel like I owe it to her to give it a whirl.

That being said, I didn’t hate this book, but it’s also too problematic to actually like.  Here’s the basic setup:  You’ve got Mack, the protagonist.  His youngest daughter is kidnapped and murdered while the family is on vacation at the lake.  The family grieves for a couple of years, until a note from God shows up in the mailbox one day, asking Mack to meet him for a weekend at the shack where his daughter was taken.  Not the worst premise, right?  A dozen different authors could have taken it in a dozen different ways, but our lot is to be stuck with William Young.  I’m sure he’s a very nice dude, but the writing could charitably be called piss-poor.  My wife listened to the audio book, and I bet that softens a lot of the awkward language and syntax, but this book is a classic example of message over style.  The Shack is self-published, and it shows.  This thing has clearly never seen the crimson tongue of an editor’s pen, and the claim at the end that it went through three “major” re-writes is dubious at best.  Or it just started life as a TOTAL MESS.

The author working on the first draft (artist's rendering)

But here’s the rub:  if you can manage to get past the headache inducing anti-style Young engages in (I’ve taken to calling it ‘Junior High Gothic’), there is some pretty heady philosophical stuff in the back half of the book.  Two-thirds of the book is spent in and around the titular shack, with the holy trinity in human form kickin’ it with Mack.  There’s some mild racism going on when you first meet the team.  God takes the form of a big black woman, who slips in and out of a ‘mammy’ patois, Jesus is described as “… Middle Eastern” whose “…features were pleasant enough, but he was not particularly handsome”, and for some inexplicable reason, the holy spirit is a tiny Asian lady in gardening togs.

Now it starts to get weird.  Ostensibly, this is a Christian-oriented book; that’s certainly who it’s being marketed towards, and all initial signs point towards this idea.  Young however, seems to all but reject any kind of mainstream religious doctrine, and instead cherry picks his own theology and hangs it across a vaguely Judeo-Christian framework.  At several points, he explicitly has God state that he/she doesn’t care for organized religion or church, at least the way we’re running things.  Which speaks to another thorny issue: God is transparently used to simply voice Young’s own opinions and beliefs, which while understandable, is still pretty ballsy.  Bruce Cockburn figures more heavily into the story than he probably should, not to mention the strangely (in)significant knowledge of how collard greens give you the shits, which manages to earn a callback near the end of the book.  Granted, these are probably the two strangest examples, but I think you get the idea.

On the other end of that however, this presumption to use God as a mouthpiece leads to some interesting ideas.  In the world of The Shack, God tacitly endorses a system of anarcho-syndicalism, which in it’s own crazy way, makes sense.  God explains to Mack that in the perfect plan, there would be no need for law, that it is in fact man’s need for control over identity that led to the creation of law in the first place.  The thrust of all this is in service to the core belief that you must give up your life to God, and relinquish control.  It goes far, FAR deeper than I am doing here, but suffice to say, there is quite a bit of intriguing philosophy to be had if you’re willing to invest the time.

To be sure, there are other problems.  The framing device is unnecessary, the pacing veers between stilted and reckless, and the language becomes so knotty at times it can seem like Young is just banging on the keys in the hopes that once he hits a certain quota of letters, the plot will automatically get itself back on the rails.  But if you can maintain an open mind, and are willing to put in a little effort, there are some interesting, valid ideas hidden within a surprising amount of subversion.

The Shack gets a 3 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.

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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.