Book Report: The Art of War

The Art of War by Sun Tzu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It's a dry, straightforward manual on war general tactics of the era. It has some unique and counterintuitive wisdom that can be applied to other areas of management. Sun Tzu's heartless, analytic thinking was the Moneyball of its day.


View all my reviews

Book Report: The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales

The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales by Jacob Grimm
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Pure insanity from cover to cover, almost all of them crammed with gruesome morbidity and plot twists that seem as though they came from either the minds of 10-year-olds or were influenced by absinthe. Disney has plundered the stories for many of their classic animated movies, cleaning them up by removing the most sadistic parts. There is a lot of stuff here, though, that could never be adapted, especially the most demented story of all, Clever Elsie. This is one of the funniest and craziest books in existence.


View all my reviews

Book Report: The Prince

The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It's more of an opinionated history than it is a treasure trove of devious advice. It's still a fascinating and illuminating look into the politics of the period. It pairs nicely with The Borgias and the first three Assassin's Creed games.


View all my reviews

Book Report: Lolita

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I hated this book throughout, and I would hope it's not just because I have a daughter. I suffered through the entire thing only to gain the right to smack down anyone who would apologize for this as something other than a child pornography/sex slave fantasy.

The elegant writing and incredible skill involved only make me despise the book more. I don't think there's artistic validity here, and I would discourage anyone who feels as though they have to read it to be well-read from doing so. The book is full of agony and depravity, and it's sickening to attempt to put a human and relatable face to such a monster. I believe the literary world would be better off if Lolita did not exist.


View all my reviews

A Look Back at True Romance, One Of The Greatest Movies Ever Made

In his commentary track on the "True Romance" DVD, Quentin Tarantino reveals how much of himself he poured into the schlubbish Clarence character played by Christian Slater.

The Elvis-idolizing Clarence, an unkempt loner who works at a comic-book shop, is poor and unloved. He's also given to explosions of nutty diatribes on music, television, movies or comic books - which tends to drive girls away. His plight is much the same as Tarantino's own, the filmmaker explains, back when he was writing the screenplay that would one day be filmed by Tony Scott as "True Romance," one of the most dynamic action films of the 1990s.

After hearing his commentary, it's not tough to squint your eyes and see Tarantino in the place of Clarence. After all, Tarantino reveals he spent most of his 20s in poverty, sometimes working at a video store, never having had a girlfriend. He sold the "True Romance" script for a rock-bottom $50,000, to help fund his dream project, "Reservoir Dogs."

The film is essentially a glorious fulfillment fantasy, in which Clarence finds himself suddenly in love and empowered, a daring rogue rampaging through a criminal underworld he'd only experienced onscreen, on the cusp of changing a suitcase full of stolen cocaine into hundreds of thousands of dollars and the easy life.

To start such an adventure, Clarence first must meet the perfect woman, the one who will giddily throw herself into kung-fu flicks, chomp fast food straight out of the bag, maintain a voracious sexual appetite and help him take out the bad guys. As fate has it, the luscious Alabama (Patricia Arquette) stumbles into a late-night Sonny Chiba triple feature and spills popcorn all over Clarence. They strike up a conversation, and he lets her take him out for pie after the show.

The date leads to an all-night sex romp, then a whirlwind marriage, which isn't at all tripped up by Alabama's revelation that she's a call girl, and the only reason she came into that movie theater was because Clarence's boss paid her to do so as a birthday present. Unblinking, Clarence cares nothing about Alabama's past. All that matters is he's finally met his soulmate.

The improbable yet strangely disarming love story quickly melts away into a full-throttle, bullets-blazing blowout, kickstarted by Clarence's insistence that he must confront Alabama's pimp and get her clothes. Muddling over the matter of whether to take the risk, Clarence is fired up from a bathroom pep talk from Elvis (Val Kilmer), who pops up every now and then to advise and compliment the hero.

Bounding through its two-hour running time with unlimited reserves of energy, Tarantino's script twists and turns over on itself, rushing like whitewater. His dialogue is vintage crime-novel pulp, smooth and self-aware:

"If there's one thing this last week has taught me," Clarence says after getting entangled with the police, the mob and movie producers in the drug deal of a lifetime, "it's better to have a gun and not need it than to need a gun and not have it."

That's one of the film's few printable quotes. The script is jammed with enough swear words to get someone tossed out of a longshoreman's pub.

The Internet Movie Database reports that a certain four-letter swear word is used 225 times. Then there are the 21 deaths, all from gunfire.

No, this isn't a movie to show the kiddies, but it has a unique way of bringing out childlike tendencies in adults, causing them to see the film over and over for their favorite parts.

