Image Credit: Bill Records/NBC
I can say with the utmost certainty that never before had I been upset by a hardware superstore commercial. Shopping for paint samples is annoying, certainly. But upsetting? Rarely.
That is, until I saw a commercial for Lowe’s that involved actor Gil McKinney. Sure, in the ad he’s just a dude looking for some affordable lawn furniture with his significant other, but all I could see was the creeper T.A. from Friday Night Lights who has been corrupting our dear Julie Taylor (Aimee Teegarden, pictured here sucking face with said culprit). As soon as I recognized the actor, it was hard not to think, “How can you be buying furniture at a time like this? Don’t you know what you’re putting the Taylor family through? Have you no shame, sir?!” I’m sure Mr. McKinney is a swell fellow in real life, and it’s certainly a testament to his skills as an actor (any FNL fan can attest they got bad vibes from him immediately), but I instantly saw Derek the Creeper T.A. when I saw him. (Sadly, the commercial has not yet made its way onto YouTube yet, so you’ll just have to wait patiently to see it on the old-fashioned television. Fight the urge to rewind!)
I’ve actually had this happen before, though. As I noted in the trailer for the upcoming Mandy Moore flick Love, Wedding, Marriage, as soon as I spotted actor Michael Weston, it was jarring. READ FULL STORY »
LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean is, technically, a very well-designed game. It’s extremely colorful. It makes funny noises. The first time you swim too far into the LEGO ocean and get eaten by a LEGO shark, you will probably laugh for a measurable second. LEGO Pirates is the latest in the Danish toy manufacturer’s series of LEGO-fied franchises, and like its brethren — LEGO Star Wars, LEGO Indiana Jones, LEGO Batman, and LEGO Harry Potter — the game wisely decides to treat its material with all the gravitas of a summer camp sketch. So all your favorite scenes from the first Pirates movie (and all your least favorite scenes from the second and third movies) get replayed by curious little block-people who speak in a guttural caveman non-language. You can break pretty much everything into little LEGO pieces, and as near as I can estimate after playing the game for about five hours, there are something like 20 million unlockable characters. LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean is a lot like the other LEGO games: Cute, playful, relentlessly inoffensive.
