Author: Chuck
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Catching Up
Crunch mode or no, Netflix still keeps taking my money, so I’ve got to stay on top of the latest in years-old movies I never got around to seeing while they were still relevant. And if you’re horrified at the thought that I’ve been watching movies and not putting my opinions of them up on…
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ktla and Sushi
I’ve been coming down to LA so often that I think I’ve finally reached an amicable relationship with the city. As a resident of San Francisco, I’m contractually obligated to hate LA, and I still do. But now that I’m not looking for the city to impress me anymore, and I’m just interested in the…
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Wood for Sheep
The Settlers of Catan is the game I’ve been most looking forward to on Xbox Live, and it was finally released today. I played two games against the AI, and I totally won both of them. My initial impression is that they did about as good a job of translating it to a console as…
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Week of Lies
In a two-weeks-late but no less well-intentioned gesture of appreciation to Kurt Vonnegut, I’m stealing an idea for another wildly popular (by me) theme week for this website. In the awesome book Galapagos (which is about natural selection), Vonnegut marked characters who were about to die with an asterisk after their name. Since I don’t…
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35 Going On 13
I can’t tell if I’ve lost any last shred of shame I was holding onto, or I’ve reached some kind of clarity that only comes from true maturity. Either way, I had no problem buying the latest Pokemon game last week. Common decency suggests I should’ve furtively taken it up to the register, hidden underneath…
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Everybody Wins
I can’t give out free copies of the Sam & Max games, but i can point you to the people who can. There’s a bunch of contests being run for a free copy of Season 1: Telltale’s own contest wants you to make with the arts and crafts Wired’s Game|Life blog is looking for a…
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House Arrest
I’ve spent the last couple of weeks locked inside my apartment, hunched over a keyboard and staring dumbly at the deadlines that keep flying by. I’ve got that sickly pallor back, I’m back on the sauce, my days and nights are completely reversed, the laundry and the dishes keep piling up, and even the cat…
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An Inconvenient Doofus
It’s an old and tired cliche that Hollywood producers are greedy, clueless, and artistically bankrupt, eager to cash in on something without really understanding it. But apparently it’s not enough of a cliche that there’s a standout example, at least there’s not one I can think of. When you think of gimmicky plot twists, you…
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By the Power of Grayskull!
From the Something Awful forums, here’s a link to a clip of a public access show broadcast in Atlanta, hosted by Alexyss Taylor and her mother. Notice a couple of things: it’s from the Something Awful forums, I haven’t mentioned the title of the show, and I’m not embedding it directly here. You know what…
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Too Hot for Television
Last night Fox aired the two-part pilot for its series “Drive”, with another episode tonight. It’s about an illegal cross-country Cannonball Run-style car race for 32 million dollars, where the racers are coerced into participating, spies hired by the race operators are everywhere, and death is one of the punishments for finishing last (presumably). It’s…
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Reel Missing
I got even more to say about Grindhouse. Cory made the point that people are trying to claim if you didn’t like Death Proof, you didn’t “get” it. You can see that in a lot of the internet reviews, and I’m sure if I had a job where I actually talked to people, I’d be…
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Grindhouse
Man, Grindhouse pissed me off. I knew as soon as I heard about it that this was a movie that’d have me shifting uncomfortably in my seat, but I thought it was going to be from the gore and cheap scares. Not out of annoyance. The “problem” was Quentin Tarantino’s half of the double feature,…