HARDBARNED! The Blog

This blog began in 2008 as a series of posts I wrote about my comically frustrated working life as a post-graduate barn-hauling truck driver, which evolved into a book I published in 2016. Those posts no longer exist here. Today, the blog mostly consists of my film reviews, occasionally touching on other aspects of popular culture. You can scroll through it all below, or browse the same content at Medium.

Blue Valentine & The Place Beyond The Wolverine

Derek Cianfrance's Blue Valentine (2010) is to divorce what Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream (2000) is to drug abuse—not an easy film to watch, but a painfully moving work of fiction grounded in profound truths, a movie you are perhaps happier to have seen than you may be inclined to revisit again.

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The Counselor Sinks Faster Than Gravity

The Counselor, boasting a bevy of swaggering A-listers at the top of their games, just never connects. It's all procedural, and Ridley Scott deserves plenty of credit for plowing artfully through all those requisite, well-tread procedures that Soderbergh covered thoroughly in Traffic—the drug selling, drug buying, drug shipping, drug dealing, drug warring, drug-mess-cleaning and all the inevitable drug fallout.

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McDonald's, McDeath, and Yes I Want Fries With That

I've done my share of bagging on McDonald's. It's the punching bag of the fast-food industry, isn't it? It's fun to punch, right? It's old news that this stuff is bad for you, but that won't stop many of us from condemning the clown's house of burgers with one side of our mouths while cramming the other side with his delicious fries.

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Prepping For The Walking Dead and WWZ

My interest, first in the comic and then in the subsequent TV show, does not begin to approach the universe of those fans who are so obsessed with The Walking Dead (and other apocalyptic scenarios) that they are literally preparing for what they are thoroughly convinced is the actual, (coming soon!) end of civilization.

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My Volvo 240 (245) Wagon (Slow, Heavy, Practical, Timeless)

In February 2013, I wrote to Volvo’s North-American car division headquarters because I wanted to suggest that they start remanufacturing my 20-year-old 240 wagon (AKA the 245, AKA the Classic, AKA the Brick), the greatest rectangular grandma grocery-getter ever built, a 114 horsepower, 26 mpg rear-wheel driven gear-hauling beast of weather-proofed-pickup-truck capacity if there ever was one.

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An Open Letter To James Cameron

Like many of us, you could pretend that T3 and T4 never happened, just like most of us pretend that there are only three Star Wars films. If you were indeed “quietly advising” Arnold about returning for T5, wouldn’t you like to make one final film and crush the last two pretenders like an old skull under the heel of a fleshless, menacing T-800?

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Gears of War 3: Long Live The Horde!

Epic Games’ 2011 futuristic science fiction post-apocalyptic hit Gears of War 3, which pits a scrappy international army of overly muscled humans (who curiously never break for the weight room or to quaff a protein shake but nonetheless waddle around, perma-swollen under their immense, rippled muscle masses like a diverse assortment of heavily armed Lou Ferrigno clones) to battle a horrifying array of evil monsters from underground known as the Locust Horde, who will stop at nothing to murder every last one of us in the most terrifying of ways.

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Get Stoked! The Bones Brigade Returns

Out of nowhere Rodney Mullen steals the emotional core of the film, sharing thoughtful reflections on his challenging relationship with a father who repeatedly banned him from the sport despite his absolute domination of what was then known as “freestyle” skating, which focused mainly on flatland tricks, of which Mullen was the undisputed champion and chief innovator.

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