10 Things ‘The Walking Dead’ Season 3 Has Taught Us

Posted in Jeff Holland, Threat Quality with tags , , on April 4, 2013 by braak

Walking Dead Carl1)      When you stop treating Carl like a stupid kid and start treating him like a child soldier, it turns out he’d make a more clear-minded and decisive leader than his dad. (Yes, he shot that dude in cold blood – but in the zombie apocalypse, when an armed boy in a cowboy hat tells you to put down your shotgun, FUCKING PUT DOWN YOUR SHOTGUN, DICKWEED.)

2)      Even when the leader of your group is bleary-eyed, sweating from every pore, waving around his gun like it’s too heavy for him, trudging along in mid-day Atlanta sunshine and DEFINITELY seeing visions of his dead wife, apparently the response is not “Hey…Rick, wanna come inside, buddy? You’re clearly suffering from a heady mix of insomnia, dehydration and post-traumatic stress disorder.” It is, “Let’s let him work through it at his own pace.”

3)      Did you know that T-Dogg truly was the best of them all?  Read more »

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TV Flashback: Watching ‘Battlestar Galactica’ For the First Time

Posted in Jeff Holland, reviews, Threat Quality with tags , , , on April 2, 2013 by braak

Considering how ultimately dour the mood of the show is – I mean, it is about the genocide Imageof the human race and all so I don’t blame it, anyway – what nobody really mentions about Battlestar Galactica is how compulsively watchable it is in the early going.

That was a pleasant surprise for me, considering that I found the initial miniseries to be kind of a slog.

But then, the miniseries has a lot to set up, whereas the series can content itself to tell a number of “done-in-one” style stories that are entertaining and move at a pretty good clip. BSG, in the early going, is rarely boring or slow.  Read more »

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The Five Disappointments

Posted in Braak, crotchety ranting with tags on April 1, 2013 by braak

A while ago, somebody sent me a link to this article on Cracked that was something like “Five Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person.”  I didn’t really care for it, and I’m not really sure how anybody looks at Alec Baldwin’s speech in the beginning of Glengarry, Glen Ross in its context and comes away thinking that the only reason you’d think his character was horrible was if you were a narcissist.  He is literally arguing that you don’t matter unless you sell the most houses!  That is an awful thing to believe, and also drives people to cheat Jonathon Pryce out of his life savings!

Anyway, those are actually five harsh truths that will make you an asshole.  I have been meaning to write a response to it for a while, and I guess this is it.  Five harsh truths that will ACTUALLY make you a better person, as opposed to a shitty, self-absorbed punk.

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Happy Day of the Living Dead!

Posted in Braak with tags , , on March 31, 2013 by braak

As all of you know, today is Easter, a day in which Christians celebrate the terrible majesty of their Undead God.

In thirty-three AD, a criminal madman was sentenced to death by the Roman Governor Pontius Pilate. Three days after the execution, the man returned from Hell leading an army of the damned, and changing the course of history to suit his dark purposes. As is custom, every year Christians gather to appease the monstrous undead legions with fresh rabbit carcasses, attempting to sate their terrible hunger in the hopes that they will be spared and live to see the glorious End of Days, when ALL the dead shall rise up and destroy civilization as we know it, and also there will be locusts and plagues, the oceans will boil, the moon will turn as red as blood, cats and dogs will begin living together, and there will just generally be a lot of hysteria going around.

Though I am not an adherent to this faith, I feel that it is important to look past sectarian differences and recognize brothers and sisters in terror.

Iä! Iä! Iesu Ftahn!

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I Have Some Opinions about Buzz Bissinger

Posted in Braak, crotchety ranting with tags , , on March 28, 2013 by braak

So, maybe you hear about this crazy GQ article in which my fellow Philadelphian Buzz Bissinger (author of Friday Night Lights ) talks about how he spent more than half a million dollars on fancy leather clothes, most of which are from Gucci.  Now he is in rehab for his shopping addiction.  That is good news, because he clearly had an addiction that was, like many addictions, probably symptomatic of a sense of deep personal unhappiness, and deep personal unhappiness is bad for everyone, even when you can afford to throw a half a million dollars of leather pants at it.

The article is about three parts, and two of them I am not going to get into.  The first is that it’s an addiction, yes, and addictions are bad, and it’s good that dude is in rehab.  The other is when he talks about he got into S&M and gay orgies, and that is his business, I am not even interested in that.

The third part that’s pretty important is that half a million dollars of Gucci leather makes you look fucking ridiculous.

627

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Veronica Mars, Kickstarter, &c.

Posted in Braak, crotchety ranting with tags , , , on March 14, 2013 by braak

I was going to write a big screed about this Veronica Mars kickstarter project, and about how ultimately destructive it is for people to base their cultural identity on products provided from an utterly amoral (all corporations are by their nature fundamentally amoral) industry that actually literally is not capable of caring less about them (the market dynamic of “paying for product” means that a corporation is going to care exactly as much about you as your money is representative of a share of their income, that is what “free market” is – if you can spend ten dollars on a movie, then Warner Brothers cares ten dollars about you; if their global revenue for a movie is three hundred million dollars, then they care one thirty-millionth about you).  Then I decided NOT to write about it, because I actually don’t even care about 1) Veronica Mars or 2) people who like Veronica Mars.  Nothing against you/those guys, it’s just that “the creation of Veronica Mars projects” is not a field of human endeavour that I happen to be interested in.

Making art is a field that I’m interested in, though, so maybe I should talk about this.

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Help Me Pick My Next TV Show

Posted in Jeff Holland, Threat Quality with tags , , , , , , , , , on March 4, 2013 by braak

It only recently occurred to me that virtually every post I’ve made of late has been focused on comics and/or superheroes. There are a few reasons for this, one of which is, shit man, that’s just what I like. I’m pretty knowledgeable on the subject and those tend to be evergreen posts. That Iron Man primer I wrote a couple years Lost-season1back? Always one of our top searches of the week. And for some reason people are always looking up Ghost Rider. Don’t ask me.

That said, once I realized just how singularly focused my posts had become, I started trying to remember what the hell else I like to write about. The answers, obviously – because I am a man of simple joys – are movies and TV (I am abysmal when it comes to talking about music, unfortunately, usually just variations on “This makes my ears feel happy!!!”).

TV, especially. You may not know this, but before we started up Threat Quality, I was pretty prolific at my old site, I Speak TV. Go check it out, it’s kind of fun to remember that once upon a time, people gave a shit about Heroes.

Anyway, a combination of frustration over the truly shitty Blogger controls, a new job where I was actually writing for a living, and coming up with topics for this site ultimately mothballed ISTV back in ’09, and as sites like Hitfix and AV Club started devoting more time to daily TV discussion, I didn’t think there was a lot more I could add anyway.

So I no longer Speak TV with regularity, except when pilots roll around, or Aaron Sorkin does something dumb, or superheroes make their unfortunate way to television. Still miss you, The Cape, you silly old thing.

Or when Lost did anything.  Read more »

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