i m N s h o

Legacy prequels and sequels appear to be the order of the day, as studios attempt to milk every possible dollar out of their back catalog IP. So it's not terribly surprising that 2 classic demonic horror films got this legacy treatment recently.  I was interested in seeing Exorcist Believer ... Until the near universal bad reviews convinced me I had better things to do with my time. The First Omen , on the other hand, had some decent reviews so, when it popped up on Hulu recently, I decided to give it a shot.  I'm just wondering what those reviewers saw that I missed... Cause frankly, I really disliked this one. For two reasons...  First is the rank cynicism of the film. Without going into spoilerish detail, the ending of the film spins out from the source material in ways that clearly open it up to new franchise possibilities, allowing them to dodge the existence of the original series of Omen films. I should not be surprised by this... The whole legacy prequels notion I...

Redshirts by John Scalzi My rating: 5 of 5 stars View all my reviews

The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers My rating: 3 of 5 stars View all my reviews

Something More Than Night by Kim Newman My rating: 3 of 5 stars View all my reviews

 Coming, as it does, from Happy Madison productions, one should not be surprised to find the Out-Laws playing hard to the comedy lowest common denominator. But seriously, this one really scrapes bottom.  I started watching the other day due to a dearth of other appealing options (everything else on my multiple watch lists seemed too heavy, deep, dark or just unappealing at the time), so I opted for the dumb movie. And after a relatively short time, I found myself stuck watching it from shear "are you kidding" me incredulity.   The moment that really broke me was the armored car chase scene after their bungled second-act bank robbery. As they start fleeing the scene of the crime, Brosnan and Barkin's characters jump into the back of the car as Devine, complete with Shrek mask/makeup running down his face, drives. AND, of course, as he pulls away, they leave the back doors of the car open, so that the money can fly out over the course of the chase that follows. I'm pr...

 Or, perhaps, simply from my darker sensibilities.  Since I'm between jobs again, once I'm done with the morning's scanning of job listings (I can only spend so much time reading job descriptions till the words stop making sense), I find myself watching a lot of movies and TV. Yesterday was not a banner day for me.  I started with Mike Flanagan's The Midnight Club . I've enjoyed every one of Flanagan's series on Netflix (the Haunting of Hill House , the Haunting of Bly Manor , Midnight Mass ) and am definitely looking forward to what he does with the Fall of the House of Usher . So I figured I'd check out Midnight Club. I should have taken a cue from this for the rest of my day, but 10 minutes in I realized that watching a series about terminally ill teeanagers really wasn't cutting it for me. So I went looking elsewhere.  For some reason, I ended up watching Men after this. Not sure how this seemed like a good idea, but at least there weren't any t...

There, I've said it. And the Golden Globes, and this writer from VOX who called it "a delightfully madcap tale of Irish zaniness" and everyone else chortling to themselves as they hop on the comedy bandwagon can all f off.  (This movie's been out long enough that I don't feel the need to worry about spoilers. So suffice it to say that, if you haven't seen the movie yet… and intend to… and you don't want any surprises spoiled, bookmark this post and come back after you've seen it.) Let me be clear… I understand black comedy. I enjoy black comedy. And I loved In Bruges , the last movie these guys did together. So I looked forward to Banshees and couldn't wait to check it out.  I've now seen it three times, and only truly laughed at any of it the on the third watching (more on that in a moment). And I am more certain than ever that this movie, as good as it and its performances are, is not a comedy.  The first time through (early on, before the ...

I got a number of "creature feature" collections for my birthday this year… Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, etc. I’m delving into The FlyCollection right now and just finished the “classic” Fly films… The Fly, Return of the Fly and Curse of the Fly. Virtually a treatise on diminishing returns, if I’m being completely honest. The Fly is, of course, a classic. Released in 1958, it stars Vincent Price and David Hedison (credited as Al Hedison in the Fly, I've always remember him as the captain on Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea… apparently imprinted on my young mind at the time… LOL). It’s written by James Clavell, and the talent there shows… It’s an interesting structure for a monster movie, with the bulk of the story being told in flashback about halfway through the film. Dated as it is (effects, etc.), it still holds up pretty well, especially in comparison to its sequels. Return of the Fly is a much more standard monster movie. Price returns as the elder brot...