The highlights are too numerous to mention. Christopher Walken tears things up as a sadistic gangster, attempting to beat information out of Clarence's recovered alcoholic policeman father, Clifford (Dennis Hopper), followed by Clifford's button-pushing historical diatribe on why Sicilians have black hair and dark skin. Brad Pitt and Tom Sizemore pop up in small but memorable roles, and Arquette's breathy performance is drop-dead sexy. Alabama, nothing close to a helpless innocent, can turn from caring nurturer to red-eyed killer on a dime.

Alabama is nothing it all like a real woman. She's a female version of Clarence - in turn the female version of Tarantino - and it makes for some amusing armchair psychology to suspect that she represents Tarantino's overwhelming narcissism.

The adoration he has for his dialogue and characters is contagious. The movie doesn't just play. It reaches through the screen and romances you. Truly.

Book Report: Paradise Lost

Paradise Lost by John Milton
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Extremely dense, and the sing-song iambic pentameter screwed with my head. There are fascinating insights and exploration of biblical principles, and Milton is incredibly skilled. But the focus is extremely narrow and the lyrical prose is a staccato assault.


View all my reviews

Top 10 Video Games Of 2013

The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds

Super Mario 3D World

The Last of Us

Plants vs. Zombies 2

BioShock Infinite

Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch

Fire Emblem: Awakening 

Shin Megami Tensei IV

Pikmin 3

Rayman Legends

Top 10 Movies Of 2013

Before Midnight

Frances Ha

Side Effects

American Hustle

Star Trek Into Darkness

Pacific Rim

Gravity

Captain Phillips

12 Years a Slave

This is the End

The worst movies were The Lone Ranger and The Hangover Part III

Our 2013 Christmas Letter

Hello, all. As you can tell from the crisp air, music on the radio, decorations in store windows and Cardinals' dwindling playoffs chances, it is nearly Christmas time once again. So now seems like as good a time as any to pretend that Facebook doesn't exist and send you a zany photo and an update about how we have been doing. 

2013 has been a year of alarming and disgusting change in our household. The change we are referring to, of course, is that of Zack's diapers. Even though he is our third child, we had forgotten just how revolting a toddler's diaper gets when he begins eating solid food. But our memories are refreshed one or two times daily, when the youngster's drooping undercarriage serves a reminder. 

Zack is the biggest mover and shaker among the household this year, having launched his own app on iTunes, launched his tech startup into an impressive initial public offering and launched an exploratory committee to gage his chances in the 2014 Congressional elections. Although he's only 1 year old, his accomplishments are remarkable. In addition to all that, he also learned how to crawl through the doggie door and spray fridge door water all over the floor, which he proceeds to lick up.

Luke, who is in first grade, is a thriving artist and musician. We see him becoming a one-man band who beat-boxes his own background music while also singing lead and backup vocals. If you think all this to be impossible, it's because you have never been serenaded by the 6-year-old.

Emma, who proudly boasts she is in 'Pre-K' and not just standard preschool, is also the artistic sort. She excels in the ancient, well-respected medium known through the ages as Grabbing Scissors Out Of The Craft Closet And Leaving Squiggly Pieces Of Construction Paper All Over The Kitchen Floor. Combined with her affinity for painting and drawing on several sheets of paper per minute, when trees see this girl, they cry.

Jessica continues to attend grad school, going for a master's degree because the master's she already earned has lost that 'new car' smell. She also continues to work part-time and rescue Zack from his minutely attempts at sending himself to the emergency room by BASE jumping off the dining room table.

As for Phil, he is still toiling away at the local newspaper -- poor guy, no one has stopped to tell him that newspapers ceased to exist in 2005 -- and passing his video game addiction on to his offspring. 

That should about catch you up. We'll check back in at the end of 2014 -- another anticipated year of disgusting, smelly change until we can get that kid potty trained.

Sincerely, 

The Villarreals

Book Report: The Witches

The Witches by Roald Dahl
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A fun book from beginning to end. Dahl's sense of wonder and imagination carries throughout the fast-paced tale. I like its bittersweet, darker-than-expected ending.


View all my reviews

How Cable And Satellite Will Go Down

The whole cable/satellite cabal will probably go down at some point because people are getting sick of paying for billions of channels they care nothing about. 

Once the networks are able to break away from the cable/satellite money and start selling directly to consumers there will be a revolution. It sucks that you have to buy HGTV and a million reality show channels to get ESPN. 

Book Report: 1984

1984 by George Orwell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An alarmist thinkpiece and word of warning to humanity. A dark and terrible read, but illuminating while terrifying. Some of its dreary projections seem farcicle, and some have come alarmingly true. The book bludgeons your mind and soul. I was glad when it was over.


View all my reviews

Review: Saving Mr. Banks

Ever since I first heard of it, I dreaded Saving Mr. Banks, pegging it as a dopey Disney self-congratulations job. A pomade-slicked Tom Hanks would be the hokey, do-no-wrong master of the universe Walt Disney, Emma Thompson would be unreasonably uptight Mary Poppins author P.L. Travers. Using his trademark Disney charm and whimsy, Walt would break through Travers' defenses, make her see the error of his ways and...

