Alvin's Adventures in Pop Culture

Fall TV 2013 – Comedy

For the last few years, the fall premiere season has been pretty spread out, but this year it seems like we’re back to the traditional big bang of having a lot of the shows start together. It’s October now, so the season is in full swing and we’ve had a few episodes to enjoy both…

Riddick – Movie Review

After nine years of waiting, is it a disappointment that Riddick is more of a reboot than a sequel to the trilogy of movies that began with the well-crafted Pitch Black in 2000 and sort of fell off the cliff in 2004 with Chronicles of Riddick? As before, Vin Diesel plays the ex-con, murderer, and…

The World’s End – Movie Review

It’s not hard to see how The World’s End is meant to be an unofficial sequel to 2004’s Shaun of the Dead. Featuring the same lead actors (Simon Pegg and Nick Frost) and the same writer/director (Edgar Wright), The World’s End also features the pub as a backdrop for a bunch of ordinary British blokes…

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke – Book Review

I consider it a miracle in itself that I finished reading Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke. After all, the book is almost 800 pages long (and since I listened to the audiobook, it was also over 30 hours long)! While it deals with magic and is set in an England where magic…

The Wolverine – Movie Review

Take Wolverine, arguably the most popular of Marvel Comics’ X-Men and give him a story set in Japan, full of ninjas, samurais, and swordplay and it would seem like you’ve got a great combination — perfect for a second solo adventure. Unfortunately, when Logan-san (played again by Hugh Jackman, who seems almost as ageless as…

Monsters University – Movie Review

Being a huge Pixar fan, I’ll pretty much go see anything they put on screen. Nevertheless, I had really enjoyed Monsters Inc. so I was excited to see this prequel — Mike and Sulley: the College Years. Now, it’s no stretch to the imagination that there was going to be some element of Revenge of…

Man of Steel – Movie Review

This umpteenth retelling of the Superman story had a whole lot going for it. Directed by Zack Snyder (one of my favourite directors, despite his penchant for stylish and flashy visuals over dramatic substance) and written by Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer (two of the men behind the highly successfully and recently concluded Batman…

Redshirts by John Scalzi – Capsule Book Review

Redshirts has got to be one of the most geek-friendly book titles I have encountered. The uninformed might guess that it’s about wearing a certain colour of clothing, and they might be wondering why it’s a single compound word. However, any sci-fi fan worth his salt knows that it actually refers to the laughable tendency…

Cloud Atlas – Capsule Movie Review

From the Wachowskis (Andy & Lana), creators of The Matrix trilogy and Tom Tykwer, director of Run, Lola, Run, Cloud Atlas was poised to be a mind-bending piece of sci-fi filmmaking. An adaptation of David Mitchell’s novel of the same name, the story (set in six distinct time periods) deals with reincarnation and the evolving…