Alvin's Adventures in Pop Culture

The Iron Lady – Movie Review

Even though I was alive for most of her political career, I don’t know very much about Margaret Thatcher — the Iron Lady who is the subject of Meryl Streep’s latest Oscar-worthy impersonation. The movie version of Thatcher’s story starts oddly with Streep looking convincingly like a very senior Thatcher (probably somewhere around her current…

70 Science Fiction and Fantasy Movies to Watch Out for in 2012

70 Science Fiction and Fantasy Movies to Watch Out for in 2012 (from io9.com) Link out for a great summary of the scifi/fantasy/horror horizon for this new year. Reading through the list, I noticed four odd trends, and one great one: Fairytale reinterpretations – We already have TV’s Once Upon a Time and Grimm, now…

2011 TV Characters: Love and Hate

Having so many new shows this year also means that there are so many more characters for me to love or hate (which is good, since I don’t like to repeat names on this list from year to year). Characters I Love Surprisingly, new TV shows haven’t added many new faves to my list. The…

Nostalgia: Hugo & The Muppets – Movie Reviews

This week I watched two movies that unexpectedly shared a common theme. Hugo by director Martin Scorsese, is the story of a young orphan whose quest to repair a mechanical man leads to an adventure of discovery into the history of early cinema. The Muppets features a young man/muppet named Walter, whose quest is to…

Happy Feet Two – Movie Review

How can a movie that looks so much like the original, wonderful tale of singing and dancing animated penguins become such an awful sequel? The animation in Happy Feet 2 is great, with amazing Antarctic scenery, realistic-looking animals like seals, birds, and of course penguins who not only look like penguins but can dance and…

Immortals – Movie Review

As I’ve admitted before, I am one of those super-geeks who has been a fan of all kinds of mythology since I was in primary school — so I’ve been imagining how the heroes, gods, and monsters should look on the big screen for a while. If I were to choose a director, I think…

Saturday Mornings, Now On Fridays

Remember those lazy Saturdays when we’d get up and run down to the family room, turn on the tv to catch the adventure of Thundarr the Barbarian, Spider-man and his Amazing Friends, Blue Falcon and Dyno-mutt, Visionaries: Knights of the Magical Light, or Space Ghost? At its height we enjoyed the Justice League in super-powered…

TV Red Light, Green Light 2011

I know it seems like I’m all about the TV shows now, but frankly I haven’t been out to the movies in a while. Whenever a movie comes out that I’ve been waiting to see, the reviews are always so mediocre or worse, that I lose interest in going out to the movie theatre, especially…

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline – Capsule Book Review

If I was like Oprah and had my own book club, this would be one novel that I would proudly put my sticker on. For a geek like me, Ready Player One was an amazing surprise. From the title, I guessed that the novel had something to do with 80s video games. However, I expected…