The Onion AV Club's pop culture lists are always entertaining. Given the immensity of the AV club inventory archives, why such a paltry offering? It could have been a slam dunk had they taken the time to publish a longer, denser tome. Instead what you get is an unsatisfyingly quick read that doesn't come close to the fun of browsing their online archives.
It was a good mix of interesting and entertaining, and I finished the book with a whole list of books, movies, and music to check out, which is always a good thing. I think some of the lengthier lists with relatively similar entries got a little tedious to read, but for the most part I really enjoyed this. Fast 9 is a fun summer blockbuster with great action set pieces and a few good character moments. Fans of the franchise will enjoy it and have a great time.
You can be someone who hasn't liked any of the previous films and finds them too ridiculous with how much they jump the shark on reality. With a tenth and an eleventh installment already in the works, it will be interesting to see where they take the series from here. There is also a mid-credit scene for those who stick around for the credits. I've an unusual love for anything in the form of lists. You must be fluent in obscure pop culture and know your classic movies (both good and bad.) but a quick read and overall entertaining book.
If you like the Onion AV Club, specifically their Inventory feature, you'll love this book. If you've never read their stuff or the feature, well, they make an inventory. Ridiculously specific inventories, like "Films that are greatly improved by reading the book they're based on" or "Products for Lazy Americans" and so on. The serious lists can be quite interesting; the comedic lists can be quite funny. The only real downside is, this is Onion AV Club groupthink at it's finest, so expect a lot of mentions about how awesome The Wire and Mr. Show are, and how horrible 2 and a 1/2 Men, is, for example. Any group of people develops some shared opinions, and the AV Club is no exception.
At times the snarky tone got to me a bit, too, such as when stating that inventions that had obvious applications for the disabled were somehow meant purely for fat lazy bastards. Still, when the book is on, it's on, very readable, and worth checking out for fans of lists of all kinds. Daniel Neil is a developing young writer from the cold city of Calgary.
To escape the climate he indulges in a love for films, novels, and comic books. He has a passion for Social Studies and pop culture and is pursuing new media, film production. During high school he participated in Model UN and Av club, managing AV for school events and assemblies, and organized a film fundraiser to raise money for Remembrance Day. F9 was originally scheduled for worldwide release by Universal Pictures on April 19, 2019, but was delayed several times, first due to the release of Hobbs & Shaw and planned release of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's No Time to Die , and then the COVID-19 pandemic. It premiered in South Korea and release international on May 19, 2021, and in the United States on June 25. The film received mixed reviews with praise for the stunts and Lin's direction, but criticism for its unrealistic action sequences and formulaic script.
F9 set several pandemic box office records and grossed over $716 million worldwide, becoming the second highest-grossing film of 2021. The Onion also has an entertainment/pop culture newspaper and website called the AV Club, which features pop culture news, reviews of almost every form of media (TV, albums, books, etc.) and interviews presented in a humorous but factual tone. The AV Club maintains a separate identity and has very little in common with The Onion, mostly to avoid people mistakenly thinking that the AV Club presents fake news like The Onion. He coined the phrase "manic pixie dream girl" as a cinematic type in 2007. He was a panelist on the short-lived basic cable show "Movie Club with John Ridley" on American Movie Classics.
In 2007, he began My Year of Flops on The A.V. Club, where he reevaluated films that were shunned by critics, ignored by audiences, or both, at their time of release. As of January 2008, the year was finished, but he continued the project as a bimonthly feature. Luckily, there are many news sites that not only stay up-to-date on real time news, but also provide artist interviews, new release reviews, and more.
A couple of years ago, we took a closer look at 10 top news sites that rock their music and entertainment coverage. Watching Ted Lasso for the first time is meant to be disarming. The Apple TV+ series puts a character in front of us that we instinctively read cynically, because everyone around him—the news media, team ownership, his players, the fans—treat him as a joke.
The fact the character originated as a commercial only increases the likelihood we'll think of Ted as a walking punchline, a football manager Michael Scott for us to cringe at. At 3 o'clock in the morning of July 22, the first round of the Champions League, the first round of the Champions League, Galatasaray will travel to the southern city of the Netherlands challenge PSV Eindhoven. In this year's summer window, Eindho is still a busy team. First, in the European Cup, the front line attack hand, the team leader, Dunfris, has received many well-known clubs from the five major leagues. Pay attention, secondly, Bruges and Tang'an, who have leased last year, have returned to the team, and the 22-year-old Czech Republic of Sastilek is also the same. In addition, the team also from Chelsea and Brighton.
