As an 1980s teenager growing up in New York City, I got the chance to see The Ramones on a fairly regular basis. The beloved local band played clubs all over the city, including the famed CBGB on Manhattan’s lower east side as well as at my hometown haunt, L’amour, a heavy metal club in Brooklyn. Every kid with a token for the subway — whether they typically listened to hard rock, punk, metal, or hardcore — flocked to see the local heroes play their signature tunes like “Blitzkrieg Pop,” “Pinhead,” “Teenager Lobotomy,” and “I Wanna Be Sedated.”

The mop-topped liked-surnamed band members — singer Joey, guitarist Johnny, bassist Dee Dee, and original drummer Tommy — formed the band in 1974, and always donned t-shirts, jeans, Converse sneakers, and leather MC jackets on stage to play their fast-paced punk anthems, getting crowds to shout out catchphrases like “Hey, ho, let’s go!” and “D.U.M.B. everyone’s accusing me!”

The Ramones are considered to be the forefathers of punk rock, thanks to the aggressive simplicity of early tunes like “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue,” “Judy Is A Punk,” and “I Don’t Wanna Go Down To The Basement,” but their extensive collection of songs also features music heavily influenced by the 1950’s girl groups (“I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend”), Bobby Freeman (“Do You Wanna Dance?”), as well as surf music and British Invasion bands.

Like most comic book loving guys my age, growing up the Silver Surfer was one of my favorite fictional characters. He was a stoic creature who traveled the cosmos on and with nothing but a board, had cosmic powers, and looked cool as fuck. And even though his task was to endlessly seek out inhabited planets for his master Galactus to raze into non-existence, he was strangely benevolent. For me, the Silver Surfer shared top honors with Thor, Hulk, Blackbolt, and Machine Man.

I’ve always dreamed about seeing the Silver Surfer up on the big screen. What Doug Jones (the actor behind the Surfer body) and the Weta Digital effects crew did in crafting the herald of Galactus in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer was quite actually the fulfillment of one of my childhood dreams. It’s not often that you can say something like that without being facetious. And not only does the Surfer looks amazing in this movie, thanks to Laurence Fishburne — who provided the Surfer’s voice — he sounds great, too.

In this sequel to 2005’s Fantastic Four, mysterious unnatural global occurrences begin to take place. Seas turn stone-like, massive holes appear out of nowhere, and power outages wreak havoc throughout the planet. Enter Mr. Fantastic (Ioan Gruffudd) and The Invisible Woman (Jessica Alba) — the super couple least likely to finish a wedding ceremony — and their ever-bickering teammates The Thing (Michael Chiklis) and The Human Torch (Chris Evans), collectively known as The Fantastic Four — our super-group of convenience in this film. The group is recruited by a military special forces team (led by Andre Braugher) to investigate the phenomena, which coincides with the arrival of the enigmatic Silver Surfer, who summons to him the world-eater Galactus and hence the impending doom of Earth. Oh, and the Fantastic Four suffers through some power-switching and another impending doom — the reemergence of Doctor Doom (Julian McMahon).

Ok, great stuff for a movie, right? Yeah, now about this movie — let’s talk a little about that …

Peter Berg, director of Very Bad Things and actor in such films as Smokin’ Aces, Collateral, and The Great White Hype, gets behind the camera again, this time emulating master Michael Mann’s own visual style in a brilliant FBI crime drama embedded deep within foreign soil in The Kingdom, a film about a crack team of agents that hits Saudi Arabian sand to uncover the mad militant strategist behind a horribly brutal orchestration that left one FBI agent dead.

At its heart, The Kingdom is a film about two cultures diametrically opposed in political philosophy, religion, and social norms that must work together to ferret out the radical Muslim fundamentalist behind an attack on an small American community in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Spurred by the recent attack Special Agent Ronald Fleury (played by Jamie Foxx), who has a knack for talking himself into and out of any given situation, maneuvers his political chess pieces, navigating bureaucratic red tape and assembles an elite group of FBI field operatives — Grant Sykes (Chris Cooper), Janet Mayes (Jennifer Garner), and Adam Leavitt (Jason Bateman) — to travel to Riyadh and find out who planned the strike that killed their friend, all in the limited time span of a week.

The dialogue between the American agents is funny, heartwarming, and sad at different moments in the film. Fleury’s three surrogates all play up their platonic bonds to different laughs throughout the film, each getting time to shine with one-liners and put downs. But this isn’t a comedy, and Fleury is no straight man. He’s a hard line agent who’ll try to do things by the book as much as possible, but often realizes that task (like getting into Saudi Arabia) requires the book to be tossed out once in awhile.

Those of you who know me personally are aware of how deeply my love of Clive Barker‘s work runs. When a well worn copy of the first Book of Blood found its way into my hands at the tender age of thirteen, I immediately devoured it and was forever changed. Much in the same way Lovecraft and Poe attacked the horror genre from their entirely unique perspectives, Barker had not only changed the rules, but literally (<--hey lookie, proper use of the term literally) rewrote the template for modern horror.After reading the insanely sick introduction to the Books, in which a fake psychic finds himself at the mercy of an all-too-real malevolent spirit who proceeds to etch the anthology’s stories onto his very flesh, literally making him the book of blood… Oh yes, I was hooked!

I then proceeded to read the first story from the Books of Blood, Midnight Meat Train, while on a NYC subway train on the way to school. Meat Train turned out to be about a fella who winds up at the end of a NYC subway line and accidentally discovers a secret underworld of barbaric murderers and monsters. And here I sat on a NYC train, one stop from the end of the line. Freaked much? Uh, yeah.

Righteo!!!! It’s Felix the cat, the wonderful, wonderful cat.

Now I’m not 60, but I remember Felix the Cat reruns from Saturday morning cartoon time “Down Under” in Australia, back in the 80s, so I was thrilled to have a sneak preview of this DVD. For anyone like me that wants to have all of their tele-visual childhood experiences on DVD to relive at any moment, to abuse as wondrous escapes from the harshness of an adult life (am I sharing too much?), this is a great buy.

The Golden Anniversary Edition DVD of Felix the Cat has all 31 episodes from the 1958-59 TV series, plus an AWESOME short film made in 1920 that is tagged as the precursor to Felix — you totally HAVE to see this. It is taking all my strength not to give away the ending of this old cartoon. My goodness. It will surely make your eyes pop out of your skull! I cannot imagine what went through the writer’s head, other than how utterly miserable their own life must have been, perhaps? You decide.