Blue Ridge Ben

  Whether you consider Texas part of the South, Midwest, Southwest or some combination of those, many normal people I talk to with only a passing knowledge of NASCAR are always surprised to learn when I tell them that historically there have not been many Texans in stock car racing. Of course, there are some really notable champions like Terry Labonte (2 time Cup), Bobby Labonte (1 Cup, 1 Xfinity), Chris Buescher (Xfinity) and James Buescher (Truck) but they are the exception to the rule all being drivers who relocated to North Carolina very early in their careers to pursue racing and the Bueschers coming after the period where sprint and midget racers coming to NASCAR had been normalized of which Texas has always had a culture dating back to the days of AJ Foyt, aided by Oklahoma being a sacred place in that world. However, historically the bulk of asphalt short tracks in Texas has been located in San Antonio and when those eventually closed there was very little left for late mo...

  I had a rough couple of weeks for various reasons but most notably being sick, and I just barely watched anything other than YouTube videos and some episodes of old TV series I’m working on that maybe might get posts on this blog later on, but today I’m finally feeling a decent bit better though not entirely over my cold and in good spirits so decided it was time to take on Saw III. As always, let’s get the nasty bad part of the review out of the way first. The entire storyline of the Jeff character is pretty uninteresting as they didn’t learn the lessons of the first film that having significant interactions between multiple instead of an angry guy just standing there contemplating not killing people like a total prick is a significant part of developing them. Also, the traps really lost their ironic basis entirely and none of them until the last one are particularly clever or interesting, they just sound like they were lazily picked out of a hat submitted by production staff....

  Finally getting around to watching Saw II as part of my complete series rewatch after a few weeks since the first, this time watched on the Roku Channel instead of my beat up DVDs because it is a marginally crisper picture and I cannot do a disservice to the cinematographer, of course. Oddly enough I believe that this is the Saw film that I have seen the most times in my life, just because it’d sometimes pop up on random streamers or back in the day cable movie channels. As often with these reviews, we’ll get to the bad first. The cast is a huge downgrade, no offense to Beverley Mitchell who I loved as a kid who sometimes watched 7 th Heaven with my older sister, from the original with none of the victims being nearly as compelling as the two originals and Donnie Wahlberg’s one-note performance being a huge downgrade from in terms of nuance from Danny Glover in the lead detective role. The nu metal music video editing isn’t quite as intense as the original, but unfortunately i...