With a new Fast and Furious movie out, I had to go back and check out this year’s new Saint’s Row game. After all, both franchises are about street-level criminals that rise in prominence thanks to their love for over-the-top stunts and each other. Saints Row: Gat out of Hell, which came out in January, shows how tight those bonds are as our characters literally go to the underworld to save one of their own. It’s more of what made Saints Row IV so fun, just not, you know, that much more.

So, spoilers for the last game: your character (the president) and the rest of the Third Street Saints are celebrating a very special birthday while adrift in your spaceship. Earth is still destroyed, which has created some overpopulation problems in Heaven and Hell, which somehow gives Satan the inspiration to grab the president and force them to marry his daughter, Jezebel. He successfully captures the president, so Johnny Gat and Kinzie go to hell to save them. How will the two of them accomplish that goal? By taking over New Hades, the new open world for this game.

New Hades feels a lot like the digital Steelport from the last game, even though it is a new city with a new layout and a hellish aesthetic. Instead of civilians there are miserable, suffering husks. Instead of water there are lakes of lava. The skyscrapers are still skyscrapers – corporate America fits right in Hell. But Saints Row IV felt like a splash of paint on Saints Row The Third and this feels like that dipped in fire. Saints Row The Third came out in 2011 and I hope the developers spend some time working on something really new for wherever the franchise goes next.

This game doesn’t really rehash anything gameplay-wise, however. Johnny gets powers that are similar but different enough compared to the ones the president had in the last game. Most notable are Johnny’s wings, which become the driving force behind several minigame types as well as the obvious preferred means of getting around. It’s a nice upgrade to the super jumping/gliding thing from Saints Row IV and it felt good to fly, for the most part. Johnny also gets access to some demonic weapons which aren’t really that exciting, at least the ones I found. The shotgun fires stakes, for example, and the grenade launcher shoots exploding toads. It sounds fun and looks good but doesn’t feel that different.

The real problem with Gat out of Hell is how short it is – I beat it in around five hours. That’s not a lot for a $20 game, and it’s even worse when you find out that there are only a couple story missions and that most of the game is made up of going around completing minigames and challenges. That’s fun and all, I don’t regret my purchase, but I’d like so much more… Maybe the series will be radically retooled for the next installment and this is kind of the bow on top of the gift that was the last couple games in the series. If that’s the case, great job guys! Don’t get cocky.

“I don’t want to be your friend, I just want to be your president.” That almost Radiohead lyric could basically have served as the campaign slogan of Francis Underwood (Kevin Spacey), the diabolic antihero of House of Cards. It’s third season is available on Netflix right now, you’ve probably already watched it if you care about the series, but whatever. Things are getting political right now, with people like Hilary Clinton finally announcing they’re campaigning for the presidency, and maybe you’re looking for something political to watch. In which case I would not recommend starting with House of Cards season three, and that’s not entirely because you should really start with the first season. Spoilers below, obviously.

So Frank’s the president now, that’s pretty cool, right? He maneuvered himself from the majority whip to president in a matter of months without a vote being cast – the man’s unstoppable. At least, that’s what we thought until this season started and the show went about relentlessly tearing him down. Suddenly the man who played everyone was getting played, the master tactician seemed to be without a clue. I guess the idea was that Frank has never been great in the limelight (a part of the show since his awkward cable news interviews in season one) and now he’s always under the biggest spotlight in the world. I don’t like it.

Think about other antihero characters. Walter White got in over his head a lot, he made many mistakes, but there was a dark thrill in watching him triumph over the odds. The same could be said about Tony Soprano or Vic Mackey or (early season) Dexter Morgan. Those were bad dudes and they got away with it and as audience members, we kind of liked it that way. A show where Walter White breaks bad only to get killed by the drug dealers in that hardware store parking lot is less fun. Just like watching Frank get beaten to the point that he’s an impotent mess at the end of the season, and then to just kick him while he’s down and call it done.

It doesn’t help that the supporting cast is so unlikable. Robin Wright is so, so good as Claire Underwood, but this year Claire reminds me most of Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation with his malfunctioning emotion chip. She seriously seems to always be doing the most selfish, foolish thing possible – and this is after the last few years made her out to be the tough one. There was a way to make her arc this year sympathetic and moving – I’d say most of the pieces were there. Instead she kind of looks like a dick. And that’s compared to Frank, the dickmaster general.

Doug (Michael Kelly) is back and has another sad, super creepy story. Derek Cecil’s Seth is also back and still a blank slate – without looking it up do you even know which character I’m talking about? Other supporting players have little arcs too, like Remy (Mahershala Ali) and Jackie Sharp (Molly Parker), which are fine but generally unrelated to the main story.

I will also say that one of the best parts of the first season was how you could believe this cynical, dark look at Washington, D.C. could be closer to reality than we’d like to admit. I’d say at this point, that’s gone. Case-in-point, the main legislation this year, called “America Works,” is all about gutting social entitlements in favor of universal employment. In no universe would a president be naive enough to actually say out loud his goal is a 100% employment rate. Similarly, no politician, especially a democrat, would ever seriously threaten defunding social security. Disbelief can only be suspended so far, you guys.

So a pretty uneven season from Netflix’s flagship show. In writing this review, I actually realized I liked it less than I thought I did and lowered my star rating down from three stars. Maybe I’m being a little harsh. I’ll give the show this: season three was probably the easiest to marathon yet. I’m not sure that’s a good thing.

