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…
Author: Jon Herrera
Writer, Photographer, Blogger.
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…
Ghostbusters 2016
Yeah, that sucked. 1984’s Ghostbusters is the only film I ever paid to see twice in a first run theater. The acting was good, the special effects were pretty damned amazing, and the story was compelling. It had it’s funny moments, but Ghostbusters was played straight. Our heroes were real scientists trying to understand something that couldn’t be understood. My favorite scene was the one where the ghosts break containment and flood the city as some wonderfully funky and scary music plays in the background. These were some scary ghosts that go on a murder spree. 2016’s Ghostbuster cost a…
Crisis in Six Scenes
A classic Woody Allen story. If, like me, your all time favor Woody Allen film is Anne Hall, then your in luck. Crsis in Six Scenes is basically an 80 year old Alvin Singer shuffling around, bitiching and moaning about everything, and baffled as to why no one cares what he has to say. Of course, if your coming to Crisis in Six Scenes with the expectation this is going to be groundbreaking new work from the man who hasn’t changed his looks, jokes, or formulas since the late 1950s, well, what the hell are you thinking? This is Woody…
HBO’s Westworld
The original Westworld was a pretty simple bit of business. We follow a couple of men as they go on vacation at the best theme park in the world and something goes wrong. There was very little depth, the last half of the film was one long chase scene. And a slow chase at that. HBO and J.J. Abrams have taken Michael Crichton’s basic idea of an interactive Disneyland and expanded it to include subtle motivations for the characters, both human and machine. In a nice twist, we find a few characters in reverse roles. Instead of an evil robot,…