Though I hope most of you at this point know to go to eonline.com every Friday to check out my stuff, and possibly geekweek.com too, I know some of you don’t want to have to keep track. So here’s a round-up of stuff I’ve done recently. Click the headers to go to the full article:
Fast Food Review: KFC Fiery Grilled Wings
But first off: what is up with KFC’s menu these days? It’s cluttered with pictures, presumably for the benefit of the ever-growing population of Illiterate-Americans, but it makes it very difficult to find exactly what you want, since everything’s all thrown up together like a scrapbook from hell. Such is the reason why I assumed the smallest offering of the wings was the 10-piece, for 7.99. I grumbled: too much. Would rather some variety, like 5 grilled and 5 hot. Only when I got my food did I see on the placemat a coupon for a combo featuring 5 Fiery Grilled Wings and a drink for 5 bucks. I’d swear to you that it was not anywhere to be found on the wall menu, except that I couldn’t even swear that Amelia Earhart’s corpse wasn’t somewhere on the wall menu, hidden within distracting clusters of percolating poultry parts.
Very belated review of AN EDUCATION
Charming twentysomething English actress Carey Mulligan gives a charming, breakthrough performance as Jenny, a teenager in 1960s England who must choose between the stuffiness of formal education, or the education in life that a charming older man (Peter Sarsgaard) can offer her. The script, by author Nick Hornby (About a Boy, Fever Pitch) is quite good, too.
FROZEN is more solid, no pun intended, but right off the bat, Green does something that makes it very hard for me to take things seriously – he names the two main characters after some of his famous friends. Now, maybe he figured that since this is a more dramatic thriller than straight horror, it’ll play to mainstream audiences who don’t know their low-budget horror celebrities. And yeah, WRONG TURN 2 director Joe Lynch has a pretty common name, so if that were as far as it went, I could give that a pass. But horror journalist Spooky Dan Walker doesn’t. Yes, the character is only named Dan Walker, but there’s honest-to-god a moment when his friend turns to him and goes, “That’s kinda spooky, Dan.”
If you were to take From Paris with Love seriously, it’d be easy to be offended by its portrayal of women, minorities, Muslims, Asians, and anyone who isn’t a big, loud American a-hole with a gun (i.e. John Travolta). Fortunately, it’s nigh-impossible to take the movie seriously, so just enjoy the destruction.
From sensitive, boring director Lasse Hallstrom (The Shipping News, An Unfinished Life) comes a love story featuring Channing Tatum and Amanda Seyfried as the two most perfect people ever. This is undeniably appealing at first, no matter which lead you find more attractive, but a horribly contrived third act displaces our empathy with its conveniences.
