Spoilers for the first two episodes of Star Trek: Discovery. If The Orville leans a little to the silly side, Discovery leans a little too much to the dark side. In the first two episodes, we met a Captain, crew, ship, and villain that will soon be dust in the wind. Just as well, they all had names that were impossible to pronounce anyway. On the whole, Star Trek Discovery is better than Enterprise, which is not too high a bar to jump. The show and its theme song hit a lot of familiar notes and bring up a lot…
Author: Jon Herrera
Writer, Photographer, Blogger.
The Orville: First Impressions
Seth MacFarlane is the creative genius behind Family Guy. My favorite episodes on that show are the ones that see Stewie, voiced my Seth, and Brian the dog, also voiced by Seth, using a time travel device. These are funny, serious, and often a bit profound episodes. This is the bar I was expecting The Orville to hop over. I didn’t expect The Orville to be Star Trek, which is kind of what the ads wanted me to expect. The Orville is neither as funny as Family Guy nor as serious as Star Trek The Next Generation. The first episode…
Ghost in the Shell
If you like CGI, this is a movie for you. Every frame is chock full of special effects. It looks good. It looks really good. But, well, it isn’t very good. The Anime Ghost in the Shell from 1995 cost around $10 million. The shinny new Hollywood version cost around $110 million. It was not money well spent. American movie goers, for the most part, like the Aristotelian model of story telling. That is to say, a beginning, a middle, and an end. Anime doesn’t always follow that model. The anime Ghost in the Shell seemed like a bunch of…
T2 Trainspotting
Twenty years ago, our heroes went on a crime spree in the great city of Edinburgh. Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller and Robert Carlyle return as the older, and slightly wiser, childhood friends and all around losers. I had forgotten that Jonny Lee Miller was Sick Boy, but I remembered the rest of the guys well enough. It’s directed by Danny Boyle and written by John Hodge. Trainspotting was an awesome movie. I loved it from the first time I watched it, though it does have a few heartbreaking, disturbing, and disgusting scenes. I love the closing scene…
A few thoughts about HBO’s Confederate
The first great alternate history book I remember reading was Guns of the South. It was by Harry Turtledove and told the tale of a group of South African racists that wanted to change history by giving the Confederate Army machine guns. It was an interesting read and spawned countless sequels set in the alternate universe. I read The Man in the High Castle at about the same time. I also grew up watching The Twilight Zone, which featured a lot of alternate history stories, time travel stories, and parables of one sort or another. Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote an interesting…
Passangers
In 1998 the brilliant Douglas Adams wrote a computer game called Starship Titanic. The game play involved a sole passenger wandering around a cruise ship trying to keep it from blowing up. The only other people on board are a collection of robots, well, more correctly, androids. Passengers reminded me of Starship Titanic once or twice. This is one of the problems with being a Science Fiction fan, everything reminds me of something else. Ok, so Passengers got all kinds of bad press for no good reason. This is a perfectly fine science fiction film. The acting is good, the sets…
Colossal
At first I thought this was just a low budget movie that had done a good job of finding an Anne Hathaway look alike, but turns out it really is Anne Hathaway. This is an odd movie. One of the rules of sci-fi is to not explain too much, but I think they might had kept a few too many secrets to themselves in Colossal. At first Colossal looks like your average Rom-Com about a 30 something failure who moves back home. Well, that is if you overlook the opening scene of a little girl in South Korea confronting a…
Valerian
Over the course of three or four hundred years, the International Space Station changes as hundreds or thousands of aliens dock and never leave. We have a cute montage of humans greeting new visitors to the station, with each race being a little more alien than the last. We watch as a race of uber peaceful aliens living on the planet Tahiti Screen Saver go about their day doing a number of bizarre and incomprehensible things. Then they watch helplessly as wreckage from a battle raging in close proximity to the planet rain down on their perfect and defenseless paradise.…
The Circle
If The Circle had been released about ten years ago, it might have been a terrifying glimpse of the future. If it had been released five years ago, it might have still been a bit of a warning of things to come. But since it was released in 2017 and everything seen on screen is already possible, if not actively happening, its a tale of closing the gate after the cow has left the pasture. The Circle is a bad movie. It’s an odd mixture of a Steve Jobs bio-pic and The Truman Show. We start with our hero, a…
Coffee shop
I love the story that JK Rowling wrote her first Harry Potter book in a coffee shop. To me it tells how she was able to fall into flow and block out the rest of the world. I do love that feeling myself. It also makes me think that she needed to get away from home. Homes are very demanding places if you care about things like clean dishes, floors, and porcelain. So nice to be away for a bit. I remember drinking coffee while sitting on my father’s lap. One of a handful of fond memories having to do…