chronovore | Media Review, in brief (Reply)

Downloadable Content, The Penny-Arcade Podcast (@odeo, xml) As much as I like Penny-Arcade, and as easy as they make it seem to put out targeted humor regularly, it is still surprising to hear how funny Holkins and Krahulik are when they're improvising while trying to plan the comic. After a long dry-spell, they're finally updating this a bit more regularly.

Similarly improvised, but presented in a vein akin to MST3K is Broken Pixels Podcast from 1UP - in short, Shane Bettenhauser, Seanbaby, and Crispin are funny. The other crew is not particularly funny, at least in the first few episodes. Shane's group is like watching improv comics critique bad videogames on the fly, and the second group is like watching my friends play a videogame that I don't want to play, while they have a media-reference-ripe conversation in which I can't participate. I guess that implies that I'm not funny when I do that, either. Side note: I've met Shane while he was in Tokyo; he seems to be a nice guy, very sharp. I also met Seanbaby and had my "face rocked" by him at E3 a few years ago. I am a longtime fan, from his Hostess Fruit Pie pages. I think he was stunned and a little scared that anyone knew who he was.

Pacific Beat, T. Jefferson Parker
I've read several Parker books so far, and this is the first one in which I was disappointed. Silent Joe pegged my fan needle into the red so far that I have been snatching up all TJP books I can find. This one's going to make me revise that policy. His women characters are not particularly well realized, there are a number of structurally abusive red herrings thrown out, and the general feeling of the book is barely a step removed from nihilism. It's hard to know what point TJP was trying to make, if any.

Hot Fuzz:
A cop comedy and action movie piss-take from the guys that did Shawn of the Dead. It's not as focused -or- as funny as Shawn of the Dead, but I am predisposed to award additional points to anything that includes zombies. Simon Pegg plays very far from his Spaced/Shawn character, in Nicholas Angel, a hyper-competent, dead serious London "police service" officer who is transferred to a quiet village to keep him from showing up the London police ~~force~~ service too much. It's very similarly paced to Shawn, both in structure and shot editing. Which is to say, it's neat and serviceable, but nothing new. I'll pick up the DVD just to get the behind-the-scenes stuff and make sure I caught all of their homage sequences.

Wicker Park: Soundtrack to the movie
I don't know a damned thing about this movie, but the soundtrack is basically a who's-who of bands that I've been enjoying for the past two years: Mazzy Star, Mogwai, +/- (this is the only track that iTMS has for this band, and that's a shame), Death Cab for Cutie, The Postal Service... And I still don't know what to call this all as a genre.