So it's interesting timing for the SF/Fantasy fan right now. In the course of just a few months we've seen the release of a TV series based on the "unfilmable" Foundation series, an epic film (and still only the first part) of the equally "unfilmable" Dune, and the release of the ages-in-development Wheel of Time series. Each of these properties have their dedicated fan bases and each have had varying degrees of success with those fan bases. First up, let's talk Dune . Denis Villeneuve's film has been a major success, pleasing both fans and general audience with it's stunning adaptation of Herbert's novel. (I'm speaking in broad strokes here… I'm sure there are haters out there, gleefully bashing on the film.) Dune is one of my favorite novels, and I've read it several times. While there are certainly changes to the story required to make it a manageable cinema experience, the obvious care about the story, and the determination to...

This holiday season has been  déjà vu  all over the place for me.  It started with Last Christmas... For years now I've realized this song is, literally, timeless. I mean, look at these lyrics...  Last Christmas, I gave you my heart But the very next day, you gave it away This year, to save me from tears I'll give it to someone special One ASSUMES that, last year they thought they WERE giving their heart to someone special... Who gave it away the next day. So what's to stop it from happening to them again THIS year. They literally could be singing this song each year to another person. Timeless, I tell you. (Dani can't unhear this theory now, and now hears the same thing I do each time it plays. She's quite annoyed with me.) Next up, Matrix Resurrections doubled down on every aspect of  déjà vu  to give us a new film every bit as enjoyable, and able to drive conversation and speculation as the first one. Is it perfect? Hell no. But it's a hell of a lot of f...

This post started very differently (as you will see below), but then the research nerd in me went looking for info on the closing credits song that I'm about to bash... and I found this article: https://www.cbr.com/zack-snyder-justice-league-leonard-cohen-hallelujah-importance/ After reading the article, and understanding where this version of Hallelujah came from and why it's there... it makes it kinda hard to bash on it as I originally intended.  But let's face it.. I'm not going to let a little thing like human emotion or sympathy get in the way of a good rant now, am I? Of course not. So, without further commentary...  Everything wrong with Zack Snyder's Justice League can be summed up by the overwrought closing credits rendition of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah.  It can be concluded that the film is, arguably, better than Joss Whedon's theatrical release of the film. It is, certainly more comprehensible. And its kinda fascinating to see how completely diff...

I've been on an SF/Space Opera jag for a while now. I think it started with Iain M. Banks " Culture " series, then I segued jnto Neal Asher's Polity universe. Galactic civilizations, post-human evolution, sentient (and often sarcastic) AI, ancient civilizations and fantastic alien life forms... These books really scratch that itch in my brain.  Looking for other options, once I'd devoured all of the above, I've sampled a lot of the recent space opera, but also done quite a bit of looking back.  First stop was Asimov's Foundation/Robot/Empire novels. Asimov did a pretty impressive job of tying his disparate SF series into a cohesive universe by the latter days of his career, and it's interesting to read those novels in story-chronological order. It's an earlier era of SF, so think robots in place of AI (and oh-so terribly serious robots at that) and no aliens to speak of. But a galaxy spanning story that kept me interested through the full set of ...

Let me start with a disclaimer... I actually liked Rise of Skywalker, despite what the bulk of this post will discuss. It was fun, it was Star Wars, Rey's battle with Kylo on the Death Star remains was pure spectacle... Overall I think they did a fine job of telling the story they wanted to and wrapping up the Skywalker saga.  Sadly, there's a lot of room in "fine" to find fault.  More revelations/admissions/what have you... I really liked Last Jedi. It took me a couple of viewings, but I came away loving the chances they took and the changes they put in motion. My annoyance with Star Wars fandom after the blistering meltdown Last Jedi triggered knows no bounds.  So I was really frustrated by the way Rise walked back so many of the plot points from Last Jedi, despite all J. J. 's assurances to the contrary. I was even more annoyed by the way these things were handled... It wasn't sufficient to sideline those changes, but they did their best to invalidate them ...

