By Brian Lafferty

August 16, 2013 (San Diego) – Scattered throughout Kick-Ass 2 are the same high-caliber flashes of genius of its predecessor.  Only thing is Kick-Ass had a rich, fully developed screenplay by Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn from which to hang them.  Jeff Wadlow's screenplay is otherwise a messy concoction of underdeveloped subplots and gratuitous nasty violence. 

By Brian Lafferty

August 9, 2013 (San Diego) – Last August, I declared on Facebook that you will never see me post about politics and religion on social media.  That’s an easy rule for me to follow on Facebook and Twitter.  Not so much when reviewing movies (Gerrymandering, Client 9).  Writer and director Neill Blomkamp packs so many socio-political issues into his latest film, Elysium, that it demands discussion.  

August 8, 2013 (San Diego) – An update today from Nepal on a story I've been following for two years: Contrary to what a number of media reports suggested last week, lack of enough evidence has prevented police from filing murder charges against the three people identified as suspects in the alleged murder of American woman Aubrey Sacco, who went missing in 2010.

Nepal's Central Investigation Bureau (CIB) arrested the three suspects Friday in connection with the possible murder of Aubrey, an athlete, scholar and musician who as I reported for ESPN had gone missing from the Langtang area of the Rasuwa district of Nepal more than three years ago.

By Sylvia Hampton

August 6, 2013 (San Diego’s East County) -- I did not watch every minute of the George Zimmerman trial, but I did see the closing arguments and enough testimony to get the basic evidence against him and the arguments from the defense.  I was convinced the jury would take the hint from the judge and find him guilty of manslaughter. Most talking heads have missed an important key to why the verdict came down as “not guilty” and that was the fact that the most powerful personality on the six-women jury turned out to be wrong, biased, and she pressured and got a unanimous vote. The hold-outs caved to her pressure because they were intimidated, I believe.

By Fire Chief Sam DiGiovanna

July 30, 2013 (San Diego’s East County) – We are in the monsoon season, where pop-up thunderstorms can quickly and unexpectedly bring flash floods no matter where you live, warns Fire Chief Sam DiGiovanna. Though part of natures beauty, these storms can be very dangerous.

“July has been dedicated National Grilling Safety Month…”

July 24, 2013 (San Diego’s East County) – “Dad, the burgers are burning, and so is the house!” Not something one wants to hear. While gas grills contribute to a higher number of home fires than their charcoal counterparts, all grills pose a risk for fires and burns, says Fire Chief Sam DiGiovanna.

By Mark Gabrish Conlan

July 19, 2013 (San Diego) – Just when you thought the current sex scandal involving San Diego Mayor Bob Filner couldn’t get any weirder, it did. On July 17 KGTV Channel 10 broke the news that Filner had been booked to be the keynote speaker at the National Military Women Veterans’ Association of America’s gala event in San Diego August 30-31. They had originally planned to give him a “Lifetime of Leadership” award honoring his work on behalf of veterans in general and military veterans in particular. But with allegations that Filner routinely harassed women, including his staff members, in the workplace and at community events, the group decided to rescind the award but keep him on as a speaker. “He is now the keynote speaker for these injustices,” said the group’s official statement.

By Brian Lafferty

July 12, 2013 (San Diego) – The scariest story I’ve ever read was Stephen King’s The Mist.  Made into a 2007 Frank Darabont film I’m too frightened to see, it told of a band of New England survivors trapped in a grocery story by a dense fog and a horde of horrific creatures from another dimension.  At the end, the remaining survivors encounter a monster so humongous, that it would make a blue whale – the largest animal in Earth’s existence – look like a trout.

By Brian Lafferty

July 3, 2013 (San Diego) – When I first learned of The Lone Ranger’s budget, I asked myself, “What studio in their right mind would spend a quarter of a billion dollars on a movie based on a property that originated as a long-running radio show, and later a low-budget 1950s kids TV show?”  In the 1930s and 1940s, Monogram Pictures and Republic Pictures rolled out hundreds of low-budget B-movies, a significant chunk of them westerns.  A cursory glance through the Internet Movie Database and a little arithmetic tells me The Lone Ranger cost a ton more than all these companies’ movies put together.

