The Fringe Season 4 finale had no shortage of striking images (The unsettling googly eyes of a dead redhead brought back to life, the show’s leading lady taking a bullet right in the thinker), but none was more striking than the image of Walter Bishop with blood on his hands.
Walter, like a certain chair-flipping Avenger, has gobs of red on his ledger. It’s gushing red. The shot of his bloody hands near the end of this episode served as a piercing reminder that the terrible things we were watching unfold were all his fault. Read the rest of my Fringe episode review @ Badass Digest.
by Mike Moody on May 17, 2012
tagged as GuySpeed
For those of you who thought all this blogging about comic books and Star Trek and nerdy movies and TV shows was done by a lady, well, sorry to disappoint you. I am indeed a guy. With balls. And facial/nose hair. I perspire, pee standing up, and I FUCKING HATE THE MOVE GREASE!
So seeing as I’m a dude and a writer, I’m happy to announce I’ve started writing for one of the best sites on the web for dudes, GuySpeed. You can find posts written by yours truly daily on GuySpeed, and be sure to catch my new weekly column, “Check it or Chuck It,” in which I recommend five cool things to check out and five horrible things to avoid for the week. Bro.
There was a lot to love about Friday’s tense and surprising episode of Fringe. “Brave New World, Part 1″ delivered the stuff Fringe fans have been looking forward to seeing since Season One – Peter and Olivia gettin’ all cozy and planning a future together, Olivia using her Cortexi-powers like a badass superhero and Walter working at the height of his confidence. This was a fun and dark episode that moved at a rapid clip and seemed to pile on new and intriguing layers every few minutes. Read the rest of my Fringe episode review @ Badass Digest.
Austin’s Kiyanna Project has posted a new session with Royal Canoe performing “Bathtubs.” This is my favorite Kiyanna video so far. Stream it below and visit KP’s site.
Mourning the loss of a great character is never easy, but how do you mourn the loss of an entire universe?
On Friday’s episode of Fringe, “Worlds Apart,” the show asked us to wave goodbye to our beloved Fringies from Over There. Like Walter, who revealed his strong attachment to the Earth 2 folks and their world at the end of the episode, I’m going to miss the Alt-set even more than I could have imagined. I know the Earth 2 folks aren’t exactly dead, but they are gone, and they took Lincoln Lee with them. It’s likely we’ll see them again before the series ends (I hope), but I don’t expect to see Peter and Olivia universe-hopping any time soon. The bridge is closed, the link is severed and our focus is now on Earth1 and the race to capture David Robert Jones.
Read the rest of my Fringe episode review @ Badass Digest.
Super-talented hyphenate Chelsea Peretti arrived in Austin this week to perform at the Moontower Comedy and Oddity Fest. I chatted with Peretti about her upcoming stand-up shows, her writing gig on NBC’s Parks and Recreation, and her work with other comedians, like Louis C.K. and Todd Glass. Here’s a bit from the interview:
How important is Twitter in your life? What has that medium really done for comedians?
Well, I’ve always felt very indebted to the Internet, even though it’s a stressful place. It can feel like the center of the universe, when it’s really hopefully not. But I used to have a blog, it’s still there, I have a blog. I had a web series, I had these videos we made, and I’ve been able to gain a following or a group of people who I can have access to that I wouldn’t have before, and I’m thankful for that. Twitter has been cool. For some reason, I think Twitter has been even better for me than blogging was, because the shorter format works well for me for some reason. It’s really cool. I guess the next thing that everyone is doing is podcasts. I try to hold off on technologies as long as I can because I’m so addictive. So, obviously Twitter is incredibly consuming in my mental space, which I don’t always love, but it’s pretty rewarding too. I like the immediacy of it, to be able to do something and then instantly see if people find it funny or not. It’s kind of a useful tool.
Read the full interview @ Austinist.
My first post for Austinist went live earlier today. It’s an interview with comedian and renowned stoner Ari Shaffir, who I spoke with on 4/20. You may know Shaffir from his polarizing Amazing Racist videos or from Joe Rogan’s podcast. Shaffir is heading to Austin this weekend to perform stand-up comedy jokes at the Moontower Comedy Fest. I encourage everyone to check out his show, especially if you like jokes about anal sex and racism! Here’s a snippet from the interview:
Some people might feel that your act is offensive just for the sake of being offensive or that you say controversial or vulgar things just to upset the audience. What you say to those people?
I do not say those things to upset the audience. I get it if you’re conservative, but I’m more casual about things like sex and race, so I just sort of take it casually. I just want to tell the joke, but the joke happens to be about doing anal with somebody or whatever. I’m not trying to be offensive, I’m trying to tell stories about human behavior, and a lot of them are fucking filthy.
Read the rest @ Austinist.
Fringe dove head first into the deep end on Friday and asked us to tag along. We ended up in the year 2036 – more than twenty years after The Observers invaded the planet, murdered people in the streets and enslaved humanity. Yeah, that happened. It was weird. Check out the rest of my episode review @ Badass Digest.
The Cabin in the Woods isn’t your typical hack-and-slash horror flick, but you probably already know that by now. There are twists and turns, surprising reveals and shocking moments, and horror tropes are applauded, audited, and turned inside out. It’s pretty damn clever, and I’m happy to learn that a movie this good (and this strange) is doing reasonably well at the box office. But here’s the thing I loved best about Cabin in the Woods: It kept me engaged from start to finish. I was never bored, I was never able to guess what would happen next, and I genuinely cared about the characters and their connection to the strange goings on at the heart of the movie.
There aren’t many movies like Cabin in the Woods. Actually, it’s probably more accurate to say there aren’t any movies like Cabin in the Woods. It’s a unique film with many layers and big, bold ideas, and it kept me intrigued right up to its shocking and hilarious conclusion. Not everything works, but most of it does. And even the few missteps are fun to watch. Director Drew Goddard and writer Joss Whedon (who collaborated on Whedon’s groundbreaking genre TV shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel) have made a fun, engrossing and suspenseful horror flick that dubs as a smart commentary and celebration of the horror genre (and the horror movie audience). The movie works on several levels, delivering almost everything you’d expect to see in a teen horror movie while subverting the expectations of both gore hounds and casual moviegoers.
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Now’s a pretty good time to be a Ghostbusters fan. Every episode of The Real Ghostbusters cartoon series is available on DVD, both movies are streaming on Netflix, the video games are still regarded as big hits, and the amount of Ghostbusters merchandise now available seems to be at an all-time high (Exhibit A). Oh, and Dan Aykroyd is still threatening to make that third movie (Although, to paraphrase Egon Spengler, the more I read about that project, the more I’m convinced it’s part of a bizarre ritual to bring about the end of the world). But with the third movie in development hell, there’s only one place where fans can go to find new Ghostbusters stories – the comic book shop!
Last September, IDW kicked off a new monthly Ghostbusters comic book series. I’ve read a lot of good stuff about the series, and my comic book illustrator pal, Nate (who would walk around with an unlicensed nuclear accelerator on his back every day if he could), recommended I check it out. So I did! I picked up a copy of the latest issue, Ghostbusters #8, today.
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