Review: Heroes and Legends: The most influential characters of literature

Heroes and Legends: The most influential characters of literature by Thomas A. Shippey

One of the things I like about The Great Courses series is the lectures are all 30 minutes or so, which makes them easily digestible. I have several of the courses (or others like them) in my library and they're great for picking up bits of knowledge between listening to full books. My latest scholarly endeavor then is Heroes and Legends: The Most Influential Characters of Literature as presented by Professor Thomas A. Shippey Continue reading “Review: Heroes and Legends: The most influential characters of literature” →

Review: Kingsman – The Secret Service

From the opening scene onwards, there is almost no way to not understand this film is a love letter to the spy/thriller films of the 80s and 90s. And if you still don’t get that by the end of the film, you should have your License to (watch) Film revoked. There is just as much nostalgia here as there was in last year’s Guardians of the Galaxy, if a little more bloodshed.

Turns out Kingsman is a bespoke tailor shop fronting an incredibly well funded gentleman spy outfit, kept purposefully small so they can forego government intervention and just get to the job at hand – namely saving the world.

Continue reading “Review: Kingsman – The Secret Service” →

Review: The Storyteller

The Storyteller by Jodi Picoult

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Like a finely braided challah (the bread baked for the Jewish sabbath), Jodi Picoult weaves an intricate tale of redemption and forgiveness, identity and masks, and relationships of all sorts. And she does it all with a certain lightness, never getting heavy handed with her subject matter, the Holocaust, although it could easily slip into melodrama territory.

Continue reading “Review: The Storyteller” →

Review: Jupiter Ascending

I admit it. I walked into the theatre completely biased. I was not expecting to like this film. Honestly, I haven’t really liked a Wachowski (Andy and Lana) film since the first Matrix film and I still think their best film is Bound. I think their visual style is impressive though, even if I don’t like their story-telling (In this respect, I feel about them the same way I feel about Tim Burton). So it was with low hopes I went to see Jupiter Ascending, a science fiction story about reconstituted genetic sequences, lost heirs and a dog (there’s always got to be a dog). Continue reading “Review: Jupiter Ascending” →

Review: Detective Strongoak and the Case of the Dead Elf

Detective Strongoak and the Case of the Dead Elf by Terry Newman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Former guard turned PI Nicely Strongoak is a dwarf in an elf’s world. Okay, not just elves. There’s also imps, ogres, tree folk, goblins, humans and various other high fantasy book mainstays. As the book opens, Nicely gets involved in a case whereby the ex-boyfriend of a girl who works down the hall from his office has gone missing. And a high class dame from the right side of the tracks comes downtown to hire Nicely to recover a stolen ring. Then there’s the surf elves (like surf nazis but with pointed ears – no seriously) and exiled royalty and it all culminates with an elf in the passenger seat of Strongoak’s vehicle who happens to have an ax buried deep in his skull (The “Dead Elf” of the title). Continue reading “Review: Detective Strongoak and the Case of the Dead Elf” →

Review: Theory of Everything

Since it’s release stateside I’ve been hearing good and bad about The Theory of Everything, the biopic about cosmologist Stephen Hawking. The conversations about the film increased when the Academy Award nominations were announced and the film took several spots, including a nod for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Music and two for the lead actors, Felicity Jones for portraying Hawking’s put upon wife, Jane, and Eddie Redmayne for playing Hawking himself. Continue reading “Review: Theory of Everything” →

Review: Kindred

Kindred by Octavia E. Butler
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Incredibly powerful piece. Seriously. Octavia Butler has crafted an amazing novel which is nominally science fiction but at the same time is a historical drama as well as a slave narrative.

Written in 1976, the story follows an African American woman named Dana who has just celebrated her 27th birthday and has moved into a new house with her white husband Kevin. Then the weird stuff happens. Continue reading “Review: Kindred” →

Review: Jodorowsky’s Dune

Jodorowsky’s Dune is billed as “The Greatest Film Never Made” and this film of the same title, which documents the first, makes a pretty good case for this statement to be true. The general conceit is that in the mid-70s, hot off another success of a cult film, producer Michel Seydoux offered to produce anything director Alejandro Jodorowsky wanted to do. Jodorowsky blurted out Dune, Frank Herbert’s seminal, award-winning novel.

