Every now and then, I’m going to take a break listing my favorite things to talk about something I don’t like: Mumford & Sons are a bland, calculated, passionless, hipster-baiting, inauthentic, and — in general — very unpleasant band. It bothers me that they are championed as paragons of bringing music back to its “roots.”…
I could probably write a whole series about things that I like more in theory than I do in practice in the pop culture world. A few examples: Sara Bareilles, Fountains of Wayne, Hoosiers, the Elder Scrolls series, and Pandora. But the #1 entry on that list might be fantasy books. It’s crazy for me…
No show will ever impact me the way that the US version of The Office did. It was the show that taught me to love television as an entertainment medium, and it remains one of my favorite shows of all time. I grew up watching cartoons and multi-camera sitcoms, so when my friend Tyler (who…
“Having dreams is what makes life tolerable.” Rudy is an excellent underdog movie, doing almost everything right and almost nothing wrong. On a technical level, as the sum of its parts, it’s very good, borderline great. It’s also one of my favorite movies in the entire world. It has X-factor magic in spades, it’s genuinely…
When I saw The Shawshank Redemption in high school, it was one of the movies (along with, believe it or not, The 40 Year Old Virgin) that convinced me that movies could tell stories on a more profound level than simple entertainment. Shawshank has a little bit of a strange backstory. It was a pretty…
“You don’t discover [The Beatles], you reclaim them… You have to take [them] back from everyone who’s admired [them] before and find your own way in, even if what you’re really looking for in the music is the same thing those old admirers found there.” – Alex Pappademas What, in the name of Saving Private Ryan,…
Party Down is a comedy that ran for two seasons on Starz before being canceled. And, goddamn, what a pair of seasons. It burned bright and bailed just before its writing or premise grew stale, giving us some fantastic character growth and hysterical jokes in just twenty episodes. Party Down is about a catering company…
The Wayside School trilogy of books is, as far as I’m concerned, a seminal masterpiece of comedy and kidlit. They operate on a surreal, childlike level of logic that still speaks to my brain today. More than that, the Wayside School books are honest portrayals of the confusion and paradoxes involved with being a child.…
In ascending order, here are the top six reasons I consider Dragon Age: Origins one of my two or three favorite video games ever. 6. World After working with Star Wars and D&D worlds for a decade, BioWare entered Dragon Age with a clean slate, eager to create a massive world with a sustainable franchise.…
It has a title that sounds like a pulpy radio serial from the 1930s. Its premise — two cousins team up to create a comic book centered around a superhero called The Escapist — hardly sounds special or deep. And yet, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is probably the finest novel I’ve ever…