Consent to wild sex with him?

That impossible historical stretch, I figured, was the only hope the movie had of being entertaining in any way. The trailer even played up this possibility, intentionally or not, with a scene in which Disney looks suggestively at Travers and asks her what he'll have to do to get the rights to her book.

The movie doesn't go that way, but it does skew far darker than I ever could have hoped for, and in that way ends up becoming something halfway profound. Although Hanks' Walt is just as much a hagiography as you'd expect, but Thompson has found a spoon-sugared plum of a role in the furiously demented Travers.

What the movie truly turns out to be is a dark flashback-laden biopic on Travers, describing in painful detail how exactly she turned out to be as coarse and brutal a caricature as she turned out to be. Her past was filled with shame, abandonment and disappointment, much of it at the hands of her well-meaning grease fire of a dad, played by Colin Farrell.

Director John Lee Hancock spins the tale with equal doses of Disney charm and indie-flick grit. The movie amuses, terrifies, intrigues and fascinates at nearly every moment, infusing suspense into a story that everyone already knows the happy ending to. After seeing the ugly, painful way the sausage was made, I'll never watch Mary Poppins the same way again.

Starring Tom Hanks, Emma Thompson, Colin Farrell and Ruth Wilson. Written by Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith. Directed by John Lee Hancock. 125 minutes. Rated PG-13.

Book Review: The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The pacing is incredible, and the writing is forward-driven, unpretentious and dripping with suspense. The detail is necessary and sticky rather than superfluous, flower and forced. Fitzgerald makes Gatsby loom as a dynamic phantom, as full of enthusiasm and purpose as the pages themselves. This is an amazing book. One of my very favorites. A true inspiration, both emotionally and technically.


View all my reviews

Review: 12 Years a Slave

Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave is one of those movies you have to see, almost as though a penance or homework assignment. It's a work of magnificence that you need to have experienced if you want to expose yourself to the best that moviedom has to offer. You know that you are in for an uncomfortable experience from the get-go, and just have to deal with that reality, wince and deal.

Based on the 1853 Solomon Northup memoir about a free man who was kidnapped and sold into slavery, the film is out to reveal the grotesque realities of human subjugation. The grime, crushing workloads, barnyard-like living conditions and cruel mental and physical tortures. It's one thing to see an innocent man whipped to a bloody pulp by a sadistic master, but quite another to see the master force another slave to elicit the whipping. Forced participation in cruelty is an ongoing theme in the movie, which explores the social strata of the slave and the interwoven levels of injustice and abuse of power all the way down through the chain of misery.

Chiwetel Ejiofor thoroughly owns the film in the lead. I hate to be one of those guys who is so stunned by a performance then runs out and declares that he absolutely needs to win the Oscar, but I have to do it here. Sure, there are about 20 or 30 movies yet to come out that I need to see before I can say such a thing with any kind of authority, but Ejiofor is so amazing here that it's almost impossible to imagine anyone out-doing him. So either he will win the Oscar or he will be robbed.

Brad Pitt pops up in a minor but crucial role late in the film, and Paul Giamatti makes a mark as a slimy slave wholesaler, but the real work comes from Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender as a disgustingly vindictive master and Lupita Nyong'o as his unwilling mistress. All three performances are enthrallingly awards-caliber, and while it's trite to boil down artistic work to that level, I want them to be recognized so badly that I can't help myself.

The movie is well paced, devastating and eventually uplifting in its strange, harried ways, but it's not quite worthy of its performances. Like The Passion of the Christ, there's a disturbing obsession with flesh being ripped from the bone. The graphic cinematography leaves no detail to the imagination. Reaction shots accompanied by sounds, which McQueen uses sparingly, are more effective at showing the devastation of lashings and lynchings, but he sticks to the gory, incredibly realized details.

The film wants to hurt you, knows you are terrified of what it will show you, then shows you way more than you bargained for. Two critics I watched the film with stormed out in disgust, and I suspect many audiences will do just the same. It normally bothers me when people do that, but I can't really blame them. I just happen to be one of the people who was stuck to his chair, unable to move even if I wanted to.

Starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Brad Pitt, Paul Giamatti and Sarah Paulson. Written by John Ridley, based on the Solomon Northup book. Directed by Steve McQueen. 113 minutes. Rated R.

Ruminations On The Direction Of New Girl

I think I'm ready for Nick and Jessica to end their relationship. We'll see if the writers can continue to explore the relationship for humor. They are doing a good job but it's getting strained.

I am at the point where I think they have accomplished brilliance and doubt it can stay this good, unless there is another dynamic shift. And there have been quite a few of those over the two-plus seasons. The writers have proven that they are not afraid to shake things up and change paradigms.

