Empty Bookshelf Reviews

Check out these two videos of "The Miz" interviewing the cast and director of "The Dark Knight." I realized that the hype machine for the movie was pretty crazy (even crazier now that it's obvious that the movie could have sold itself on its own merits), but I had no idea they were so desperate to allow a WWE "representative" to interview the stars.

The image of a ridiculous wrestler (title belt draped over his body) interviewing Maggie Gyllenhall is really one for the ages as is her confusion when he insists on playing with the action figures. Likewise his mustache discussion with Gary Oldman of all people hits "awkward" right on the head. (I guess Oldman insisted that he not be interviewed by someone wearing a championship belt from a fixed "sport.")

Also of note is Christian Bale's look over to his assistant as he has no idea how to react to "The Miz." You'd think they could've had an interesting comparison of the injuries accumulated in filming a fight scene (Bale seems intense enough to acquire injuries during filming - it looks like he has marks on his arms from filming Terminator 4 around the time of the interview) to the injuries in wrestling or stories about "working through pain in the name of entertainment" - who knows.

Anyway, enjoy the awkwardness.

Superstar To Superstar: Miz interviews the stars of "The Dark Knight" - Part I.

Superstar To Superstar: Miz interviews the stars of "The Dark Knight" - Part II.



There's a reason that professional wrestling will never be considered a "mainstream" form of entertainment. This is it.

Mini-Review (no exclamation mark)

Yet one more instance of the Bookshelf® being a step ahead of the mass media.

Last week, the latest "internet phenomenon movie," 300 released its first official trailer. Without judging the movie, of which I only know a marginable amount, it looks like someone decided to make a bluescreen movie, but this time, turn up the dynamic range.



Anyway, take a look at the trailer here, and give it a nice listen. Yep, the music might sound a bit familiar for those of you that remember a semi-but-now-quickly-being-un-disowned movie trailer put together by your favorite group of (not so) local idiots. That's "Just Like You Imagined" from Nine Inch Nails' album, The Fragile. These "300" people stole my idea without even having met me or knowing that they stole something.



They get one star because they're movie looks pretty darn cool, but they lose four because of the aforementioned idea-stealing, and the fact that they didn't take advantage of the fact that the song already has the "quiet, loud, quiet" dynamic good for making movie trailers dramatic (or in our case, confusing) and just recycled the beginning of the song at the end. Bad form, Hollywood. Bad form.

*to be fair, the song was used in a trailer before we used it, but it was a trailer for a Nine Inch Nails concert DVD, so I think it's safe to say that that doesn't count. I'd send a link to that video, but it's buried within the Flash in the "clips and trailers" section of the DVD's website.

Each game, the Steelers come in with eight trick plays. These include end-arounds, halfback options, double-reverses, etc. In the middle of the second quarter, they used their first with great success.

Lining up in the I formation, one of the most flexible of the offensive formations, Ben Roethlisberger, faked the handoff to the half-back who then ran to the right side of the offensive line as the fullback ran to the left all while a wide receiver from the right side ran towards the half-back. The wide receiver got the hand off, followed the fullback's blocks to the left and got the easy first down.

Unfortunately for the Steelers, the drive ended in an interception.



The trick play doesn't receive five stars if only because it didn't result in a huge gain, just a first down.

The Seahawks WR just caught the ball, made a football motion (a turn), and put feet down, as the steelers player hit him and the ball popped loose. Unfortunately the refs blew the whistle for an incomplete pass, blowing the play dead, and unreviewable. In my opinion the refs never get this call right, because on iffy calls like this, both teams should be able to get a reasonable image of what actually happened. The safe call here is to let them play, like in hockey or soccer in a situation like that. when the play is dead, then the team that felt ripped off could officially challenge the play and get a definitive answer. In all reality it didn't matter in this instance though, as the ball went all the way back to the pittsburgh 10 yard line or thereabouts, and the punt recovery probably gave them better field position.



the blown whistle on the iffy call gets no stars because because the only reason for them to call a play like that dead is for the refs to save face and claim their authority on the field. Nobody likes refs though, and power plays like this don't help their cause. This hurts both teams in the long run, because that really was a fumble, and by letting the play go through they can look at all the evidence, and not just a quickly-viewed, one sided opinion.

