Tag Archives: reviews

Anti-nationalist sentiment – The Pursuit of Happiness (1934)

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First up, thanks to all of you who sent notes of encouragement after last week’s lengthy discussion of Alzheimer’s. It’s not an easy road to travel, but since when was life ever easy? It’s good to know how many people I have in my corner.

pursuitNow on to the blog I started writing two weeks ago, a group of thoughts about a movie I watched even more weeks ago, almost by accident. It’s old. So old that, if you search it on IMDB, it doesn’t even show up on the initial list of possible films, even if you type its exact title. It was made in 1934, and I discovered it because I was watching some films with Joan Bennett on YouTube. (Not a lot of Joan Bennett’s films are available on NetFlix streaming!) I was watching Joan Bennett films because I was reading a biography of the Bennett family, which was recommended by Lara Parker in her latest book, which I reviewed recently. All this discussion of her early film work got me interested in seeing some movies. That’s the way my mind flows. One thing to the next.

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Thor: The Dark World – Checking off the Boxes

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thor__the_dark_world_v_2_by_natetravis23-d5dktesSo I says to my wife this morning, I says, “Hon, is it just me, or are a lotta folks throwin’ a lotta other folks under buses nowadays?”

And she says to me, “Oaaaah, yeah, hon, they’s been throwin’ each other under buses right and left out dere in de alley!”

Okay, so, no we don’t really talk like that. We’re Baltimorons only in the geographical sense.

My actual question concerned my growing perception that people in the workplace are faking it. They take credit for work they didn’t do. They’re desperate to make it look like they’re accomplished big things, and they’re equally desperate to make it look like they never make a mistake. They therefore cast a lot of blame and aspersion on their colleagues. Colloquially, they throw each other under the bus an awful lot.

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Leadership Lessons in Ender’s Game

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enders-game-posterI had a meltdown Friday night. Fairly small thing, but one damn thing on top of many other things had me spending about fifteen minutes screaming at the heavens, demanding to know why I keep getting, um… used for the universe’s gratification without benefit of lubricant… when, day in and day out, I feel like I do nothing but the right things.

Huge self-pity fest. You have those sometimes. Nothing to do but get over it. I consider it the equivalent of the pressure valve on the water-heater kicking off, venting off some steam, and preventing the whole system from exploding. If it happens once, you may not even notice, or you notice and just monitor. If it happens once too often, well, there’s an obvious need for intervention.

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Review – Dark Shadows: Wolf Moon Rising by Lara Parker

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Wolf-Moon-RisingLara Parker is the (still) lovely lady who played the witch Angelique (and a few other roles) on the 1960s horror soap opera, Dark Shadows. She appears very briefly in Tim Burton’s recent film adaptation of the series, and she’s done a boatload of Dark Shadows audio productions for Big Finish, also usually playing Angelique.

Wolf Moon Rising is her third novel set in the Dark Shadows universe. (Or, more correctly, the Dark Shadows multiverse, which she’s expanded with this volume.) In her first venture, Angelique’s Descent, she gave us a biography of her character. That is, she chronicled one of Angelique’s numerous lives, albeit a short one. Angelique Bouchard was born in the 1770s and lived on the island of Martinique, where she was a servant to Josette DuPres, daughter of a wealthy French merchant. As a very young woman, Angelique fell in love with an American, Barnabas Collins, a young man on his first business trip abroad, representing his family’s company. Sadly, Barnabas had his fun with Angelique, then met her mistress Josette and forgot all about the poor servant girl. Josette, as heir to another fortune, was more fit to be the wife of a rich New Englander.

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Don Jon – Losing it

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Explicit Language Warning!

Yeah, that’s my second warning in as many weeks, isn’t it? Of course, you only know that if you’re still here after last week, right? Are you still here? I promise, this time out, not to say anything that will offend the sensibilities of my left-wing readers. Oh, except this observation: Miley Cyrus is a lot prettier when she’s trying to look like Michele Bachman than she is the rest of the time these days. There. That’s done. You’re safe now. On with the show. Which may offend the sensibilities of everyone not offended last week.

don-jon-posterJoseph Gordon-Levitt is an actor I admire a lot, ever since I first saw him play David Collins in Dan Curtis’s 1991 primetime remake of Dark Shadows.  He’s one of the most talented performers of his generation, taking on roles that are sometimes provocative, sometimes downright bizarre, but, even when he’s doing a comedy like 3rd Rock from the Sun or a blockbuster like The Dark Knight Rises, never pedestrian.

Recently, he broadened his career horizons by making his debut as a writer-director with Don Jon, a film in which he also starred. This film is laugh-out-loud funny, insightful and daring. I recommend it wholeheartedly… but… It may make you uncomfortable. It is very, very explicit. The opening line, narrated by Gordon-Levitt as Don Jon, contains the f-word and describes the state of his genitalia. It gets more explicit from there. So be warned. It made a lot of viewers in the theater where I saw it uncomfortable, even as they enjoyed it. Continue reading →

Of Robots, Sex and Good Intentions (Warning: Here be libertarianism!)

