I’ll be reviewing HBO’s True Blood this season for Badass Digest. Excitement!

I dig the show, and I appreciate its fierce commitment to over-the-top, blood-soaked Southern goth/fairy sex insanity, but I gotta be honest here: The real reason I campaigned to cover the show was to write about Christopher Meloni’s turn as a badass black-cloaked vampire who calls himself “The Authority” (Do ya feel the menace?).

OK, maybe Meloni’s not the only reason I want to write about True Blood. According to reports, this season will be the last spearheaded by show creator Alan Ball, which means we’ll hopefully start seeing the show move in a somewhat different direction as Season 5 progresses and the new showrunners start to influence things. It’ll be fun to follow the show this year to see what new tricks it has in store for us and how it plans keep us hooked for Season 6.

So join me @ Badass Digest every week after the show premieres on June 10. It’ll be fun. And probably a little dirty.

Marvel’s The Avengers is not the best superhero movie ever made. It may not even be the best Marvel movie ever made. But that doesn’t mean The Avengers isn’t a great movie. Writer-director Joss Whedon has pulled off a mini miracle here — The Avengers is a fun, exciting and sometimes magical superhero flick packed to the gills with heart, humor and bad-assery.

I use the word “miracle” because that’s exactly what The Avengers is. There’s no way a two-and-a-half-hour-long action movie with this much baggage, starring four charismatic Hollywood leading men — plus five or six distinguished supporting players — should be this good. Or make this much sense. Or not feel like an uneven, drawn-out mess. Whedon balances everything like a pro, giving each major character just enough depth, conflict and screen time to make us love them all and cheer for them in the end.

It takes a deft hand to make a movie like this work. The film stirs several larger-than-life characters and elements from five mega-successful comic book movies together to create one big mass-marketed, mass-appealing stew. This thing was conceived to capitalize on the popularity and success of Marvel’s recent spate of blockbusters (and to pave the way for a decade’s worth of future Marvel movie projects), and somehow, the movie doesn’t play like the cold, calculating product of corporate synergy that it is. Despite a somewhat clunky opening and Samuel L. Jackson’s not so stellar performance as Nick Fury, The Avengers plays like a movie made by a talented storyteller who is in love with the concept of superheroes and who wants everyone else to feel the same way.

There’s a genuine sense of love and respect for the characters and the comic book source material that’s palpable in every scene. It’s important for a good comic book movie to have that. And more importantly, it’s clear that Whedon made his movie with a genuine sense of love and respect for the audience in the mind. That’s rare, especially when we’re talking about summer blockbusters.

There’s no doubt in my mind that Whedon was absolutely the perfect guy to bring The Avengers to the big screen. The man knows how to entertain — he delivers the thrills, jokes, layers and heart audiences crave. He’s been doing it for years with his TV shows (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, Dollhouse — all fun, smart, exciting and engaging shows that will suck you in, surprise you with their depth and humor, and inspire you to pump your fist and ask for more. I believe this is true for ALL OF YOU!).

Making The Avengers was a no-brainer for Marvel. In its desire to earn a massive payday that would keep on paying, Marvel decided to put its most bankable stars together in one mega movie that was sure to make everybody rich. But here’s the amazing part: Marvel also decided to make a great fucking movie!

Instead of just throwing its contractually-obligated, spandex clad stars up on the screen, adding a few explosions, and hoping the world would show up, Marvel opted to protect the integrity of their characters, and reward viewers, by hiring an ace like Whedon to craft a marketable work of pop art. The decision paid off with a wonderful Avengers movie worthy of the billion dollars it earned on opening weekend. Fuck yeah, nice job, Marvel!

Look, The Avengers didn’t have to be a good movie. It would have made a billion dollars even if it was a piece of shit. It could have ended up looking and playing like Michael Bay’s Transformers — a plodding, soulless, but financially successful product that topped the box-office despite its of lack of love or respect for its characters’ history or its audience intelligence. But Marvel said, “Fuck that, let’s rock this shit right,” and hired one of the greatest storytellers of our time to helm its flagship franchise.

Thanks, Marvel. And thanks, Joss Whedon. I’ve seen your movie twice, and it made me feel like an amazed, care free kid on both occasions. I don’t think that’s ever happened to me before in my adult life. Not lately anyway. That shit is priceless.

The Fringe Season 4 finale had no shortage of striking images (The unsettling googly eyes of a dead redhead brought back to life, the show’s leading lady taking a bullet right in the thinker), but none was more striking than the image of Walter Bishop with blood on his hands.