Mmm.... mozzarella, prosciutto, and other Italian words I probably can't spell very well. The Suprimo and Turkey Diablo.



Best sandwiches ever. 1/2 star off for a necessary lack of variety.

In order to predict the outcome of this year's Superbowl, we used the best tool in our repertoire to predict the outcome: John Madden NFL 98 for Sega Genesis. It was a tense game, filled with back and forth scoring. Nate's Steelers came up short after a risky "going for it" on 4th down situation late in the 4th quarter.



In typical Madden 98 form, the final score (in spite of the 5 minute quarter length) was (my) Seattle Seahawks 39 to Nate's Steelers 32. We each had about 300 yards of total offense, though I won the battle of time of possession.

You heard it here first: Seahawks 39, Steelers 32.



The "preview show" (meaning our game of Madden 98) receives four-and-a-half stars due to its close finish that we can only hope the actual game will also have. Go Seahawks!

As a warm-up to the Superbowl, Animal Planet is offering a marathon of the Puppy Bowls from years past. For the uninitiated, the Puppy bowl is at least an hour or so of about 7 or 8 puppies running around in a miniature stadium, made of cardboard. Multiple cameras around the "stadium" show images of puppies running around, jumping on each other, or mostly just laying on the turf, all set to zany music. To make matters worse, they spared no expense on the announcing, getting NFL Films, NFL Radio, and longtime Philadelphia Phillies announcer Harry Kalas to do the deed. Also, this is a big production, probably 5 cameras, including one called the "bowl cam", placed underneath a glass bottom of the water bowl that they drink out of. At halftime they clean up the turf with a blatantly used bissel vacuum cleaner, and then they bring out the kitty castle for the kitty bowl halftime show. While an interesting diversion for about 5 minutes, it get incredibly boring and repetitive as the animals don't do very much, other than walk around to wacky music and disco lighting. Also, you can buy the video here



Puppy Bowl II receives 1.5 stars for being a pretty big waste of your pre-superbowl time. I honestly think I'd rather watch a marathon of"The OC".

Site note: We'll be having our first night of live reviewing on Sunday, February 5 during the Superbowl. That's right; we'll be reviewing all aspects of the game while it's still in progress: we'll review plays, people, commercials, the foods we're eating, you name it. Be part of our reviewing milestone starting at 6pm EST on Sunday Feb. 5.

MINI-REVIEW!




I had this sandwich the other day, and I suppose while I can't really claim to have expected there to be any more to it, it was very underwhelming. Having not lived under a rock for the past however many years, I realize that ads for food usually exaggerate (or "overrexaggerate" as friend of The Bookshelf Josh Calloway would say) the overwhelming deliciousness that said foods provide, and that Quiznos is a big purveyor of such underhanded tactics.

First of all, and yet a side note, Quiznos likes to pretend that their prices are cheap when they're anything but. When you hear them speak of just 2.99, you automatically jump to the mindset that Subway instilled in us about subs being 6-inch or footlong, however that's not the case. It's more along the lines of 4, 8, and 14 inches, or something like that, and so the 2.99 price is for the small. I'm willing to forgive the higher pricing as the sandwiches are mostly considerably more "gourmet" than subway, but the fact that they advertise them as cheap without saying the actual size, essentially preying on this mindset, really grills my flatbread.

Back on topic. So the sandwich looks all big and stacked full of slow cooked roast beef and melted swiss cheese, when in reality, all it is is a regular roast beef sandwich (the beef hasn't been specially cooked or anything), with swiss cheese, served with a cup of roast beef juice, known better by some french term that i'm not going to stoop to saying. The sandwich was hot, but I'm not giving them the special credit for that because they toast all of their subs. Basically this was a plain roast beef sandwich, made to look all important, and the price that the people paid for it probably wasn't worth the letdown.

