Kirkus Reviews Interviews Leonard Pierce About If You Like The Sopranos

So you got paid to write a book about a TV show! I’m jealous as hell. Tell me a little about how you got the gig.

One of my editors put me in touch with the folks at Hal Leonard, and they let me know what they were looking for with the project. We talked about their expectations and desires for the series, and I sent them various samples of stuff I’d written, and it turned out to be a good match. I had to push [the deadline] a bit so we could get the book out by the holidays, but I think it turned out pretty well. It meant several months of sitting on the couch watching gangster movies—not that I wouldn’t have done that anyway, but this way I got paid for it.

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Hayden Childs Recaps The Simpsons

The very idea of satirizing Mad Men is a good one, even if it’s a year or two past timely. However, this episode was thin on satire, as if they cast John Slattery first and then tried to hang a story around him. It wasn’t particularly funny but neither was it particularly bad. They stayed away from the odious “dumb Homer” tropes and the obnoxious “cram a bunch of random crap together and call it a joke” tendencies that clutter the worst episodes.

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Paul Clark Reviews Happy Feet Two

2006’s Happy Feet wasn’t a great movie by any means, but for all its cute dancing penguins what lingers in the memory is what an eccentric vision Miller placed on screen, especially by family-movie standards. Unfortunately, genuine eccentricity in cinema is hard to pull off in a way that’s charming rather than annoyingly precious, and doubly so when a filmmaker must re-create his original formula. The biggest problem with Happy Feet is how what was once endearingly off-kilter now feels focus-grouped to death.

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The Fatal Difference

by Leonard Pierce

As the Occupy Wall Street movement drags on, and law enforcement agencies make the foolish but predictable decision to respond to its persistence with violence, a fundamental contradiction begins to make itself known in our political lives.

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Hayden Childs Music Library: Only Ones to Ornette Coleman

The Only Ones – The Only Ones (1978). Utterly phenomenal slice of power pop-punk anchored by “Another Girl, Another Planet,” one of the best songs of the punk era. The Only Ones had a lot of Rolling Stones and Big Star mixed in with their punk guitars and attitude, and it is only right and natural that they influenced both The Replacements and Yo La Tengo. This is a great album by any measure.

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Vadim Rizov Reviews Breaking Dawn

Social conservatives have applauded theTwilight series for emphasizing the importance of abstinence before marriage, while the teenage girls powering the Twihard base have swooned over pale pretty vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) offering up romantic forest idylls and werewolf Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner) exposing his abs at the slightest provocation, both courting Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) without so much as hinting at a threat to her virginity: they’re sexily sexless.

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The Five Most Terrifying Pregnancies In Cinema History

by Andrew Osborne

Impending parenthood is scary enough, but the real white-knuckle moments are typically associated with the anxieties and complications of pregnancy and childbirth. Thus, as a public service to Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson’s nervous, mopey vam-parents in this week’s Breaking Dawn (Part One), we’ve compiled a list of the five worst-case scenarios to expect when you’re expecting. (And no, we didn’t include Eraserhead — bonus points for the first commenter to figure out why.)

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Lot or Not

by Leonard Pierce

Now, before we get too far into this, let me clarify something:  I am not arguing that the lottery is, in and of itself, a good investment.  The odds, as everyone should be aware, are extraordinary remote, and the argument that it is a kind of regressive taxation on the poor is a hard one to answer.

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Hayden Childs’ Music Library: Om and Oneida

Om – Variations On A Theme (2005), Conference Of The Birds (2006), Inerrant Rays Of Infallible Sun (Blackship Shrinebuilder) EP (split single with Current 93, 2006), OM/Six Organs Of Admittance split (2006), Pilgrimage (2007), Gebel Barkal 7″ (2008), Live At Jerusalem (2008), Conference Live (2009), God Is Good (2009). After the extraordinary stoner metal band Sleep broke up in 1998, guitarist Matt Pike went on to form High On Fire while bassist Al Cisneros and drummer Chris Hakius formed Om, a two-man, all-rhythm section band that was part heavy stoner rock and part drone-oriented space rock.

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Scott Von Doviak Recaps The Amazing Race

Let me get this out of the way right up front: I’m not sure this episode actually deserves a B+. But the bunnies certainly do. Is there any chance of getting an all-bunny edition of The Amazing Race next season? Somebody run that up the chain of command over at Worldrace Productions. Of course, cute as they are, the obstacle-hopping rabbits aren’t the only reason this episode turned out better than I thought it would. A surprise ending (and not a particularly unwelcome one) didn’t hurt, either.

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