Kurt Pankau Dot Com

💊 I'm Pushing An Elephant Up The Stairs... The Crime:  Addicted to Outrage: How Thinking Like a Recovering Addict Can Heal the Country The Guilty Party: Glenn Beck Overview: Beck goes full stream-of-consciousness for 400 pages ignoring his own very obvious framing device and, my god, did anybody  edit this? Why I Hate It... The last 20% or so of this book is pretty good. Beck makes an impassioned argument for reaching across the aisle and he offers some practical advice for how to do so, using addiction and AA as a metaphorical framework. I disagree with a lot of his base assumptions and feel like he leans too hard on his own pop philosophy, but those are relatively minor things in the long run. He admits that he built his career stoking outrage, comes dangerously close to actually apologizing for that, and his basic thesis of be-less-of-an-asshole-to-people-you-disagree-with is thoughtful, well-reasoned, and feels like it's coming from a place of honesty and good intent...

😈 He's a Tramp, But I Love Him... Since taking over LucasFilm, Disney has developed a bit of a scoundrel problem. Not that there's too many, per se --scoundrels make for great characters. Han Solo is one of the most iconic scoundrels in all of cinema. But since they started making  Star Wars  content, Disney has gone all-in on anti-heroes, scamps, and ne'er-do-wells. The problem is, though... they kind of suck at writing them. I mentioned this being one of the main problems plaguing  The Book of Boba Fett , but it's endemic to the franchise at this point and goes back at  least  as far as  Rogue One . Now, don't get me wrong, I liked  Rogue One  quite a bit, and not just because I was crushing super hard on Felicity Jones at the time. But think about Jyn Erso's character progression in that movie. And if your immediate reaction to that question is "What character progression?" then you know exactly what I'm talking about. Jyn makes practical...

🌱 Feed Me, Seymour... The Crime:  In Defense Of Food: An Eater's Manifesto The Guilty Party: Michael Pollan Overview: Read words. Mostly books. Not this one. Why I Hate It... There's some good advice in this book. The cover, for instance, has the words "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." That's pretty sound advice, if you ask me. And you can pretty much just stop at the cover. This one angered me more or less from page one. I went into it expecting to like it, and I was immediately repulsed. At least a portion of the blame must go to the narrator Scott Brick, who performs the audiobook with maximum condescending smarm. It's whatever the exact opposite of charming  is. But Brick was reading from a terrible script, and the end result was bad enough that I found myself constantly reacting against it--even during the times when I knew Pollan's facts were right. He correctly, for instance, dives into the technical obstacles of doing good food science and ...

🚀 Any Trick In The Book, Now Baby... The Crime:  The Book of Boba Fett The Guilty Party: Jon Favreau Overview: Less a TV show than a collection of fan service and poorly-executed ideas all chess-pieced together into a meaningless action set-piece finale. Why I Hate It... Do you know the difference between a story and a premise? This isn't a set up to a joke or anything. It is, rather, the sort of question that comes up if you spend enough time hanging around with writers. A premise is simply an idea. For it to be a story  you need a character journey rooted in the choices of the protagonist. You need stakes. You need agency. You need an internal conflict that must be overcome. If you don't have that central character journey, then all you're left with is just a bunch of stuff that happens, divorced from meaning or consequence--full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. This is the classic amateur writer mistake. Newbie writers  love  a good premise. They ...

🕺 I Like To Move It, Move It... The Crime:  Keep Moving: And Other Truths About Living Well Longer The Guilty Party: Dick Van Dyke Overview: The more you learn about Van Dyke's personal life, the more he comes off as a gigantic douche. Why I Hate It... I have a lot of affection for Dick Van Dyke. I grew up watching Mary Poppins  and reruns of The Dick Van Dyke Show . (Yes, especially the walnut episode!) So I borrowed this from the library expecting it to be charming and familiar and warm and fuzzy--like a favorite bedtime story as narrated by Morgan Freeman. Ostensibly a how-to guide for the nonagenarian, I thought it would secretly be a blend of philosophy and memoir with a dash of the self-deprecating humor and unflinching geniality that was the core of his appeal as a young actor. What I got instead was rambling Hallmark-channel dreck, overwrought and presented in seemingly random order with such wide-eyed sincerity that it begins to slip into self-parody. Is this......

🥊 Mama Said Knock You Out... The Crime:  Sucker Punch The Guilty Party: Zack Snyder Overview: Snyder crafts a hyper-stylized meditation on feminism and audience complicity in sexual-violence-by-proxy that fails on just about every level but you kind of have to admire it for what it's trying to do. Why I Don't Completely Hate It... Another week, another content warning for sexual assault. We'll do something lighter next week, I promise. I am not a Zack Snyder fan. There are things he's good at, for sure: He's got a distinct and well-executed auteur style (I don't love it, but it's definitely singular and finely crafted); he's got a great sense of scene geography during chaotic action sequences; he's got a vibrant visual imagination; and he's great at shot composition. He uses these talents to create instantly-recognizable and iconic visual tableaus. The things he's not so good at, however, are the things that I really care about in my stories...