From the exempt from the words, Fan Jinkel and Propper.fast and furious 9 cinema wood greenThe fixed and mobile voice service is stable. I am a huge fan of many features of the Onion AV Club, and Inventory is one of them. So it's no real surprise that I really enjoyed this book. Some of them I remembered from the website, but many were new. There are some guest lists - some kinda stupid, some, like Weird Al Yankovic's brilliant entry rivetingly detailed - but mostly it's a lot of the Onion's usual stuff. I check out a lot of new-to-me music from these lists, and occasionally get some other direction for pop culture consumption.
However, I still had a lot of fun flipping through this book, and I can definitely say I've expanded my pop culture media knowledge. Not sure if that was ever the point, but now I can talk somewhat confidently about 15 songs guaranteed to clear out a party. I'll even throw in an extra star for introducing me to the Inventory posts themselves, now a favorite part of my RSS feed.
So all in all, not exactly a waste of time, but nothing one needs to keep on the shelf or ever read again. However, while the action set pieces are entertaining to watch, there is hardly any tension during any of them. It gets to the point where it feels as if you are watching a cartoon.
They're coming out of these crazy scenarios with as little as a scratch. Dom Torreto in this movie feels like an indestructible superhero. In one scene in particular he gets out of a sticky situation. He does this by using chains to bring the roof of a concrete building down on a bunch of guys. This is just an example of how unbelievable most of the big action scenes are. That ride begins with Dom and his wife Letty trying to live off the grid and raise Dom's young son, Brian.
This makes sense, since they spent several movies dealing with mayhem, but a distress call from an ally brings them back into the action. It also brings them face to face with a new character, Jakob , who is revealed to be Dom's brother. Now, everyone knows Dom and the Fast and Furious franchise is all about "family," so for the patriarch of it all to have a long-lost brother we've never heard of needs a fair bit of backstory. For that brother to also be a super spy who drives fast like Dom requires even more story.
To explain how they both end up on the tail of a mysterious new device called Project Ares, requires—you guessed it— even more explanation. By the end of the movie, the characters are running around with comically gigantic Gears of War guns, in a blowout action scene that finally gets to the thrilling, immersive place Spectral wants to be all along. But for most of its runtime, this is a much smaller, talkier film. The dialogues aren't smart and challenging enough to rival a heady, ideas-based science-fiction movie like Arrival, and the story isn't paced well enough to rival action science fiction like Aliens. It's copycatting the right things, but in the wrong ways.
It's understandable that Netflix jumped at the chance to grab what was intended as a big-screen, large-scale thriller. But Spectral winds up feeling like a much smaller film, like something that was intended for a casual streaming experience all along. In all, the movie is incomprehensible in the best way, but it's grounded by the very real melodrama at its core.
Death, family, and lineage factor greatly into the plot, as ties are broken and reforged. It's like Dynasty at 200 miles an hour with a nuclear bomb attached. Did I weep openly when Dom and Jakob reunite, or when Han returns from the dead? Absolutely, along with most other people in the theater. Sobs gave way to laughter, which racked my body until it was sore.
At the climax I joined hands with a random stranger and jumped up and down along with everyone else. I've never had another theater experience like it, at least not one in which I willingly participated. After a year of so much unimaginable death and destruction in my own life and on the planet at large, this latest Fast & Furious felt like a release. I certainly won't need therapy for a few months now that I've seen it. DC comic book character Harley Quinn has been adapted for the screen dozens of times, but DC Universe gives her her own titular animated series for the first time, much to the delight of critics. "Man City" is the eighth and final episode of Ted Lasso's second season that was made available to critics ahead of the premiere, which means that it's been nearly two months since I first experienced it.
As I've noted before, I wrote my reviews one-by-one as I went through the screeners, stopping to settle my thoughts so that there was no point where my review was out of sync with you as readers. I love books of lists, especially lists of stuff that I am likely to know about. While a book of lists featuring obscure 19th century European novels or popular algebra equations might not fire me up as much as one, which features movies & music, I'd still probably like it well enough.
