REVIEW: The Slammin’ Salmon [2009]

“Feed my pretties—Feed!” Those Broken Lizard boys had quite the run. After needing to visit colleges for screenings of their debut Puddle Cruiser, the comedy troupe struck it big with Super Troopers, in effect giving them free reign to see both follow-ups have their day in multiplexes, albeit to low returns. As a result—Club Dread is admittedly weak, but Beerfest found some of that magic from their Trooper days—the new flick wasn’t given a wide release, instead relegated to DVD and the hopes word of mouth and fan base will…

Read More

Using the space between two languages … Ha Jin ventures to Buffalo

The second installment to Just Buffalo Literary Center’s Babel series for the 2009-2010 season saw American-Chinese author Ha Jin taking the stage. He is an interesting writer in the fact that he crafts his work with his second language, English. Not even learning it until college, where it was his fifth out of five choices to study at university, he has both adopted it and America as his home. Saying that he is in semi-exile from China, he still holds a linguistic bond to the nation even though they have…

Read More

It’s a comic, not a graphic novel: Babel’s Marjane Satrapi

I’ve finally come to the realization that the people who go to events such as Babel and another artsy affairs generally lean to the left. When tonight’s speaker, the Iranian author/artist Marjane Satrapi, relayed that this was the point where she would usually spend ten minutes bashing Bush, the crowd burst into uproarious laughter and unanimous applause. Well unanimous minus one, although I did laugh … it was funny. However, I think I was just the person Satrapi was hoping to reach when she wrote down her life’s experiences in…

Read More

REVIEW: Definitely, Maybe [2008]

“I make a living” Maybe I was just in the mood for a romantic comedy with some intelligence, but as far as wondering if I liked this week’s Valentine’s release, I say … definitely. Wow, I just did that. Despite the horrible wordplay, I really found myself fall into this story of one man’s three loves told to his daughter in order to show the complexities of that, humanity’s greatest passion. Definitely, Maybe is very much your run-of-the-mill rom-com, yet something about it just resonated with me. It might be…

Read More