Not saying that the sandwich wasn't good (it was quite tasty), but I probably would've been better off with the Chicken Carbonara sandwich, the classic italian (minus the olives), or the more expensive black angus sandwich, but hey, I wasn't paying for it, so nothing to lose.



This sandwich gets three stars, due to the fact that while it was good, it was small, and didn't even have the filler (lettuce, tomato, etc.) to make it more substantial a meal. Add to it that the roast beef was actually cold in spots, due to the hasty toasting of the sandwich, and the fact that the commercial makes it look substantially more overwhelming than it turned out to be, the sandwich leaves a good amount to be desired.

Footnote: While I understand that I am again using the argument that a product did not live up to my prior expectations as a gauge by which to judge said product, this case is different from before in the sense that the company itself was inducing false presumptions, and not other noted reviewers.

Mini-Review!

Not to get all Seinfeldian here, but really, what's the deal with warm winters? Here it is, January and it's feeling like mid-March. Everyone knows what winter is good for, so I won't go into detail here, but still, I expect some snowy fun. Of course it did snow in December and it remained cold enough to make driving no fun for a solid two weeks or so, but spring time in January? I won't have any of that. And for those of you who hate the cold weather, just remember there's a whole month (then three weeks) for the weather to get back in sync. So at best, this warm spell serves only to get your hopes up as February prepares its icy wrath.






Warm Winters receive two stars due to their disobeying of the natural order of things. I've not skiied for a number of years BM, but if I were a skier, I wouldn't be a happy camper. Is it too much to ask that the seasons be seasonal? The two stars are given for the fact that the car-based world is generally a safer place when roads aren't slippery and the fact that my house is kept at the "meat locker" setting on the thermostat and warmer weather makes that much less of an issue. Regardless, I want my wintry rage!

Mini-review!

So, maybe reviewing half of a book is not the most fair thing to do, but I'm about half of the way through The Rule of Four, probably the most notable of the non-Dan Brown authored so-called "it's like The DaVinci Code" books popular during the "great historical artifact mystery novel boom of the early-to-mid 2000's." It was popular enough to spawn a "the truth behind" sort of exposé into its central historical mystery.

Keeping up the mini-review theme, here's a mini re-cap: the historical artifact is a book written in the late 1400's, entitled Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. If you're familiar with The DaVinci Code, replace "works of art" with "big book." But, The Rule of Four, so far (of course), rises above whatever one would consider the DaVinci Code to be in terms of quality with actual interesting writing with (what we so ambitiously learned in 7th grade) "voice," not just the author writing "x,y,z, happened, Mr. Smith thought a,b,c, then said, 'l,m,n.'" Maybe this is just the product of the first-person point-of-view, but it works.

Oddly, the authors move between past tense (normal for adventure-fiction) and present tense depending on the (sometimes upcoming) action. It works for creating tension, but once you realize that they move between the two tenses, it's easy to expect something dramatic to happen as soon as someone "sees" something instead of "saw" it. BUT, the book is enjoyable to read during the parts of "low action," very unlike The DaVinci Code, so their stylistic choices/risks work out well.



The first half of The Rule of Four receives four stars (coincidentally) due to its setting up of a potentially solid second half. Because of the relative obscurity (compared to anything by Leonardo DaVinci) of the historical artifact in question, there isn't any built-in suspense. "There's a murder clue in The Mona Lisa!!!" is interesting on its own, while "There are clues hidden about a 600 year old secret in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili!" gets more of the "huh?" response than intrigued readers. BUT, being that the authors are tasked with not only devising an interesting story, but making readers intrigued in an historical artifact they've never heard of, they've succeeded admirably on both fronts: making me curious about this 600 year old book and wondering how their book will end.