Each week, the writers of The A.V. Club issue a slightly slanted pop-culture list filled with challenging opinions (Is David Bowie's "Young Americans" nearly ruined by saxophone?) and fascinating facts. What's unexpected is how F9 also has much bigger emotional components, both from the resurrection of Han, but also the complex relationship between Dom and Jakob. Though this is the ninth movie, the Fast and Furious franchise has never really explained much about why Dom is Dom. With the addition of Jakob, F9 really digs into his character in a way that feels, yes, a bit much on top of everything else going on, but also effective in giving him and the rest of the characters new angles to explore. As we learn more about them, an even deeper connection is built, and in turn, everything about the film gets elevated. As you'd imagine, F9 spends a good amount of time explaining how Han is alive and the role he has to play in the acquisition of Project Ares.
The character has long been a fan favorite in the franchise, so having him back and seeing Lin, who also co-wrote the movie with Daniel Casey, explain it all while keeping the main story relevant is a lot. It's dense, requires new characters, old characters, suspension of disbelief and more. Sad to say but if all of Han's story was cut, F9 would probably have been a more compact, tighter, faster-paced movie. On the other hand, his scenes are also some of the best in the entire movie.
Sure, it's completely over the top and ultimately a little superfluous but it leads to so many incredible moments and interactions between the characters that you basically have to forgive it. Could the very long movie have been shorter and simpler without it? With it, does the movie have a whole other layer of not just heart, but satisfying narrative connections that makes the whole thing that much better? That'll bring the series up to 11, with Fast And Furious 9 set to come out next year after having its release delayed by the coronavirus pandemic. That means it'll still be a while before we have to say goodbye to the old family, but the end of their increasingly ridiculous adventures is, unfortunately, in sight.
In addition to the trusted Rolling Stone reviews and recommendations for music, movies, and TV, you can also find a mix of politics, sports, and culture news. If you want to know which actor was cast in an upcoming film, read an album review for your favorite band, or check which TV show had the highest ratings last night, this is the place for you. The A.V. Club is published by The Onion, but don't worry, the site offers real news, interviews, and features. There's a great selection of in-depth profiles on movies, TV, and music you may not have heard of yet.
Damon Lindelof's gripping new take on the iconic comic book series is universally beloved by fans and critics alike, with only two rotten reviews out of a total 88 who reviewed HBO's newest hit. While the first season followed people a week or so into the zombie apocalypse , Season 2 is free-for-all carnage. While many zombie projects postulate that it'll be a few years before humans start truly turning on each other -- you know, the true blue "the real monsters are us" theme -- Black Summer asserts, quite brutally, that this will happen almost immediately out of the gate. Mere months after Season 1, now in the dead of an unyielding winter, survivors are at each other's throats.
Gangs and factions have been formed, and those roaming the snowy wasteland are killing each other over supply drops coming from a mystery plane - drops that feel humane in nature but in reality are causing those on the ground to go to war with each other. Some of the lists are overlong and the authors spend too much time establishing their hipster cred, but overall it's an amusing look at various cross-sections of music, film, and literature. I have added loads of fun facts to my repetoire of usless and innane factoids that I can spew out randomly. I particularly enjoyed the list of "15 ridiculous lies perpetuated by John Hughes movies." This was a cute quick read that contained lists of various pop culture ideas. Some of the lists had very odd topics such as Movies That were about People who Tried to be Funny.
There were a few lists I did not enjoy because I didn't know any of the subject matter. Overall, a good read but its very hard to compare this to a full blown novel. This book has made everyone in my family laugh out loud on multiple occasions. Plus it provides me with endless additions to my movies to watch/books to read/albums to listen to lists. In this new online world, we are used to reading lists. But these go normally as "best of", "worst of" or combinations.
The people of the AV Club list them as "songs about the Apocalypse", "lame horror movie foes", "literary gimmicks" and such. I think the best way to read this book is in front of a computer with Google at the ready. I think that's how Inventory as a blog post works best, as they can embed clips and links. Then again, maybe I'm just not "with it" enough to know all the often obscure(ish?) music, movie, book and TV references.
This book probably would have been slightly better had I not read it cover to cover AND as an e-book. It's the kind of book you leisurely pick up and read a list while "doing your business". It's entertaining in spots, but at times seems redundant even though it's a completely new list. Because it's by the editors of The Onion's A.V. Club, it tends to lean towards some obscure things at times, most especially when they talk music.
There are also a number of guest lists, written by celebrities of assorted flavors. Most of them are utterly skippable, despite the talent of some of the contributors . A notable exception is Patton Oswalt's thoughtful list of six quietly revolutionary films; Daniel Handler and "Weird Al" Yankovic put together a couple funny ones as well. The entire book also has a sort of running gag in the form of parallel lists at the top and bottom of each page, comprising A.V.
