5 Razors

Usagi Yojimbo #151

/ / Comics

Usagi Yojimbo #151In another single-issue tale, Usagi Yojimbo #151 opens with the rabbit ronin stumbling upon a valley of death where a ruined procession, and the broken bodies of both its samurai escort and the attacking bandits all line the forest floor. In the middle of the carnage Miyamoto Usagi finds only a single survivor, the daughter of the sake brewer in Maru Town who is the promised bride to the son of a brewer in the town of Tansu in two days time.

With only two days before her scheduled wedding, and on the eve of a tempestuous storm about to erupt, Usagi volunteers to accompany Haruko to Tansu when the pair are attacked again on the road by Koroshi, the League of Assassins.

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Longmire – The Calling Back

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: Longmire – The Calling Back
  • wiki: link

“I always assumed you had to be really tough for your job. It never occurred to me that you were just you.”

Longmire - The Calling Back

Walt (Robert Taylor) runs into all kinds of complications while looking into the rape of a young Native American woman (Julia Jones) by local oil workers. First, because the crime took place on the reservation but by American citizens the prosecution of any case falls into a legal quagmire a Federal prosecutor would need to untangle and neither Walt nor Mathias (Zahn McClarnon) have the jurisdiction to investigate the case on their own. Also standing in the way of the truth is a traumatized victim who is hiding facts from Walt about that night, the girl’s ball-busting mother (Irene Bedard) who is more concerned about how the tragedy effects her than her daughter, and the lack of a proper rape kit and DNA evidence to match up to the perpetrators if they can even be found and brought to trial.

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Wander Over Yonder – The Fremergency Fronfract

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: Wander Over Yonder – The Fremergency Fronfract
  • wiki: link

Wander Over Yonder - The Fremergency Fronfract

It took almost no time at all for “The Fremergency Fronfract” to become one of my favorite episodes of Wander Over Yonder. Opening with drugged Lord Hater (Keith Ferguson) accidentally giving Wander‘s (Jack McBrayer) name to the dentist as hiss emergency contact, the entire episode features a loopy Hater hanging out with Wander and Sylvia (April Winchell) and becoming the friend Wander always knew he could be with a trip to an arcade Sylvia is all too happy to capture via Instagram.

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1995 – The Usual Suspects

/ / Home Video
  • Title: The Usual Suspects
  • IMDb: link

“The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”

The Usual SuspectsOn or around this date 20 years ago The Usual Suspects hit theaters for the first time. Written by Christopher McQuarrie (who recently gave us the best Mission: Impossible movie yet) and directed by Bryan Singer (who has struggled to make a film even half as good ever since), The Usual Suspects introduces us five criminals through a series of flashbacks which recount the events which brought them all together in a police line-up and what then led them to the docks a fateful night leaving only a single member of the group alive to tell the tale.

Despite the fact that the film hinges on reveal and twist ending, it works as well on the twelfth viewing as it does the first. Kevin Spacey stars as Verbal Kent (a role that would earn him an Academy Award and make him a star) who recounts the events of the crew’s movements to Customs Agent Dave Kujan (Chazz Palminteri) while attempting to keep certain facts about the boat and the mythical Keyser Soze from coming to light. The definition of an unreliable narrator, Verbal’s accounts are all Kujan and the audience are given to deduce the truth for themselves.

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Ex Machina

/ / Home Video
  • Title: Ex Machina
  • IMDb: link

Ex Machina

In creating a film about artificial life that is almost entirely driven on emotion rather than logic writer/director Alex Garland has beautifully crafted one of the most memorable movies in recent years. The film begins with a computer programmer winning an exclusive trip to the secluded home of the company’s CEO who has far more going on than anyone associated with the world’s largest search engine could possibly guess.

In the hidden compound Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) comes face-to-face not only with his boss, the alcoholic self-absorbed Nathan (Oscar Isaac), but also Nathan’s creation Ava (Alicia Vikander) who Caleb was handpicked to help Nathan test whether or not she is indeed the world’s first true Artificial Intelligence. Stranded miles from civilization in these odd surroundings, Caleb’s view on sentience and reality will be tested as Ava proves to be everything Nathan promises, and more.

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