Month: August 2014

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Guardians Of The Galaxy Save Summer!

Guardians-of-the-Galaxy

It turns out that after a summer of box office misses it would take a team of misfits to save the day, and in August of all months.  Which is usually the month that movie studios send their movies that they have no faith in to languish and die.  Disney should have faith in Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy because it is a lot of fun.

The story primarily follows Peter Quill AKA Star Lord (Chris Pratt) as he leads a group of outlaws to try and stop Ronan the Accuser (Lee Pace) from attacking the planet  Xandar.  His group includes Drax the Destroyer (Dave Batista), Gamora (Zoe Saldana), a tree named Groot (Vin Diesel), and Rocket the Raccoon (Bradley Cooper).  They are outclassed and outgunned, but they are crazy enough to get the job done.

The writers of this movie were very smart.  Introducing the Marvel space universe requires giving the audience a lot of names and places, so they did their best to make this movie as fun loving as possible.  That way even if you didn’t get it all you still had a good time.  This is probably the most comedic of the Marvel movies yet, and that is a good thing.  I also liked that they made this a group origin story, sure they did talk about all the characters’ backgrounds a little, but this movie is about the group not the individual which feels a little more fresh.

If you are going to make an action comedy, you are going to need a lead that can deal all those jokes with good comedic timing, and Chris Pratt was a perfect choice for that.  All his years on Parks and Rec helped him get the comedy side down, and it turns out that he knows how to throw a punch too.  Zoe Saldana apparently just wants to do space operas, Guardians Of The Galaxy, Star Trek, and Avatar.  She is good at it, so I would keep letting her do it.  In this movie she gets to be in the middle of the action more, and she handles herself well.  Bradley Cooper and Vin Diesel got to prove their talent as voice actors.  They managed to steal every scene they were in, and Dave Batista is a good professional wrestler that may have a good acting career ahead of him too.

James Gunn had to tone himself down a little, and bend to the Marvel movie “look”, but he still got some of his trademark weirdness in.  Especially in the scenes with Benicio del Toro as the collector.  The amount of random Marvel stuff he “collected” in those scenes was incredible.  I may just have to watch that part of the movie over and over again just so I can find all the references.  Since James Gunn usually directs horror-comedies, action-comedy apparently was right up his alley.

This movie promises that the Guardians of the Galaxy will be back, and that is an exciting thought.  I can’t wait to see what trouble Star Lord and his group of numbskulls get in to next.  I just hope that they can keep the next movie as fun as this one because if they do, they will have a great new franchise on their hands.  Not that Disney was lacking any.

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This Is Not The Hot Dog Toaster You Have Been Waiting For!

ne-rs-hot-dog-taoster

The Nostalgia Electrics Retro Series Hot Dog Toaster looks to be a hot dog lover’s dream, but sadly that dream is a bit of a nightmare.  There are few things easier in this world to cook than an American Hot Dog.  I mean they are already pre-cooked.  You can, fry them, grill them, boil them (please don’t), steam them, hold them over a camp fire, wrap them around a light bulb, or just about any other heat source you can imagine, so you would think that a toaster would be up to the job, but I have found it to be lacking.

Like any toaster it is easy to operate.  Well in theory it is anyway.  You have twist dial on the side that goes from one to five to pick how long you want to cook your dogs and buns, and a leaver which you pull down to start the cooking.  There is also an emergency stop button, just in case.  So being the accomplished toaster-user that I am, I turned the dial to four and put in two hot dogs and two buns, and I pushed down the leaver.  The dogs came out undercooked.  The next two I turned the dial to five, and guess what?  It burned the crap out of them.

It is crazy to me to think that the one thing this toaster was designed to do, it would be bad at.  Sure it did indeed heat up my hot dogs, but it didn’t do a good job!  It has one reason for its existence, and it does it poorly.  I guess I could put the dogs in at five and then watch them, and then push the button when they are ready, but that defeats the purpose of a timer.  Plus it can only do two at a time, so if you are cooking dogs for friends, you would have to use something else anyway unless they like to wait while others eat.  If I had to give this toaster a classroom grade it would get a D+.  It toasted the dogs, but just barely successfully.  It gets the “+” because it looks good doing it.

Pretty much anything that heats stuff up in your kitchen or backyard is going to do a better job of cooking your hot dogs than this thing.  Sure it kind of works, but not well enough to recommend it.  It is such a shame too, because it does look cool.