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robots-of-dawn-isaac-asimovI’m currently re-visiting an old favorite, untouched on my shelf since I received it as a Christmas gift the year it was published, 1983. The Robots of Dawn is a sequel to The Caves of Steel, which I’ve reviewed previously, and The Naked Sun. These are the first three of Isaac Asimov’s “robot novels,” which eventually became precursors to his more famous Foundation series. This particular novel was written some 25 years after the books it sequelizes. Times had become more liberal, allowing Asimov to openly discuss topics in human-robot interactions that he hadn’t been able to visit within the confines of 1950s SF. Specifically, The Robots of Dawn prominently features the complications which result when a human woman marries a robot. Lots of author before had probably speculated on robot sex, and many have since; but this was speculation on robot sex by the master of the robot story. Continue reading →

For Your Review – No Seriously

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Upfront — this is an appeal. I’m asking you to do something. It’s not a favor. I hate favors. It’s something I think is a critical part of the writer/reader relationship. It may be something you don’t always think about, but it’s really, really important.

First, let me ask you a question.

How do you hear about books? Stop and think about it. What’s your favorite book? How did you first discover it? If it’s a lifetime favorite, probably a parent, librarian or a teacher read it to you when you were little. If it’s a favorite from your teen years, probably a friend recommended it, or some adult told you not to read it. (The Catcher in the Rye syndrome, I call that.) My all-time favorite book, I’m pretty sure, is Time Enough for Love by Robert A. Heinlein. One of my best friends in high school (and still one of my best friends today) turned me on to Heinlein. As an adult, you probably found some favorites just by looking on bookstore shelves. But somewhere along the line, if you’re a serious reader, you started asking, “What else is out there that I’ve missed?” And to answer that question, you did one of two things: you asked your librarian or bookseller to make a recommendation, or you read book reviews. Continue reading →

Carter Hall is one bloodthirsty guy… A Review of The Golden Age Hawkman Archives, Volume 1

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gahaHawkman has been one of my favorite comic characters since I first heard of him back in the early 1970s. You might rightly ask if there’s a comic book character I’ve heard of who is not one of my favorites. A fair question. I don’t like Lobo or the Punisher. Wolverine wears on me after a while. He’s a great supporting character on a team, but I have little desire to read a whole book (or see a whole movie, even starring Hugh Jackman) about him. But if you were to ask me if there was a character created before 1975 who isn’t a favorite, well, probably no. I love them all. Each for different reasons.

In Hawkman’s case, I loved the fact that he came from another planet. I loved that his wife Hawkgirl was his equal partner in adventure. (She was later Hawkwoman, when we became socially aware, and then Hawkgirl again, when social awareness, um… took a cruise? I’m not sure.) I loved that he dressed in red, yellow and green. Not everyone can pull that off. There’s definitely not enough green in the superhero spectrum. If recent films are to be believed, there’s little color at all. Isn’t it sad that, after they went to all the trouble to invent Technicolor, that our films (superhero and otherwise) are now effectively in black and white again, they’re so drab? No, that’s not fair. Black and white films of yesteryear had far more color than many of our films do today.

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LSH RIP

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LSH_Cv23_ecyo86666t_And so it ends… With issue #23 of The Legion of Super-Heroes, the ninth American series from DC Comics to bear that title, the Legion is no more. Does anyone care? Seriously, call out if you do, but I’m really wondering. Well, it’s clear that Paul Levitz cares. He’s been writing the title for the past few years, and wrote it from 1977 – 1989.

Come to think of it, it’s a toss-up as to whether or not I care. I waited several days to read the damned thing, and I believe I let the penultimate issues pile up into a stack of about six before I read them, all in one sitting. (I skimmed.) Was a time I would have read the new issue the day it came out, probably in the car on the way home. (I should point out I refer to a time when I did not drive. My mother drove, whilst I perched in the shotgun seat with a lime Slurpee. I learned early not to drink and drive, and certainly not to read comics and drive.) Nor did I skim in those days. Indeed, I told everyone around me to shut up, because I was reading. Or I hid in my room where the TV somehow never distracted me, because the comics were so good. Continue reading →

Review – The Tarzan Collection (Well, the last half, anyway)

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TarzanCollThis DVD collection include six movies: Tarzan the Ape Man, Tarzan and His Mate, Tarzan Escapes, Tarzan Finds a Son, Tarzan’s Secret Treasure and Tarzan’s New York Adventure. These comprise all of the MGM Tarzan films, filmed between 1932 and 1942, which starred Olympic Gold Medalist Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan and Maureen O’Sullivan as Jane Parker. (Ms. Parker was an Englishwoman, unlike her namesake from the books, Jane Porter, who was a Balmer gal, the daughter of a Hopkins professor, as I recall.)

I’ve had this sitting on my shelf for a while, and had only watched the first three films. I stopped short of Tarzan Finds a Son some months (probably years) back. I suck at time sense. My kids tell me all the time. Or are they my grandkids? Hmm… Continue reading →