I Need A Hero I really liked the first season of True Detective. It was a wild and magical story with a lot of mumbo jumbo and talk about Time being a Flat Circle. It was also pretty clear who the two main stars of the show were. Lots of people came and went, but our two detectives were the stars. I have no idea who the hell’s supposed to be the main character in HBO’s True Detective Season 2. With a dozen or so people sharing screen time, and four people who seem to be sort-of main characters, the…
Author: Jon Herrera
Writer, Photographer, Blogger.
Dead Wake by Erik Larson
The Last Crossing of the Lusitania Erik Larson writes dense books filled with minutia that somehow always feel poignant and relevant. This time the story is about World War I u-boats and the end of the great age of Ocean Luxury Liners. The Lusitania was a large ship and had close to two thousand souls on board. Erik does a great job of bringing many of those two thousand people to light. Celebrities of the day and people working their way across alike. Everyone has a story. Of course, the rich and famous get a bit more attention as a…
Humans-Androids Are Slaves
Another Science Fiction Show where machines with souls are bad. Humans is a British Channel 4 science fiction show picked up by AMC. The big American star in the cast is William Hurt. He plays a grumpy old man who has a strong attachment to his malfunctioning robot. In this alternate reality, health care is not only free, it’s mandatory. The Government tells William he must replace his old model with a new one. The new model appears to be based on Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. The main storyline has to do with a handful…
Inside Out
The last Pixar film I watched was [easyazon_link identifier=”B00A6PD9I4″ locale=”US” tag=”londonthoug-20″]Brave[/easyazon_link], a Pixar film with a Disney plot shoved down its throat. Brave could have been so much better. I didn’t bother watching [easyazon_link identifier=”B005SAP45I” locale=”US” tag=”londonthoug-20″]Cars 2[/easyazon_link] or [easyazon_link identifier=”B00G9U7R2O” locale=”US” tag=”londonthoug-20″]Monster’s University[/easyazon_link]. For the most part, Pixar films have been consistently good, but I have feared more Disney interference. It doesn’t look like Disney did too much damage to Inside Out. I watched [easyazon_link identifier=”B00YCY46VO” locale=”US” tag=”londonthoug-20″]Inside Out[/easyazon_link] in 3D, a gimmick that I guess is not going to go away any time soon. The 3D effects were…
Mad Max Fury Road
One of the things I hate about new superhero movies is that they spend the first twenty minutes of the film on an Origin Story. Dammit, doesn’t everyone already know that Batman’s parents were gunned down in an alley and Superman was raised by a couple of hicks in Kansas? Well, [easyazon_link identifier=”B00XOXDXV8″ locale=”US” tag=”londonthoug-20″]Fury Road[/easyazon_link] wastes no time telling us how Max ends up in a desert snacking on a two headed mutant lizard. We have a handful of flashbacks of a little girl begging Max for help and then off we go on our two hour chase scene. Fury…
Jurassic World-Not As Bad As I Feared
spoilers. I’m not a fan of the scene where they feed a mosasur a great white shark. I guess it could have been worse, they could have fed it a killer whale. Jurassic World had a lot of fun nods to the original film and a lot of Really? moments as well, such as when we see a handful of T-Rex headed pterodactyls or when we see guests in a theme park free wheeling it on their own while surrounded by run of the mill dinos that could crush their little hamster ball by stepping on it or when a…
The Matrix…Let JJ Abrams Have a Shot at It
Just look at the One Sheets. The Matrix has actual humans photographed. Reloaded has Neo and Trinity Photoshopped within an inch of their lives. Revolutions has photos turned into a digital illustration. This parallels the path of the films, The Matrix is a very good film. Reloaded is a not so good film. Revolutions sucks. Part of my feeling has to do with time. If you come to Matrix as a Trilogy, then you probably don’t see much of anything wrong with the sequels. A small aside. Easily the best ever episode of Star Trek:The Next Generation is Best of…
Defiance Season 3
The Syfy Channel’s post alien invasion/post apocalyptic tale of a city that used to be known as St. Louis. The first season was basically a Western, with the town getting a new Marshall and fighting off the Indians, only the Indians were a rag tag group of aliens. They are long gone now. Season 2 saw the Marshall’s daughter turn into a killing machine bent on the destruction of Earth. We abandoned any idea that Defiance might be the last free city in the world and spent a lot of time with massive CGI destruction. A few characters from the…
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
The novel had one of the worst covers I’ve ever seen on a professionally published book. It’s solid black with the title in white text. I suppose they could have gone that extra step and had the title in black text, but the effect was pretty much the same, it could have been a book about anything or nothing. Add to that a page count that made it feel like a dictionary when you picked it up which inspired you to promptly set it back down. But once I got around to reading it, several years after it came out,…
Teen Titans GO!
In 1980 George Perez rebooted an old DC title called New Teen Titans. This was one of my favorite comic books. Great story arcs, amazing artwork, and all kinds of cool stuff happening each and every issue. These were often stories about the end of the world, major problems with parents and guardians, and occasional conflicts with each other. This was right before the birth of the all powerful Graphic Novel and looking back now the artwork looks more like a comic book and less groundbreaking than it did at the time. So, flash forward about 35 years and the Teen…