Archive for April, 2010

Going to the tattoo parlor and coming back with a butterfly on your ankle?  Cut. “I’ve always wanted a tattoo,” you say.  ”I think it would be so cool, like Chad Kroeger.” You know this barely counts.  It’s one thing to coat your arms with snakes and demons and metaphors for band names.  If...
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Kick-Ass lives up to its name and delivers pure fun as it mixes comic book action (think: Spider-Man) with quirky teen movie (think: Juno) without trying too hard (think: Ghost World). The title character’s arsenal of self-deprecation and self-awareness manages to fight off the outwardly nerdy, secretly hip superhero plot clichés just long enough...
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It was early February at a Flyers-Devils game.  My friend and I were chortling at a poop/sex/talking animal joke of some kind while drowning deep in the nose bleeds. The place suddenly went dead.  One of the Devils was sliding on the ice, face down and motionless. A collective gasp and a piercing, lustful cheer...
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Welcome to minor league baseball, where men’s dreams are crushed yearly like bugs in the dust.  Pro catcher Chris Coste delivers the 13 year tale of his expedition through independent league ball to the majors, and every stop in between, all the while making you wonder:  was all of it really worth it just...
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A little backstory: In case you didn’t know, the nonpretentious mix tapes started as a way to share new music and promote cool people doing cool things around the globe. Here at nonpretentious, we’ve always been big believers in word-of-mouth recommendations from friends and friends-of-friends alike (see: our creative philosophy). In fact, that’s precisely...
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Haunting, devastating, gut-wrenching story that runs at you with its arms outstretched and then viciously stabs you in the back with a corkscrew.  This book takes the genre of family drama character studies and turns a scenario you’ve only heard about on the news into a relate-able punch in the stomach that makes you think...
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No, this is not the number of electoral college votes Walter Mondale received in his race against Ronald Reagan in 1984 (he could only wish-in fact, he received only 13 votes), but instead the number of games Hoss Radbourn won pitching for the Providence Grays in the 112 game National League season in 1884....
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The best Jane Austen book that Jane Austen didn’t write and if Austen had, it may be her best novel. Two fiftyish sisters and their mother are all forced for various reasons to leave Manhattan and share their cousin’s ramshackle cottage while they sort out individual and family issues and find new lives for...
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Dark and disturbing. In First Love, Last Rites, Ian McEwan makes sex and violence look intriguing.
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What’s more unreadable than the cover of conservationist Mike Bingham’s story about saving the penguins of the Falkland Islands from commercial fishing industries, backed by the local corrupt government?  The descriptive, highly graphic sexual encounters he narrates throughout the first half, in which penguins are barely mentioned at all.
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