Don't Panic, Cincinnati

There are way too many factors to blame for the absolute disaster that was the Steelers/Bengals melee. The city Cincinnati woke up with severe depression after witnessing what should have been a sure-fire win evaporate in the span of two game minutes. Once again knocked out of the first round. Once again losing to the dreaded Pittsburgh Steelers. Once again got bit by the injury bug. And once again, blowing a lead in all the wrong times. It is unfathomable to find a worse way to lose the way the Bengals lost last night.

Might be karma, for the fans throwing crap on to the field when Big Ben got injured (although it might be retaliation for one of their players being knocked unconscious and the Steelers celebrating it). It might just be the inability to overcome the hurdle of bad history in the playoffs. But there is a person that should receive none of the blame. None of it.





Marvin Lewis.



Keep that man’s job. It is not his fault that he was dealt a bad hand. It is not his fault that the heart and soul of the organization got hurt on the final weeks of the season and was unavailable to help out. Up until the injury, Andy Dalton’s Bengals were one of the best threats in the entire league---even clinging to the #1 seed at one point. I had predicted that this was going to be Dalton's coming out party---similar to when Flacco finally took the next step with the Ravens back in 2013. It is not Lewis’ fault that the Bengals front office staff also rounded up a squad with toxic players prone to self-destructing.

Marvin Lewis kept the team intact, prevented them from panicking, and coached them to within two minutes of a victory. With a back-up quarterback that clearly wasn’t prepared going up against a Pittsburgh squad that has a Super Bowl-winning quarterback at the helm, this team was destined to lose in the first place. I had all my money on the Steelers. No Dalton, no victory. In the NFL, you cannot win without your leader at center—it has become impossible in this pass/offense-crazy league.

Excellent teachers can wind up with bad classes of students. Great poker players can be dealt bad hands. Marvin Lewis was dealt an ugly scenario with emotional players knowing they won’t go far without the entire team losing their cool because their victory disappeared after a series of terrible decisions that was the result of the melee that had transpired during the previous 58 minutes.

Once upon a time, the Cincinnati Bengals was the best team in the AFC. Lewis’ job was not in jeopardy then, and it shouldn’t be now. The game was disgusting, didn’t have to reach that point, and the sooner everyone forgets about it, the better.



The 2015-2016 Bengals minus Andy Dalton was not meant to win. Don’t throw Lewis under the bus because of this.

The Hateful Eight: 5/10

Kendrick Lamar was the best live performance I've ever seen. April 2014, he rocked UCF. However, we had to endure two hours of mediocre rappers before getting to the main event. By the time we got to the very good part of the night, we were emotionally, physically drained. Lamar did his best, but Orlando struggled to maintain the energy. This is Hateful Eight in a nutshell.

It is extremely hard to get mad at Tarantino and the Hateful Eight project as they went through extreme lengths to ensure that it felt, sounded, and looked like a Western straight out of the 1960s. From getting Ennio Morricone to compose the soundtrack to using the same cameras used to film Charlton Heston, Tarantino and friends reached far back into cinematic history and moved it to present day. This alone propels the movie to become a unique experience, as there is actually an overture and then an intermission about halfway into the film.

But leading up to that intermission is where the film really struggles. Throughout his career, the better Tarantino's script is, the better the movie will become—regardless of all the other intangibles. Death Proof's climax rivals as one of the best in the past decade, but the ho-hum dialogue and unlikable first round of characters prevented us from truly enjoying it. In the meantime, Reservoir Dogs is one of the rare movies in which literally every word said is important, making it one of the best indie films you'll ever see.

There is a lot of what I like to call abe dialogue (already been established) in Hateful Eight—leading to a lot of repetitive dialogue, repetitive conversations, and verbal revelations that we had already encountered. As a matter of fact, you could have cut the first third of the movie because the facts and characterizations created were re-created once the movie's setting becomes more claustrophobic and remains in the cabin. Part of Tarantino's magic was his ability to create awesome characters without revealing too much about them. Sadly we don't get much of this in Hateful Eight.

The Tarantinoisms (good music, sharp imagery, inventive directing) start taking off once intermission ends and the intriguing mystery begins, as the tension suddenly revs up. In the second half is when things become interesting and the actors (and lone main actress) can start chewing at the scenery. The words suddenly become important, the details become more prevalent, and the audience has become much more engaged. In spite of this, the length of the film and the over-indulgence of throwaway dialogue weighs down on you and never allows for Hateful Eight to really reach the quality lengths of Tarantino's other hybrid westerns like Django Unchained and Inglorious Basterds.

Hateful Eight is like a large fluffy pound cake, a lot of density but lacking in flavor and substance. Tarantino directed this with his usual precision and quirkiness, however it lacks an outstanding moment, it lacks an outstanding character, and with the climax being delayed in favor of displaying past events it's hard to find the pulse of this irregular heartbeat.

In order for lengthy movies to maintain interest you have to cover a lot of ground in terms of whether years or space. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly covers an insane amount of Western territory, leading to every minute being required. Shawshank Redemption covers over two decades of prison life, so it too needed every minute. Hateful Eight is a cinematic bottle episode that could have been much shorter, much tighter, and with that each detail and word being much more vital.

Somewhere in that cabin lies a good story, and overall a good movie. You just have to get past the thicket of words to find it.

The Debate That Shouldn't Even Be a Debate

I will never understand the gun control issue.



This should not even be a debate.



We are not trying to ban all the guns, we are not marching to your door to strip them from your families. We aren’t drowning all your precious weapons by tossing them into the ocean. The only thing it sounds like we are trying to do, is making sure that we are safer while living in a society that accepts and loves their firearms. We are merely trying to make it harder for people that are mentally disabled, disgruntled, or just plain evil from obtaining weapons to use on innocent lives. That is it. What is the big issue?

We are not enforcing a shutdown on gun sales. We are not trying to limit anything. We just want to make the procedure a little bit tighter so fewer monsters can slip through the cracks and craft a deadly attack. We want less bad people having full access to weapons. To say this is a non-issue is absolutely silly, after all the United States has seen an increase in mass shootings and they have been becoming quite gruesome. Sandy Hook should still shake your soul considering that dozens of children couldn’t reach puberty because of an emotional prick.

The United States doesn’t deserve to moan about gun control simply because we collectively as a society have lost the right to freely just purchase a weapon. Although we are nowhere near as violent as the Middle East, we are still way ahead of the pack of civilized nations in terms of gun violence. Whether its suicides, murders, mass shootings, gang shootings, or accidental shootings by toddlers (which was an unfathomable 40+ incidents in 2015), the gun violence is at a high level and needs to cool off a bit.

The fact that we haven’t done much of anything since Sandy Hook is just a really unfortunate thing. After that terrible, terrible day, something has to be done. I am not asking for much: stricter background checks, banning of certain assault rifles (because seriously, you don’t need assault rifles unless you live in a warzone).

I am perfectly fine with people owning guns, I don’t fear them as long as they aren’t causing any problems. The truth is however we need to make this country safer in terms of gun violence. Being a stick in the mud and complaining that criminals will still kill is a silly argument. Under that logic, we should never lock our doors because criminals will rob you anyway. In terms of fighting crime, every little bit helps, plain and simple. This should be a non-issue. We need to work together on this, and try to reduce the crime. If you don't see a problem with the way things are right now, you are part of the problem.



Don’t ban guns completely, but go through the proper screenings and classes before buying one. Period.