Before the bell rings on 2014 and rings in 2015, I wanted to give my two cents on a few of the blockbuster movies that blew away the box office in 2014 (but I missed catching them at the theatres). Guardians of the Galaxy Marvel’s leap into space adventures had a US opening weekend of…
Category: Sci-fi
2014 TV Characters: Love and Hate
Some say that TV is going through a quality renaissance. That might be true, but unfortunately if you have enjoyed hard-edged shows like True Detective, Broadchurch, American Horror Story, or Breaking Bad for their wonderfully complex and messed-up characters, you won’t find any of those shows on my list. I tend to enjoy the lighter,…
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…
Big Hero 6 – Movie Review
Big Hero 6 represents the true coming-together of Disney and Marvel universes (even moreso than being able to play The Hulk alongside snow-queen Elsa in the videogame world of Disney Infinity). Disney animators (with no small influence from their Pixar brethren) have taken an obscure Marvel Comics super-team and brought them to cute, plastic life…
Capsule Book Review Catchup
Now that I am listening to audiobooks on my commute to and from work, I’m catching up on so many books that I’ve got a backlog of books to write about on my blog. Of course, this is all thanks to Audible.com (Free credits for the plug, please!) which has been a great way for…
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 #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 #16: Coherence
First off, this sci-fi film is not the second in the Divergent trilogy. Rather, it’s a head-scratching indie-sci-fi (a growing sub-genre that I’ve loved ever since I discovered the movie Primer — check it out if you like tying your brain in knots). Anyway, set mostly over the course of a single evening’s dinner party,…
Movie #15: Amazing Spider-Man 2
I had really loved the first instalment of this latest reboot of the Spider-man series on the big screen. I thought the combination of director Marc Webb, along with lead actors Andrew Garfield (as Peter Parker/Spider-man) and Emma Stone (as Gwen Stacey) gave an indie-film freshness to the non-superhuman parts of the story. While all…
Alvin's Adventures in Pop Culture 