Somehow a dumb movie about street racers stealing DVD players fourteen years ago got six sequels. Somehow that seventh sequel is on its way to grossing a billion dollars at the box office. Somehow I ended up being all about these movies. Life’s a big, dumb, goofy mess. At least it’s fun.

Furious 7 basically picks up where Fast and Furious 6 left off, with Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham) killing Han (Sung Kang) in Tokyo as revenge for what happened to Deckard’s brother. This upsets Dom (Vin Diesel), who gathers the rest of the family to avenge Han and ends up setting them on a globe-trotting quest that seems unrelated but it all makes sense at the time. The family, in case you haven’t been paying attention, includes the amnesiac Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), Dom’s bromantic life-partner Brian (Paul Walker), Dom’s sister and Brian’s wife Mia (the increasingly forgotten Jordana Brewster), the tech guy Tej (Ludacris), and joker Roman (Tyrese Gibson). Also, Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) is back for some great, horrible one liners at the beginning and end of the movie. I typed all those names from memory.

At this point our heroes’ criminal pasts are completely behind them… Along with any concern for their mortality. This lets Furious 7 feel more like a James Bond or Mission Impossible movie than ever before, which is kind of unfortunate for those franchises which both have sequels due out this year. But it’s awesome for this movie, which embraces vehicular warfare completely and includes some of the most ridiculous stunts I’ve ever seen. Cars dodge missiles, fall out of airplanes, and spectacularly fly between skyscrapers and it’s all awesome.

An observation I’ve read a few other people make is that Fast and Furious movies celebrate and enjoy dumb, over-the-top action in a way that a lot of similar movies, like the ones made by Michael Bay, do not. That’s a dark reading, one that suggests that Michael Bay doesn’t love what he does and is motivated entirely by greed, which I don’t think is the case. I just think Michael Bay’s a mean person who laughs at other people’s misfortune. Conversely, I think director James Wan really wanted to make a movie as fun as the ones that preceded it and that the cast of the Fast and Furious movies genuinely enjoy working with each other.

After Paul Walker died in a crash in 2013 and it was announced that the production of Furious 7 would resume, there was one question every was asking: what will they do with Brian? Walker had not finished filming his role, and since this movie was meant to be the start of a new trilogy of Fast and Furious movies, it seemed unlikely they had anything prepared to make him go away. The team reassured us that they would tastefully retire the character, but this series doesn’t tastefully do anything. Or at least, that’s what I thought until I saw the end of this movie. The last few minutes don’t tonally make sense with the plot, but sure does work as a fond farewell to a real person who really isn’t here anymore. So additional props to you, Furious 7.

Looking back over my review of Fast Five and Fast and Furious 6, I’m surprised I gave both movies a three-and-a-half star rating. That seems low for movies that ranked among my 10 favorites for the whole years they came out. I guess the big difference between me now and me then is that I am at this point free of any shame in enjoying this franchise. I still think Fast Five is my favorite, but I think this new one is a close second. It’s pretty great. But when you live your life one quarter mile at a time, that can seem like quite the distance.

For all intents and purposes, I am a “lyrics guy”.  Meaning, I have an easy time falling for artists who place an extra importance on the lyrical content of their songs instead of just putting some silly lovesong bullshit to a nice melody, which is what I assume most of the world wants out of any given song.  This gameness for lyrically-minded artists probably started during my high school obsession over Bob Dylan, and has reaffirmed itself during the first few months of this year as I spent a lot of January and February getting in to The Mountain Goats.  So it was pretty much a lock that I would fall for Courtney Barnett’s debut album (though it feels more like a confident sophomore effort, due to her last release being a “double EP”).  However, I don’t know that it’s just the wonderful drollness of Barnett’s lyrics that make her a force to be reckoned with, but more just that her entire laconic vibe makes her the type of personality that you’d wanna hang out with, and so far I’ve been having a hell of a time hanging out with Barnett over the course of Sometimes I Sit And Think‘s eleven tracks.

I have to assume that Barnett’s force of personality (or anti-force of personality) is also what makes her and her band’s approach to ’90s-inspired guitar rock feel way more fresh than it has any right to be.  And don’t get me wrong, I’ll usually be open to this kind of return to slackerdom that has manifested itself in a lot of young bands in the last few years, but it rarely ever gets me that excited.  Barnett on the other hand, has such an acute sense of detail in songs like “Depreston”, which recounts things like buying a percolator in order to save $23 dollars a month on coffee or the merits of pressed-metal ceilings.  Yet despite her assured perceptiveness, Barnett’s never afraid to declare herself a total wreck, like on lead single “Pedestrian At Best”, whose loudness sees Barnett and her band of bearded Aussie dudes rocking harder than they’ve ever rocked before.

Speaking of Sometimes I Sit And Think‘s inherent Aussie-ness, I think you do have to thank the Southern Hemisphere’s reversed seasons for the perfect timing of this album.  Because I feel like a lot of inappropriately winter-y albums end up getting released in the spring and summer, mainly because they were recorded during the colder months.  But luckily this album was (I assume) recorded during Australia’s summer months, and thus feels like a perfect summer album (there’s even a song about surfing!)  Also, there’s charmingly-titled song towards the end of the album (“Nobody Really Cares If You Don’t Go To The Party”), whose chorus goes “I wanna go out / But I wanna stay home”, which will surely be a sentiment that will haunt me every night as the weather continues to get better and better while I fail to appreciate it.  Luckily, I’ll have Courtney Barnett and her plainspoken wisdom to accompany me during every one of those inevitable summer nights spent in doors.

Favorite Tracks: “Pedestrian At Best”, “Depreston”, “Nobody Really Cares If You Don’t Go To The Party”