Captain America: The First Avenger may not be the best of the Marvel Avengers movies, but it’s certainly not the worst. Despite some pacing issues in the second and third acts and an all-too-abrupt ending sequence, the movie manages to infuse the superhero genre with some much-needed heart. Pros Cap is a nice guy. “Nice” isn’t a word you hear in the superhero context very often. Superman is a boy scout, Batman is a dark knight, Tony Stark is egotistical, Thor is cocksure. So it’s a welcome change to have a superhero who is actually a downright nice guy for…
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There is a part of me that wishes Nintendo would just drop the console business all together and start working on their own licensed games for other systems. I want to love Nintendo, I really do, but I just haven’t been interested in anything since the N64. I will say that all the DS hand-held systems have been the object of my desire at some point or another, but for the most part, the price is just far too high. Clearly I am not the only person that disagrees with the price point. After having just ended their fiscal year with…
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The Hollywood Reporter released this loaded bit of news yesterday: Sources confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter that Darabont, the creator, executive producer and director of the zombie hit based on the comics by Robert Kirkman, is stepping down as showrunner. Whether the former feature film director will stay on with the series remains unclear. Who knows if this will be a good or bad thing? After rumors that Darabont had fired all his writers at the end of last season came up, and were put down by comic book creator and Producer Robert Kirkman, little is known about the state of…
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So the first question you’re probably asking yourself is, what the heck is Let’s Play? That’s a valid question, because most people I know have never heard of it. The phrase “Let’s Play” collectively refers to a community of gamers on the internet who take the time to record themselves playing through a game while providing audio commentary, most of which end up on Youtube or Something Awful. This can often be quite work-intensive for the player, especially for some longer RPGs, but Let’s Players are a dedicated, fun-loving, and some might say slightly deranged bunch of people who want nothing more…
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Matt Taibbi was an old hand at documenting the rape of a national economy long before most of his current readership had ever heard of such exotica as “Collateralized Debt Obligations” and “Credit Default Swaps”. He spent most of the 1990s in post-Soviet Russia watching a handful of well-positioned, would-be oligarchs either collude with or swindle the Russian government, and the western “privatization experts” who swarmed to help in the full-scale conversion of the biggest experiment in command economies in history to a market economy. His forehead-slapping account of that wholesale fraud, which left ordinary Russians going for month or…
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I had a driveway moment in my car the other night. One of those strange happenings that only seem to occur when you listen to public radio or really good music. The sticky Ohio heat wrapped around me as I just sat in my driveway with the windows down, the music up, and the lights off. The train-like drum work of “Red Lake Shore” overtook me as I helplessly swayed back and forth in my seat. Canary from Southeast Engine is an album filled with these potential driveway moment songs. Southeast Engine’s music is a strange reflection of the juxtaposition that takes place in…
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I am not a Catholic, but I bet John Urbancik is or was. His novel is so completely steeped in Catholicism (at least to my Protestant-raised atheist eyes) that I feel I should be wandering the nearest catacomb singing Gregorian chants and bashing myself over the head with my copy. Ordinarily, this might be a complaint, but in this case, it is praise. Sins of Blood and Stone makes Catholicism everything it should be in fiction: dramatic, dark, ritualistic, earthy, sexy, and above all, romantic — romantic in the old-fashioned art-historical sense, where strong emotion is its own aesthetic expression and…
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