Category: Review
-
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,…
-
Arcane: League of Legends
We don’t get to choose our families. We don’t get to choose the times in which we live. The best we can hope is that the times bind us closer to our brothers or sisters rather than cleave us apart. At the heart of Arcane: League of Legends (Netflix 2021-2024) is a story of a…
-
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…
-
The Unstoppable War Machine
Did the producers at Netflix celebrate when the current U.S. President declared war (not war police action. Not police action, regime change. whatever) on Iran? You have to think one of them did, right? This is probably here nor there. The basic plotline: A soldier, still grieving the loss of his brother, takes part in…
-
Interstellar: Beautiful lunacy
Lunacy – from Late Latin lunaticus “moon-struck,” from Latin luna “moon” The yearning to reach the stars runs deep in Baby Boomers like myself. We grew up with the deep, ingrained, cultural mythos that we were headed for a moon base by the end of the 1970s and, after that the planets. Beyond that, the stars. But then the…
-
Whiskey and Warfare
“Old Woman’s War” is how I characterized Whiskey and Warfare by E.M. Hamill when someone asked me what I was reading for SPSFC4. While I found John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War sort of meh, this book feels like a more mature, more heartfelt exploration of similar ground. Given the opportunity would someone of middle age…
-
EAT
“Night of the living furries” is how a character describes their situation a little more than midway through Jesse Brown’s EAT. I laughed when I read that line and I also nodded. That’s a good description of the basic premise, though replace cute or weirdly sexualized furries with the sleek, muscle-bound, eat-your-face-off variety. Caede wakes…