(Seriously... When I posted six months ago, I had every intention of getting active again. I'd blog about movies and TV and politics and whatever else interested me.  Then 2020 happened. Politics became... Unfathomable. Movies simply stopped happening. TV is still there, but after months of binge-watching, what is there to talk about? So I'm reduced to blogging about my cat. And, oddly, pleased by that.) Years ago, I saw a documentary on cats and their behavior. It sought to explain the nuances of cat behaviour and, for those that appreciate cats, was a pretty fascinating watch. (for those that don't get cats, nothing is going to change that, and the fascinations I'm recounting will surely be lost on you.)  One of the things I learned from this documentary was that cats, when they meow, are talking to YOU. Cats do not meow at other cats. They hiss, yowl and posture. They do not meow. That interaction is limited to humans. When a cat meows at you, he is talking to you.  ...

It's been a long time since I posted here. Nearly 6 years, based on that last published post. But I think I need to start blogging again... I've been listening to audio books lately. Need something to occupy me on longer drives, especially when I'm driving by myself. I love listening to music, but sometimes I need something... more to keep my brain engaged.  I started with Fevre Dream ... one of my favorite vampire novels. Set on the Mississippi river, on a 19th century steamboat, it's one of the best vampire novels I've read. Written before Twilight and its ilk, it doesn't suffer from the need for a tragic vampire love triangle and instead settles for a bloody battle for supremacy between a pair of alpha vampires. A great read, and the audio book treatment was most satisfying.  Next up was It . I'd just seen the movies (part 2 this past fall) and, being one of Kings books I've never read, I figured it would be a good choice. Another excellen...

Though maybe not for the reasons we think… Saw Olympus Has Fallen over the weekend and had a really good time overall. Big dumb action movies are my guilty pleasure… I make no pretense to their quality, I know most of them don't hold up to any kind of critical review, but I buckle in for the ride and, if the ride is fun then I count it as time well spent at the movies. So I enjoyed the ride, even though I had some qualms by the time I walked out. My first reaction was that, as long as you could ignore the ridiculous plot devices in the third act, it was a pretty good movie. Lots of action, with good performances all around (and, as an actor, I have to admit that good performances will let me ignore a lot of other failings). I was especially amused by the way the audience burst into spontaneous applause each time Gerard Butler's character efficiently eliminated the movie's terrorist villains. There's no pretense to "I'm the good guy, so must show compassi...

Came home from the gym tonight, looked at Dani and said "I don't know how, or why, but suddenly I completely understand the concept of the word " knackered ". (Or words to that effect. I doubt I was anywhere near that articulate, frankly). Ten minutes later, I open my email to find my "A.Word.A.Day" email word of the day is… "knacker": http://wordsmith.org/words/knacker.html This kind of coincidence ALWAYS messes with my head. As I've mentioned once or twice before.

I read Mira Grant's Feed last year and loved it. I'm actually not a HUGE zombie story fan, preferring my supernatural stories on the vampiric side of things, but since romance authors co-opted the genre years ago, it's been tough finding a good vampire story that doesn't involve some kind of tortured love triangle. So I'm open to branching out into other venues. Feed hooked me right away, making me laugh out loud in the first few pages, requiring that I buy the book immediately and find out more about these characters. I was not disappointed. (No, the book's not a comedy—quite the opposite—but it's not afraid to have some fun, along with a healthy dose of social satire, in the midst of its zombie-outbreak horror story.) I just finished the sequel, Deadline , today (equally entertaining) and picked up the next book, Blackout . To my surprise and delight, I found this on the back cover: Blackout is the conclusion to the epic near-future trilogy t...

(Update courtesy of my local gas pump video screen.) In other news... The Earth is Round! Ice is Cold! Fire Burns! (Sadly, all of the above probably IS news to Tea Party politicians.) 

While browsing through Stephen King books today, looking for his book On Writing , I came across this thought… Writing controlled fiction is called "plotting." Buckling the seatbelt and letting the story take over… that is called "storytelling." Storytelling is as natural as breathing. Plotting is the literary version of artificial respiration. I found this quite reassuring, and kind of exhilarating… I've never been good at plotting out my stories, though I've lost count of the classes I've taken and books I've read that recommend (or flat out require) it. Frankly, buckling in and letting the story take over is how I've written everything I've ever felt good about. Now I've got some backup for my lack of plotting. Let's face it, Stephen King knows a little bit about storytelling. Ironically, I found this in the intro to 'Salem's Lot (probably still my favorite Stephen King novel ever) and not in On Writing. But that ju...