Category: Pop Culture
-
The End of Cliche Street
I’ll confess to having zero respect for J.J. Abrams. It began with the final episodes of LOST and the clear admission that they never had a clue how they were going to end the thing. It was made worse when he said this in a live interview: Bear in mind, he was promoting Star Trek,…
-
Beware of Greeks Bearing Gifts
The two phrases that always come to mind when considering The Odyssey are “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts” and “Never look a gift horse in the mouth.” The latter would have negated the former. If those hapless Trojan gatekeepers had only peered into that horse’s mouth, they could have saved the day. But we are…
-
A Spider-Man’s Spider-Man
With the biggest opening-weekend box office in history, the latest Marvel outing ought to erase the conventional wisdom that their audience suffers from superhero fatigue. And really, what are we measuring with opening-weekend box office? The power of positive reviews? The strength of the marketing strategies? The raw dollars pumped into advertising? The charisma of…
-
Service Model
As I listened to Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Service Model, I was struck by two things: how the story captured a post-apocalyptic world in a manner that felt like a Terry Gilliam film, and how brilliant Tchaikovsky’s narration was. I was gobsmacked by both. Briefly, Service Model covers the plight of a robot valet seeking answers in…
-
When The Moon Hits Your Eye
If you love John Scalzi’s “voiciness”, this is a book for you. If you find Scalzi’s voice a little too glib, smarmy, and laced with pop-culture winks and nods—maybe not so much for you with this book. When The Moon Hits Your Eye (A title borrowed from Dean Martin’s hit That’s Amore) is the 2025…
-
Project Hail Mary: A clinic in screen adaptations
I read Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary over a year ago and loved it. I loved The Martian and PHM had the feel of a sequel. All the elements that worked in The Martian are there—an isolated main character (Ryland Grace in PHM, Mark Watney in The Martian) with no game plan for survival up…
-
Punching Angels
2010’s Legion, directed by Scott Stewart and starring Paul Bettany, is just a god-awful movie. How’s that for a subtle opening line? It’s not for want of a cast of talented actors. Though some in that squad are less than spectacular in this film, they’ve proven themselves worthy in other roles. Paul Bettany, cast as…
-
Man on Man Violence
They would be funny if they weren’t terrifying. They would be sad if they weren’t monstrous. We would have sympathy for them if they didn’t show, at every turn, that they don’t have a sympathetic bone in their bodies. Today’s topic is the Manosphere, as brought to you by Louis Theroux in his new documentary,…
-
Enshittification, Episode 1
This evening I was looking for a link to a simple web developers’ resource, a listing of all the native html elements. I know a listing like this exists, though I haven’t had to look for one in a few years. So, I entered the following search term into Google: “full listing of native html…
-
The Face of Evil
A chess match, played by two brilliant but flawed opponents. Two narcissists hoping to manipulate the other into helping them achieve their own ends. For Hermann Göring, the goal is to cheat the hangman’s noose and show the world that the Nazi Reich was a just cause. For Dr. Douglas Kelly, the goal was to…