Usually, a sitcom will wear out the platonic romance thing for the whole run of the show, Who's the Boss style, or the four or whatever seasons of Pam-Jim in The Office.

I think they ended the Schmidt-Cece fling too early. He did not deserve her, so it's only fair. And in a way she did not deserve him, for nearly going through with the whole wedding charade just to please her family. But still, it hurts that he screwed up his second shot with her.

But he kind of has to be a doofus who messes everything up. A Schmidt who acts rationally and makes good choices is not a funny Schmidt.He has to be an overzealous wannabe bro, who never quite knows how to bro it up properly.

Nick, in the long run, has to be an untame-able manchild, and Jess has to be someone amazing for whom love never quite works out. Eternally nearly missing out on the romance she so badly desires.

One of the things I like about Nick-Jess is how screwed up and awkward their relationship is. If they can keep that going, and keep them always hanging by a thread and never blissfully at peace with their love, then the relationship can continue to be funny.

Just Posting This

So I don't go the entire month of September neglecting my poor little blog. I want to post more on here. I've got a ton of drafts that would take me a few seconds to massage into post form. Maybe next month. Or perhaps October 2014 at the latest.

Book Review: The Three Musketeers

The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

A dull and laborious haul, even for a piece of classic literature based on a candy bar. I did appreciate the use of the terms "lackey," "antechamber" and "What the deuce?" but other than that I had a tough time staying interested. It was almost as tough to truck through as Moby-Dick or War and Peace. I can't fathom why the franchise is so popular.


View all my reviews

Review: Getaway

Get. Away.

That's what I kept saying to the movie, but it wouldn't budge. It just squatted there all stupidly on its big dumb screen, mocking me by refusing to obey.

How dare this silly action flick spoil the good name of the beloved 1994 Alec Baldwin-Kim Basinger sexcapade, which itself was a remake of the 1974 Steve McQueen film. The title, much like everything in the movie, makes no sense, has no bearing on reality, and simply expressed the urge you feel as you longingly eye the portal below the exit sign.

Ethan Hawke stars as a racecar driver whose wife, like so many women, has been up and stolen by Jon Voight. Voight calls Ethan up, tells him that he totally dug Before Midnight and Snow Falling on Cedars, then commands him to steal an armored, camera'd-up car and race it around town at his whims. Do it or his wife dies.

Voight is rather firm about his demands most of the time, but occasionally allows a little freelancing, such as when Selena Gomez tries to carjack Ethan and ends up an unintended passenger on the miseryride. At first, Voight is all KILL HER ETHAN YOU CAN'T LEAVE NO WITNESSES!. But soon he realizes that a female lead for Hawke to vibe off of will help pass the time so he lets her stay.

Gomez tries her best, but she has a little problem in that she was bitten by a vampire at age 11, and thus, despite her biological age of 452, cannot be taken seriously as an adult actress. When Ethan locks Selena in his car, there's a distinct stranger danger vibe going on that's quite off-putting.

More video game than movie, the idiocy has Ethan, in the name of saving the woman he loves, murder dozens upon dozens of people via vehicular manslaughter. You shake your head as his tonka toy of a vehicle survives fiery wreck after fiery wreck, avoiding the cops and ramming through buildings and doing whatever because it's touched a Super Mario Bros. star and cannot be killed.

It's too bad, because this mess could have been sort of fun like Crank, The Transporter 1 through 17 or pretty much any Jason Statham movie that all happen to be exactly the same. All Getaway needed to be mediocre instead of awful was Jason Statham, half a script and one fewer 452-year-old creepy Disney demon spawn.

The real getaway here was the one the filmmakers pulled on the studio, having heisted giant paychecks for minimal work or thought. While I respect the earnest con, I am sad to have suffered 90 minutes of punishment at the hands of the execrable results. Gag away, I did.

Starring Ethan Hawke, Selena Gomez, Jon Voight and Rebecca Budig. Written by Gregg Maxwell Parker and Sean Finegan. Directed by Courtney Solomon. 90 minutes. Rated PG-13.

5 Stupid Things People Can Go Ahead And Stop Saying

1. "Breakfast of champions." When the expression is known better than the source is, it leads morons to utter it about eating Doritos or pizza in the morning without knowing or caring where it comes from.

2. "Your tax dollars at work." Your brain cells are not at work though.

3. "If I had a nickel." If I had a hammer every time I heard someone say that, I would likely be in jail by now.

4. "Which begs the question." This has been misused so much that its misuse has become accepted usage. Even if the saying has backed its way into the realm of grammatical correctness, it still sounds moronically pretentious.

5. "___ o'clock." Beer o'clock, sex o'clock, nap o'clock, snack o'clock. How about shut the eff up o'clock?