It’s Academy Awards time, and that means it’s once again time for me to weigh in with my ignorance and inability to appreciate an Oscar-worthy performance. If you’re like me, you’ll want to cram-watch a few more of the nominees in time to at least have an opinion for the awards next week. Let me…
Category: (3.5 out of 5)
Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey – Book Review
I was surprisingly disappointed by Leviathan Wakes, which is the first of a series of books now headed to tv on the US SyFy channel as “The Expanse”. They characterize the show as a Game of Thrones set in space, so that gave me all kinds of expectations of an array of interesting characters and…
Unholy Night by Seth Grahame-Smith – Book Review
Featured image is Diamond Star by Brian Yi (please click the link to see the full image — it’s nice.) Seth Grahame-Smith is the author who brought zombies to Pride and Prejudice, and turned America’s “great emancipator”, Abraham Lincoln, into a vampire hunter. He’s been tipping some of the sacred cows of literature and history for…
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1 – Movie Review
Having recently read (and reviewed) the book, the last part (lucratively split into two films) of the Katniss Everdeen story was still pretty fresh in my mind when I went to see the movie. I knew to expect that the saga that began with a teenage girl bravely competing in a dystopian to-the-death competition has…
The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman – Book Review
I enjoy it when authors perform on the audiobooks themselves. The interpretation of the voices and the inflections of any dialogue are true to their original vision and conveys the intended feelings. That’s especially helpful in the case of Neil Gaiman’s novels because they are full of surreal imagery and magic realism. This story is…
Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins – Book Review
Featured image is The Mockingjay and the Rebels by Samuel Teixeira. With the third movie in the Hunger Games series not far away, you just know I’ve got to prep myself by catching up on the books. Despite the dramatic cliffhanger at the end of Catching Fire, I was able to hold off reading the…
Movie #18: Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons
As a kid, I grew up hearing Chinese folk tales as bedtime stories. The most well-known of them all is the Journey to the West: the story of the trickster-god Monkey King and his companions as they travel across an ancient China plagued by demons. When I heard that Stephen Chow, writer and director of…
Movie #17: Robocop
I was 16 when the original Robocop movie came out, but I can’t say that I remember it too well. One of the things I do recall about the Paul Verhoeven directed movie was that it was satirically tongue-in-cheek (which was kind of new for sci-fi). For a teenager in the audience, it wasn’t totally…
Movie #14: Knights of Badassdom
I do love a good genre spoof. There are often a lot of inside jokes (most of which I actually get) and fun cameos. Often the plot is nothing too original, but that’s OK. In the case of Knights of Badassdom, the genre is fantasy role-play — specifically LARP (or live-action role-play) — where players…
Alvin's Adventures in Pop Culture 