Walter, like a certain chair-flipping Avenger, has gobs of red on his ledger. It’s gushing red. The shot of his bloody hands near the end of this episode served as a piercing reminder that the terrible things we were watching unfold were all his fault. Read the rest of my Fringe episode review @ Badass Digest.

For those of you who thought all this blogging about comic books and Star Trek and nerdy movies and TV shows was done by a lady, well, sorry to disappoint you. I am indeed a guy. With balls. And facial/nose hair. I perspire, pee standing up, and I FUCKING HATE THE MOVE GREASE!

So seeing as I’m a dude and a writer, I’m happy to announce I’ve started writing for one of the best sites on the web for dudes, GuySpeed. You can find posts written by yours truly daily on GuySpeed, and be sure to catch my new weekly column, “Check it or Chuck It,” in which I recommend five cool things to check out and five horrible things to avoid for the week. Bro.

There was a lot to love about Friday’s tense and surprising episode of Fringe. “Brave New World, Part 1″ delivered the stuff Fringe fans have been looking forward to seeing since Season One – Peter and Olivia gettin’ all cozy and planning a future together, Olivia using her Cortexi-powers like a badass superhero and Walter working at the height of his confidence. This was a fun and dark episode that moved at a rapid clip and seemed to pile on new and intriguing layers every few minutes. Read the rest of my Fringe episode review @ Badass Digest.

Austin’s Kiyanna Project has posted a new session with Royal Canoe performing “Bathtubs.” This is my favorite Kiyanna video so far. Stream it below and visit KP’s site.

Mourning the loss of a great character is never easy, but how do you mourn the loss of an entire universe?

On Friday’s episode of Fringe, “Worlds Apart,” the show asked us to wave goodbye to our beloved Fringies from Over There. Like Walter, who revealed his strong attachment to the Earth 2 folks and their world at the end of the episode, I’m going to miss the Alt-set even more than I could have imagined. I know the Earth 2 folks aren’t exactly dead, but they are gone, and they took Lincoln Lee with them. It’s likely we’ll see them again before the series ends (I hope), but I don’t expect to see Peter and Olivia universe-hopping any time soon. The bridge is closed, the link is severed and our focus is now on Earth1 and the race to capture David Robert Jones.

Read the rest of my Fringe episode review @ Badass Digest.

Super-talented hyphenate Chelsea Peretti arrived in Austin this week to perform at the Moontower Comedy and Oddity Fest. I chatted with Peretti about her upcoming stand-up shows, her writing gig on NBC’s Parks and Recreation, and her work with other comedians, like Louis C.K. and Todd Glass. Here’s a bit from the interview:

How important is Twitter in your life? What has that medium really done for comedians?

Well, I’ve always felt very indebted to the Internet, even though it’s a stressful place. It can feel like the center of the universe, when it’s really hopefully not. But I used to have a blog, it’s still there, I have a blog. I had a web series, I had these videos we made, and I’ve been able to gain a following or a group of people who I can have access to that I wouldn’t have before, and I’m thankful for that. Twitter has been cool. For some reason, I think Twitter has been even better for me than blogging was, because the shorter format works well for me for some reason. It’s really cool. I guess the next thing that everyone is doing is podcasts. I try to hold off on technologies as long as I can because I’m so addictive. So, obviously Twitter is incredibly consuming in my mental space, which I don’t always love, but it’s pretty rewarding too. I like the immediacy of it, to be able to do something and then instantly see if people find it funny or not. It’s kind of a useful tool.

Read the full interview @ Austinist.

My first post for Austinist went live earlier today. It’s an interview with comedian and renowned stoner Ari Shaffir, who I spoke with on 4/20. You may know Shaffir from his polarizing Amazing Racist videos or from Joe Rogan’s podcast. Shaffir is heading to Austin this weekend to perform stand-up comedy jokes at the Moontower Comedy Fest. I encourage everyone to check out his show, especially if you like jokes about anal sex and racism! Here’s a snippet from the interview:

Some people might feel that your act is offensive just for the sake of being offensive or that you say controversial or vulgar things just to upset the audience. What you say to those people?

I do not say those things to upset the audience. I get it if you’re conservative, but I’m more casual about things like sex and race, so I just sort of take it casually. I just want to tell the joke, but the joke happens to be about doing anal with somebody or whatever. I’m not trying to be offensive, I’m trying to tell stories about human behavior, and a lot of them are fucking filthy.

Read the rest @ Austinist.

Fringe dove head first into the deep end on Friday and asked us to tag along. We ended up in the year 2036 – more than twenty years after The Observers invaded the planet, murdered people in the streets and enslaved humanity. Yeah, that happened. It was weird. Check out the rest of my episode review @ Badass Digest.