TV, music, movies, and books we're into this week

While everyone else was tied up with Avengers hype this week, I decided to take advantage of the distraction to hit up another movie: A Quiet Place.

Starring John Krasinski and Emily Blunt, A Quiet Place tells the story of a family simply trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic setting. The only catch is they must live their lives entirely in silence, so as not to perish at the hands of what caused mankind's demise in the first place: horrifying creatures that hunt by sound.

I enjoy unique horror flicks, and A Quiet Place certainly fits the bill. The film weaponizes sound in a way that has you completely on edge at every shuffle and peep the characters make. Plus, I think seeing it in a relatively empty theater (thanks, Avengers!) only heightened the experience.

The press, Hollywood, and liberal left continue to lead the charge to get more women into leading roles. Here's an all-female lead film that is ridiculously good and failed to launch in theaters and continues to be ignored by aforementioned parties. Go watch it and appreciate something you may have missed otherwise.

Someone reminded me this week about Infest by Papa Roach, mainly because of how old it is. And, as another anthem of my teenage years that meant one thing: listening to it on repeat. Everyone knows "Last Resort," but honestly, that's not even the best track on this album.

I recently spent a lot of time on a roadtrip, which is in my opinion one of the best times to enjoy all those albums that you've heard and loved in the past and since forgotten about. Absolute Loser by Fruit Bats is one of those albums, starting off with the heartfelt "From a Soon-to-Be Ghost Town," continuing with the banjo-infused "Humbug Mountain Song," and continuing on from there with more folky, poppy tunes from singer Eric D. Johnson.

If you've read one John Grisham book, you've kind of read all John Grisham's books. The best-selling author's legal thrillers all feel somewhat similar. But he didn't get that 'best-selling' title for no reason; Grisham's book are easy-to-read page turners that suck you in. So that's not necessarily a bad thing.

The Rooster Bar fits that mold well. It's the story of four young law school students in Washington, D.C., who quickly get overwhelmed with student loan debt, BAR exam prep, and a dire lack of job prospects even if they do pass their exams. So they decide to battle back against what they view as a corrupt system of loan companies, and their sketchy law school, by simply posing as lawyers in the local criminal courts without actually finishing school. And they eventually come across the case of a lifetime.

The scheme works … for a while. Then everything falls apart, and the story turns into a kind of cat-and-mouse chase, as the police hunt the students, and they try to reach safe harbor somewhere, with a pile of cash in tow. The book requires a certain suspension of disbelief, but it's a fun read regardless.

Finding a McElroy in a used bookstore is a little like finding a nugget of gold in a quarry, so you can imagine my excitement when I pulled this one off of a shelf last weekend. The Letter Left to Me, written in the early '90s, is framed as a letter that a now-deceased father wrote for his son three years before.

It's classic McElroy prose ― a seemingly simple style that's impossible to emulate ― that's sort of like a training manual for life as an adult and the hardships to expect later down the road.