I can't review The Wire Season 5 without spoiling it for those who haven't seen it, but I'll do my best. There's a scene towards the end of the last episode where a character has a monologue pretty much summing up the entire 5 season run of The Wire and I was thinking, "This is what the show has always been about," and then something unexpected happens summing up the series EVEN BETTER. I don't know what else to say except that I wish there was going to be The Wire Season 6.

How difficult is it not to hire four thousand dollar prostitutes? I saw this question and wanted to try to answer it, especially coming from the mindset of a politician. You never know, it's tempting. That damn Emperor's Club VIP makes it so easy. So I made a flow chart! Every politician should print out the full flow chart and use it in everyday prostitution related decision making. It would be best if no more golden boys were beset by faulty logic, so in the future, I hope they use the Eliot Spitzer Flow Chart.



(Click image to enlarge) (Thanks to Eric and Mike for image help, to Brian for prostitutional knowledge)

Although Friday Night Lights Season 2 unabashedly started with a transparent audience grab in the first couple episodes, the season calmed down to deliver enough of what I like about it to keep me loyal and hoping for a satelite savior. In Season 2, football became less of a focus as the series continued it's "issues based" writing: one week it's teen sex/pregnancy, one week it's race, one week it's stealing from a meth dealer, even the mortgage crisis impacted Riggins this year. I'm hoping for a couple more seasons, if only to see how the creators deal with the problem facing every high school drama - graduation - though, admittedly, keeping a high school football player back a year, and in the series another season, isn't even that big of a stretch.

I watched this on a bus. I can't imagine anyone voluntarily watching this movie. I'm giving it one star because it is, technically, a motion picture.

The Astronaut Farmer is either (a) the worst movie ever made, or (b) a deeply mischievous dark comedy about a monstrously selfish man and the hell that his monomaniacal obsession puts his family through.

The best part? When his rocket fails hilariously the first time he tries to launch it. Ha! Ha ha ha. Ha. I was totally rooting for J. K. Simmons's cartoonishly sinister FAA director. (Yes. That's right. In this movie, the bad guy is the cartoonishly sinister FAA director played by J. K. Simmons. Virginia Madsen and Bruce Willis also manage to embarrass themselves in this movie.)

Whoever wrote it should seek professional help. It had everything! Comic relief from the FBI guys with bad mustaches, smirking government bureaucrats, and even that old hoary staple of lazy writers looking for a way to signify that it's their protagonist against the world: the evil child protective services lady!

Sadly, Billy Bob Thornton's character lives at the end (OMG! Spoiler alert!), despite the fact that his homemade space ship stops working when it, like, passes near a satellite? Or something? It wasn't entirely clear, but somehow putting his wedding ring on made the radio work again.

To call this movie an insult to my intelligence would be an insult to insults to my intelligence. Even the title makes no sense! He's not a farmer. He's a rancher! Farmer's his last name! Gahahsdafhasdfhadshfsdhfasdhfjlj hatesplosion.

I still don't know exactly what Be Kind Rewind was trying to do, but I also am not totally sold on the idea that a movie (or a work of art in general) can't just be about entertainment without needing a message. In Be Kind Rewind, you always knew what was going to happen, which didn't reduce it's enjoyment that much. It's just, what did end up happening wasn't THAT great, you know?

Simple and lazy writing, crap dialogue, headache and fury-inducing narrative, and neon-lit plot twist telegraphing. All of these and so much more tripe leaves this book undesserving of my typical three sentence review.

Scientific RickRolling.

I don't know what to say about Margot at the Wedding. Unremarkable in many ways and then a sudden and strange ending. What exactly was the point?

As I mentioned first in my review of Stardust, there's a genre of fantasy where the reality is just a click off of the reality that we know. For the reader this means it's not so much a suspension of disbelief that is required as a questioning of what we consider real. Katherine Dunn understates practically every shocking turn, making each that much more shocking.

(Google searches provide evidence that the idea of "geeks" or "geeking" as used in the book is actually true. Woah. Geeking is real.)

Atwoods Tavern had a bacon eating contest yesterday. I briefly mentioned last bacon post how my friends have decided to make me their bacon guy. In keeping with that, 6 different people wished me luck in the contest on Friday. Maybe I'll take part next year.