When I was in the 7th grade a teacher gave me a bag filled with old copies of Fantasy & Science Fiction. I was already a fan of Star Trek and Lost in Space and just about every other clunky sci-fi show I could find. But these stories were something different. They demanded more from me than passive viewership, they made me think. Many of them made me think, hell, I can do better than that. Turns out after lo these many years, well, I couldn’t do better than punished writers from forty years ago. I stopped writing short stories.…
Can You Ever Forgive Me?
I’m a photographer and every once in a while a movie will get my attention with a particularly beautiful shot. This image of Melissa McCarthy sitting alone at the end of a long bar as her character’s world reaches one of its many low points is a great shot. I like everything about it. The leading lines, the strong shadows, the darkness of the bar while the world outside the windows is clearly light. The different tones from the light shadows to the subtly illuminated bottles. Great imagery. Of all the great actors on Gilmore Girls, Melissa McCarthy was not…
Dallas Cowboys Rant
Rams 30, Cowboys 22. I remember the days of Roger Staubach, Too Tall Jones, and Hollywood Henderson. Those Cowboys went to the Superbowl on a regular basis. The great Danny White took the team to three NFC Conference Games. Things went downhill from there, but even during the last few years of Tom Landry’s reign, his teams still often lost by a field goal or less. There was always hope that they could make one more play. Then there was the Jimmy Johnson juggernaut whose game plan was to score 40 points in the first half and protect the lead.…
Welcome to Marwen
The special effects in Welcome to Marwen are on display from the first scene. Our Hero, the brave toy Cap’n Hogie, is shot down during World War II and immediately has a problem. He shoes catch fire. It’s a setback, but luckily, he finds a crashed Nazi car with a truck in the back seat. Inside he finds a pair of black and white wingtip…women’s pumps. He likes wearing the high heel shoes, finds that they help him to understand dames, and he wants to make it clear, he likes dames. We then meet Mark Hogancamp, a man with serious…
Mary Poppins Returns
Mary Poppins Returns is CGI on overload. Special Effects cranked up to 11. But they are very good special effects and very good computer generated graphics. But I didn’t love Mary Poppins Returns. We open with a song and there will be plenty of song and dance to follow. Soon enough Mary Poppins shows up to help Michael’s children in a moment of crisis. A villain in the piece is the Bank Manager, who wants the Banks house so he can sell it and add a few more pounds to the coffers. The original Mary Poppins was the last of…
YouTube’s Origin
In space no one can hear you say Wait? What? Space travel is often depicted in one of two ways. Everything is clean and perfect or everything is gritty and dirty. Origin goes for the Star Trek model of everything in its place. Which is a bit odd since it is filled with murder and mayhem like Alien. Origin helps itself to bits and pieces of lots of SciFi plots from the past fifty years or so. A handful of people trapped on a ship they can’t control. Inscrutable aliens being inscrutable.…
Wreck It Ralph 2:Ralph Breaks The Internet
Wreck It Ralph was a surprisingly good movie. It was a classic Hero’s Journey and there was no need for a sequel. So naturally, Wreck It Ralph 2 is not that great. But it was still fun. The premise was a little thin to start with. An old guy runs a video game arcade where the game Wreck It Ralph, a kinder, gentler version of Rampage, has been sitting for thirty years. Ralph is a bad guy who learns that being bad doesn’t define who he is. We flash forward about six years and discover that the arcade still has…
Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald
I never read the Harry Potter books, I just watched the movies. The last three or four Harry Potter films suffered from a serious case of taking themselves too seriously. What started off as a somewhat silly story about a boy living in a cupboard who discovers he’s really a wizard turned into this totally silly story about that boy saving the world. The first Fantastic Beasts was kind of fun. It was like the first couple of Harry Potter films, where Harry could worry about House Points and walk around with a stunned look on his face all the…
Serpentine by Laurell K Hamilton
Serpentine is the first Anita Blake Vampire Hunter book in quite some time that is a good 90% Anita Blake Vampire Hunter. The sex scenes are brief and limited to less than ten people. The talk about the joys and heartaches of being Polyamorous are present, but not omnipresent as they have been in other books. Anita doesn’t add a new lover, doesn’t enslave anyone, and doesn’t outright murder anyone. Though she does come close. There’s less talk about sex and vampire politics. There was more descriptions of The Circus of The Damned and the blue waters around…
Netflix’s Maniac
Maniac tells the story of a group of people involved in a bizarre clinical trail.We focus mainly on two subjects and two of the doctors conducting the study. And a slightly insane Artificial Intelligence. Maniac is the kind of show that would have never been made just a few years ago. It’s chock full of special effects, all of them flawless in their execution, and has a story that is a story in the loosest sense of the word. From the very start we are never sure of that these people live in the real world. There are none of…