July 1, 2013 (San Diego) – With warm weather and family events, the Fourth of July can be a fun time with great memories. But before you and your family celebrate, make sure everyone knows about 4th of July safety, says Fire Chief Sam DiGiovanna. If not handled properly, fireworks, barbeques and heat can be dangerous and cause injuries to kids and adults. The best advice: “Attend public fireworks displays, and leave the lighting to the professionals,” says Chief DiGiovanna.

By Brian Lafferty

June 28, 2013 (San Diego) – Neil Jordan’s Byzantium is cinema’s best answer to the Twilight series since Tomas Alfredson’s Swedish vampire masterpiece Let the Right One In (not counting Matt Reeves’ equally crafted American remake Let Me In).  It takes the now all-too-familiar forbidden vampire-mortal love story and breathes into it an intoxicating mix of realism, atmosphere, and wicked sexiness.

Originally posted Wednesday, June 19 at the Reno Dispatch

June 25, 2013 (San Diego) – The news of Michael Hastings' death comes as a total shock. Michael, 33, who was killed early Tuesday in a car crash in Los Angeles, was among the last of a disappearing breed of fearless investigative reporters. A friend and former colleague, he and I worked together often when we were fellow writers at Newsweek.

I'll never forget our marathon phone conversations about politics, war, civilian casualties and General David Patraeus. Michael was probably the general's most outspoken critic, as you can see in this article he wrote for Rolling Stone. Michael ripped the general in that story, and in others. I haven't exactly gone easy on Patraeus, either, but I've typically left it to my sources to evaluate him in stories such as this one for Newsweek/Daily Beast. Michael had no time for that. It just wasn't his style. He called it the way he saw it, and I admired him for it.

By Brian Lafferty

June 21, 2013 (San Diego) – After a long and troubled production history going back to 2007 – none of which needs to be rehashed here – World War Z is finally here.  It’s a simple pulpy globetrotting zombie flick starring Brad Pitt as Gerry Lane, a former member of the United Nations called into action to combat a worldwide zombie pandemic.  Such a simple plot, yet it serves a movie so confounding that I may never know if it’s good or bad.  If I were to look at it from every respect, it would be split right down the middle at 50%.  I can make strong arguments from both sides.

Originally posted Wednesday, June 12, 2013 at The Reno Dispatch

June 18, 2013 (San Diego) – Marine Corps Capt. Sarah Bettencourt, 29, was just days away from being designated a naval aviator when she developed a rare neurological disorder in 2008. Despite her disability, she bravely continued to serve in the Marines until symptoms ended her career in 2012. Sarah, who retired with a 100 percent disability rating, now struggles at home with day-to-day tasks due to severe problems with her central nervous system.

And of course she is not alone. More than 2.2 million American veterans like Sarah were seriously injured at some point while serving in the military, according to a Pew Research Center survey. Among the center's troubling findings: Veterans who suffered major service-related injuries are less likely in later life to be in overall good health or to hold full-time jobs.

By Roddy Scheer and Doug Moss, E - The Environmental Magazine

June 17, 2013 (San Diego) -- Dear EarthTalk: Could it really be true that we are in the midst of the worst drought in the United States since the 1930s? -- Deborah Lynn, Needham, MA

Indeed we are embroiled in what many consider the worst drought in the U.S. since the “Dust Bowl” days of the 1930s that rendered some 50 million acres of farmland barely usable. Back then, drought conditions combined with poor soil management practices to force some 2.5 million Americans away from the Great Plains, only wreaking further havoc on an already devastated Great Depression economy. The lack of native prairie grasses or cover crops to keep the soil in place meant large swaths of formerly productive agricultural land turned to dust and blew away in so-called “black rollers.”

While we have learned a lot about maintaining soil quality since, drought conditions today are nevertheless taking a heavy toll on agricultural productivity, fresh water supplies and the economy—especially as the effects of global warming start to kick in more seriously.