I thought this was going to be a blatant ripoff of Harry Potter and The X-Men, but turned out to be more of a ripoff of, well, all the terrible movies featuring teen heroes from the past decade or so. Kids are smart, adults are idiots, and the new kid who should be killed right off the bat turns out to be smarter and more powerful than everyone else. On the plus side, I did kind of like it. This is a Grade A turn off your brain while you watch it film-nothing makes any sense. And I mean, Nothing.…
Author: Jon Herrera
Writer, Photographer, Blogger.
Bridget Jones’s Baby
At first I found Renée Zellweger’s looks and Hugh Grant’s absence a bit distracting. But McDreamy does a good job standing in as Bridget’s other love interest, and Renée still sounds like Bridget. It’s not that she looks old, it’s that she looks so different. We’re talking Darrin 1 and Darrin 2 from Bewitched different here. Anyway… We find Bridget a bit bummed out about turning 43 and still being alone. One of her younger and hipper friends takes her to a Festival, where she meets a love guru played by Patrick Dempsey. Since it’s a movie, they hook up…
Gilmore Girls A Year In The Life
Gilmore Girls was always a wonderful show filled with gags about current events, heart felt moments between lovers, and a cast of oddball characters worthy of a great Britcom. Everyone still alive seems to have come back to revive their roles for A Year In The Life. It’s been ten years since the show went off the air and everyone looks pretty amazing. Of course, I have seen the bulk of the cast in other roles over those ten years. I loved seeing them all again. I loved all the gags. The reference to Inside Llewyn Davis was a hoot.…
The Things They Carried
After fifty years or so, it seems impossible that there would be anything new to hear about the war in Vietnam. Boys were sent to the other side of the world to commit murder and mayhem and many of them came back damaged and broken. Many of them didn’t come back at all. We’ve seen their stories in TV shows and movies, read about them in books and short stories. We’ve even laughed about the conflict in the sort-of-a-protest song Alice’s Restaurant. So it is a bit surprising to read yet one account of yet one more soldier’s experience and…
Arrival
Yeah, that was good. Movies like this normally have a long putting-the-team-together opening like Oceans 11 or The Core, but not here. The team is mainly Amy Adams and it doesn’t take her long to get on board. Jeremy Renner and Forest Whitaker are the other familiar faces trying to figure out how to talk to some mysterious aliens who have parked in twelve spots around the world. Arrival is a great movie. It works on both the global level, where the end of the world is a real possibility, and on a personal level, where the loss of a…
Doctor Strange
I’m not all that familiar with Doctor Strange, so for once I needed the Origin Story that takes up the first part of Doctor Strange the movie. Our hero is a egotistical jerk who, like Doctor House, only treats people whose cases he finds interesting. Being a surgeon, when he finds himself in a car crash, naturally it’s his hands that are damaged. No longer being able to preform surgery, he decides to follow the path of enlightenment. He ends up in Nepal and meets an immortal. This person is a lot like Tyler Durden from Fight Club. All Doctor…
Pres Trump and The 2nd US Civil War
Donald Trump being elected President is right up there with 9/11 and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It’s shocking and baffling and a concentrated act of pure evil. Or maybe it’s more like the attack of Fort Sumter. The first shot in a new American Civil War. The media, for the most part, are talking about Trump’s plans and how difficult it would be for him to go through with them. They are still thinking of Donald Trump as a normal person, a normal President that will play by the rules. Donald Trump doesn’t have to play by the…
Revival by Stephen King
The genius of Stephen King is his ability to write in such a way that you feel as if he is talking to you across the dining room table. This time he seems to be talking directly to men of a certain age, somewhere between fifty and sixty, who share memories of the same TV Shows and the same popular music, among countless other things. I listened to the audiobook read by David Morse and he does a great job of reading the story of a man from Maine who loses his faith as a boy. We follow our hero…
Crimson Death
As with the last Anita Blake book, there was some hope to be had in the opening pages. Edward calls and tells Anita that rogue Vampires are running amok in Ireland and that he needs her help. But instead of the next chapter starting with Edward driving Antia away from Dublin Airport, we spend the next few chapters watching Antia and two of her sex slaves looking for a good place to take a shower. Seriously. Laurell K Hamilton doesn’t so much write novels anymore, as several hundred page long sermons on the poly lifestyle. One of the themes she…
Suicide Squad
Was This Trip Really Necessary? No, No It Wasn’t. Spoilers. Ok, when two of your Big Bad Villains are Gods, you can’t kill them with a couple of bricks of C4. You just can’t. And when you let your main pure evil, murdering scumbag, Government Employee get away in the end, well, you can’t do that either. Suicide Squad wasn’t quite as bad as Ghostbusters, but that’s not saying a hell of a lot. This was easily the most over-hyped film of the year and just as easily one of the worst films of the year. We start off with…