movies

UnMarvelling and UnStarWarsing

I’m a board-certified geek, and proud of it. I read fantasy series that are longer than 10,000 pages. I watch all of Jackson’s Middle Earth movies in a marathon. (The extended versions, naturally.) I have gone to a party dressed as a Slytherin student. In other words, I’m the prime audience for Marvel and Star Wars. And I’m getting tired. It’s not that I don’t like Marvel or Star Wars anymore. I like water plenty, but if you give me too much of it, I drown. (Or I get tired of all the rain. Or I complain about the flood.

2022 Media Review

2022 is come and gone now, and I wanted to take some time as I usually do to go over the best (and worst) of what I read and watched. All told, I made my goal of 52 books for the year. I watched 27 television shows in their entirety, and I watched 103 movies. I gave books an average rating of 7.74 and movies and television an average of 7.59, indicating I generally stop reading things I don’t like more than I stop watching stuff I don’t like. Those averages are honestly a bit on the high side, though

Movie Marathon: Mission Impossible

It took me a while to figure out which movie series we should binge this holiday season. We’d done Lord of the Rings (and the Hobbit) twice, and Star Wars once, and those had all gone swimmingly. Harry Potter was a fiasco, mainly because the movies just get worse and worse after about the fourth. My family has never really gotten into Star Trek, so that seemed a bit of a stretch. What else was there? It had been a while since I’d seen any of the Mission Impossible movies, so I thought that might be a good option. We

A (Brief) Update on the Memory Thief Movie

Longtime readers might recall that more than five(!) years ago, there was a big announcement about The Memory Thief getting made into a movie and getting a sequel. And then four years ago, I announced who I’d found out the screenwriters were. Since then, you’ve heard . . . nothing. And today, that’s not going to change that much, but there is *something* to tell you, and so I thought I’d let you in. The book was originally optioned by 21 Laps and Fox, back in the days before Fox was bought by Disney. Before that sale went through, things

Revisiting The Matrix

The trailer for the fourth Matrix movie dropped yesterday, and it’s pretty impressive. (Love the use of White Rabbit, even though it’s the most obvious soundtrack choice for a Matrix movie ever.) Coincidentally, I just rewatched the original for the first time in well over a decade. There was much of it I still loved: the science fiction what-if elements, the twists and turns of the plot, and the climax where Neo faces Agent Smith is still incredible. One of the most famous parts of the movie, however, now goes over like a brick with me. When I first watched