Now, Dune had never been an easy sell. After it had been serialized in Analog no publisher wanted to touch it as a full novel. Finally, in 1965 Chilton (best known for publishing auto repair manuals) finally brought the book to the mainstream where it won all the awards and has gone on to be one of the most popular science fiction novels of all time. Continue reading “Review: Jodorowsky’s Dune” →

Review: Station Eleven

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“Survival is not enough.”

These are the words painted on the side of the Symphony’s wagon and tattooed on the arm of one of the two primary protagonists of Emily St. John Mandel’s latest novel. The tattooed girl is Kirsten, an actress in her late 20s who is our primary guide to life in the 20 years after the “Georgia Flu” has wiped out 99% of humanity. Continue reading “Review: Station Eleven” →

Review: Big Hero 6

The latest Disney offering is based on a comic book although it retains little of its initial concept. In this incarnation, the main character of Hiro Hamada is a 14 year old robotics/computer genius who is recruited by Tadashi, his older brother, also a robotics whiz, to join him in a university robotics program. All Hiro has to do is impress the program’s founder at the annual robotics show and he’s in. Needless to say, he does.

What happens after that, though, is where things start to go wrong. When a fire breaks out at the show, Tadashi runs into the blaze to save his mentor. The subsequent explosion kills them both. Continue reading “Review: Big Hero 6” →

Review: Killing the Top Ten Sacred Cows of Publishing

Killing the Top Ten Sacred Cows of Publishing by Dean Wesley Smith
My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars

If there’s only one thing to take away from this book it’s that Dean Wesley Smith has traditionally published over 100 novels. Seriously. He tells us this repeatedly in order to prove his bonafides. This makes sense when you remember these ten essays were originally published on his blog (and are still there, among others) so you weren’t getting them all at once. Might have been nice to reformat or go over the collection in advance of compiling them into a book, but one of the other bits of advice we get is (in other words) never look back – keep moving forward. Continue reading “Review: Killing the Top Ten Sacred Cows of Publishing” →

Review: What If (2013)

What if.

What if you meet the person of your dreams but they’re already involved with someone else? What if you keep hanging around because having them in your life in any capacity is better than not having them at all? This is the premise of the film What If (originally titled The F Word) starring Daniel Radcliffe as Wallace, the smitten in the above scenario and Zoe Kazan as Chantry, the smitee (smiter? maybe more apt).

The two meet one night at a party thrown by the Alan (Adam Driver) who is Wallace’s old roommate and Chantry’s cousin. They bond over clever repartee and magnetic word poetry and by the end of the night, the leave together, Wallace walking Chantry to her door. Continue reading “Review: What If (2013)” →

Review: Saga, Volume 1

Saga, Volume 1 by Brian K. Vaughan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Wow that was good.

While I’m not familiar with the work of Brian K. Vaughan if this book is any indication, he’s certainly earned the reputation for quality writing. Continue reading “Review: Saga, Volume 1” →

Review: Obvious Child (2014)

No matter what the ads say, this is not a “Rom-Com” about abortion. It’s romantic, yes. It’s has an abortion as a through line, sure, but it’s in the comedy part where I question things. I’m not saying it’s a bad film but it’s not a particularly funny one.

The story follows Donna Stern (Jenny Slate) who is a 28 year old, adrift in New York. She’s working days at a dead end job in a “quirky” book store (which, we find out we see her there, is closing) and at night she’s trying to make a go of it as a stand up comedian. After being dumped by her boyfriend, she ends up having a one night stand with a nice guy, Max (Jake Lacy) and gets pregnant. The rest of the film is her dealing with the consequences of this action. Continue reading “Review: Obvious Child (2014)” →

Review: Joss Whedon: The Biography

Joss Whedon: The Biography by Amy Pascale

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’m a Joss Whedon fan. I think Firefly is one of the best shows ever aired and The Cabin in the Woods a classic deconstruction of the horror genre. I think his turns of phrase are incredibly clever and full of the pop culture references I love. So yeah, I’m a fan. Not sure you’d pick this book up if you weren’t. Even more so, I’m not sure this book would convince you to be if you weren’t already. And I think that’s the biggest problem with Amy Pascale’s book – she’s also a fan, a big one, and this book comes across like a fan’s take on examining the catalog of her hero.

Which, to be fair, she does quite well. Continue reading “Review: Joss Whedon: The Biography” →

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