Baby Driver
Written & Directed by Edgar Wright
In the Southern metropolis of Atlanta lives Baby, the best wheelman your heist could hire. He’s under the thumb of Doc (Kevin Spacey), a man who makes the jobs happen. The rest of the crews may change, but Baby is the one constant, Doc’s lucky charm. What makes Baby different than all the rest is that he’s always cranking the tunes, using the rhythm of his music to drive the car, life his life, and fall in love. Everything changes when Baby meets Deborah (Lily James), a waitress who wants to leave town and just drive while the radio blares on the speakers. Baby struggles to extricate himself from the mire of crime he’s drowning in, surrounded by lowlifes and sociopaths (Jamie Foxx, Jon Hamm, etc.). Will he get free and ride into the sunset with Deborah or will this be the day the music dies?
I have a soft spot for deceptively simple card games, those games that come in small-ish boxes and seem to just be a few cards and maybe half a dozen tokens. It doesn’t look like much, but upon playing them, you start to see the depth of strategy lying underneath. Love Letter was like this for me, and subsequently, Sushi Go among others. Belle of the Ball is another game that falls into this deceptively simple category.
For July, my book will be The Fisherman by John Langan, recent winner of a Bram Stoker award. The book is described thusly:
The town of Nevada, Iowa doesn’t have much going for it in the late 1990s, apart from the Video Hut. Twenty-something Jeremy works full time there while living at home with his widower father. Life is pretty quiet until customers start returning videos with hesitant complaints about “something wrong with the tape.” Jeremy finally sits down to watch these movies and finds sudden cuts to home video footage spliced in. These strange videos reveal a possible dark secret one of the townspeople is keeping. Jeremy begins to share these film clips with his manager and other people close to them causing more and more people to become entangled in the darkness surrounding his town.
Since DC Comics rolled out their New 52 relaunch, they seem to continue their lack of surety when it comes to Aquaman. Geoff Johns’ run began with a big chip on its soldier about the pop culture joke perception of the hero and Abnett’s first arc in the new Rebirth status quo continues that strange chest pumping. Aquaman aka Arthur Curry has opened an Atlantean embassy to the surface world. The previous story arc in Justice League where Atlantis attacked the surface has led to enormous tensions between the governments of the world and this mysterious underwater nation. While welcoming visitors, Arthur is forced to deal with The Trench, a radical terrorist group of Atlanteans who want to eliminate the surface dwellers. He has his fiancee Mera running interference while Tula acts as the ruler of Atlantis in Arthur’s absence. And his old nemesis Black Manta looms in the distance.
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