Barbecue is a little bit different as one moves around the country, but I never paid much attention to how much it changed when I moved around the great state of Texas. Author Daniel “BBQ Snob” Vaughn and photographer Nicholas McWhirter have done an amazing job of bringing these differences to light. As a photographer I have to say that I like the style of most of the images in The Prophets of Smoked Meats. They have a nice fine art feel to them, Nicholas McWhirter does great work with depth of field and putting as much info in the background of an…
Tag: good job
Drive
There’s a lot to like about Drive: we have a hero, a villain, and a running time of about an hour and half. That’s about as long as you really want to hang out with the people you meet in Drive-any longer and one of them will turn around and kill you. The previews for Drive made it look like a film about a getaway driver, which is why some nutjob sued because there was not that much on the getaway driver front. The opening scenes follow along as our hero drives a getaway car and does a pretty good…
Kiss The Dead
Laurell K. Hamilton has banged out 21 Anita Blake Vampire Hunter books. The fact that her name is ten times larger than Anita’s is proof that the writer has become more important than the story. While this a good thing for the publisher and the author, it’s not always a good thing for the reader. The first half of Kiss The Dead really got my hopes up. We find Anita Blake acting as a US Marshall, chasing down bad guys, talking business with her Cop buddies. She even mentions in passing that she sometimes works as a Reanimator. There’s a…
The Iron Lady
Meryl Streep won an Academy Award for her portrayal of Margaret Thatcher. I think she did a very good job, but her makeup artists where the real stars of this show-they also won an Oscar. We shift from the past to the present and the actors playing the principals all undergo some dramatic changes. At one point I mistook another Minister for Margret’s husband, who has a co-starring role as a ghost/hallucination. You’ve seen one old British guy with huge glasses and you’ve seen then all. Not being an expert on Margaret Thatcher, I had to google her to find…
Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows Part 2
I’m one of those people who didn’t read the Harry Potter books, but I have enjoyed the movies over the years. Well, except for those three or four in the middle that didn’t seem to make much sense or advance the plot or even tell an interesting story. But they were still fun to watch. I always thought that Harry was going to turn out to BE The Dark Lord. That would have been a great twist, eh? It’s hard not to spill all the secrets and mention in passing that Luke is Darth Vader’s son, that the Maltese Falcon is…
Water for Elephants
The story of a college dropout who falls in love with a married woman. The only trouble is that her husband happens to be a homicidal maniac. He gets away with constant murder by running a circus that is always on the move. Water for Elephants is a so over the top that I found myself waiting for the clichéd ending a good thirty minutes before it happened. The madman/ring master abuses his wife, kicks dogs, beats an elephant bloody, murders countless people, and yet no one ever even thinks of trying to stop him or reporting him to local…
Room by Emma Donoghue
Room is read by Michal Friedman, Ellen Archer, Robert Petkoff , and Suzanne Toren and they do a very good job of pulling you into the story of a woman and her five year old son who has spent his whole life in a small shack he knows as Room. Jack has names for everything in Room. Rug, Bed, TV, Skylight, Wall, Floor, and so on for the small assortment of items that fill the near identical days of the lives. Told from Jack’s point of view, we experience the world as he sees and hears it-or as he…