The year was 1984, Orwell's year, the year that the Apple Mac first burst onto the scene, also the year I finished graduating from Hudson Valley Community College and moved on to SUNYA to study psychology. It was also the year of the Terminator, of the Karate Kid, and the original Nightmare on Elm Street. And it was the year that Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, Dan Akroyd, and Sigourney Weaver told us who we're gonna call. Ghostbusters begins with a brilliantly atmospheric stage setting, with the New York City Library [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: JAWS
July 7, 2015 By 2 Comments
A long time ago – forty years ago, to be exact – summer was considered the "dead time" for movies. It was assumed that most people wouldn't go to movie theaters in the summer, preferring to pursue other activities. But in 1975, that changed, and the "summer blockbuster" was born, with the release of one of Stephen Spielberg's true masterpieces: Amazon instant Video link for Jaws. Jaws was also the very first movie I ever saw by myself in the theater. No one else in my family was interested in it, so I went to see it on my own… and [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: Big Hero 6
July 2, 2015 By 2 Comments
Hiro (yes, our Hero is named Hiro) Hamada is a teen genius – 14 and already graduated from high school. Raised by his aunt Cass and his considerably older brother Tadashi, Hiro has yet to find direction for his genius and when we meet him is making money by hustling in "bot fights" – robot combat duels with significant money riding on them. His cockiness almost gets him in serious trouble, since he doesn't recognize that tricking people involved in illegal operations doesn't just get you a stern talking-to. Fortunately big brother [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: The Amazing Spider-Man 2
March 13, 2015 By 1 Comment
I was reluctant to see the second entry in the quick reboot of the Spider-Man franchise, despite the fact that I really, REALLY liked the first entry. My reluctance stemmed from two things. First, there were three villains advertised, and multi-villain films have a history of having… issues. (see Spider-Man 3, Batman 2, etc.) Second, the combination of Gwen Stacy and Green Goblin pretty much added up to Biggest Tragedy of Spidey's Life, which I saw as meaning a pretty damn downer of a film. I was entirely [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: Godzilla 2014
May 19, 2014 By Leave a Comment
I have previously written on Godzilla as a franchise and what he meant to me from my childhood onward. Now Legendary has finally released the second American-made Godzilla movie (after the disastrous 1998 movie) and I have seen it. THIS is what Godzilla is intended to be. Before I move into detailed and possibly spoilery discussion, I want to just say that this was a great Godzilla film, one of the best of the entire franchise. It includes all but one of the elements I outlined as key elements of Godzilla, and the one it [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: Dante’s Peak
May 14, 2014 By Leave a Comment
One of the landmark events of my youth happened in the early morning of May 18th, 1980, during my senior year of high school. On that day, Mount Saint Helens suffered one of the largest recorded landslides in modern history – resulting in a cataclysmic volcanic blast which unleashed a pyroclastic cloud in a lateral detonation that scoured the landscape for up to twenty kilometers from the mountain. It was the first volcanic eruption on the U.S. mainland in two generations (the last being Mount Lassen in 1912) and one [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: Captain America: The Winter Soldier
May 7, 2014 By Leave a Comment
For once I'm reviewing something before it's out of the theaters, rather than a decade later. Not bad. THERE WILL BE SPOILERS. The Spoiler-Free review: Awesome. If you liked the first one, you'll like this one too. On To The Spoilers ! ! ! Captain America: The Winter Soldier is, for those hiding out from too much Internet publicity, the sequel to Captain America and The Avengers. Steve Rogers, AKA Captain America, is sent on what seems a simple, if dangerous, rescue [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: The Iron Giant
April 25, 2014 By Leave a Comment
Brad Bird is probably best known as the genius behind The Incredibles. However, he was also one of those responsible for another brilliant piece of animation, one rather unfairly obscure: The Iron Giant. Something crashes to Earth during the Cold War, leaving a trail of destruction through the Maine woods; when this giant mechanical figure rises and tries to find its way out, it encounters an electrical substation and electrocutes itself. Hogarth Hughes, a young boy who lives on an isolated farmstead with his [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: Pirates of the Caribbean
February 26, 2014 By Leave a Comment
"You're forgetting one thing, mate: I'm Captain Jack Sparrow." Once upon a time there was a rather cheesy amusement park ride called "Pirates of the Caribbean". Disney had constructed this ride to capitalize on the image of pirates that it had, itself, helped to create, swashbuckling rogues who were perhaps not quite as blackhearted as they would like you to think, and certainly not very much like the real thing. This was certainly a slight foundation on which to build a movie, and I myself have never seen the ride [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: Young Sherlock Holmes
February 17, 2014 By Leave a Comment
The power of speculative fiction – and, indeed, of many other works of fiction – rests on the simple phrase "what if…?" What if we could reach the moon? What if you could predict the course of civilization and saw its collapse? What if the Greek Myths were real? This is of course also the foundation of much fanfic – what if the story continued, what if these people had a different relationship than shown in canon, etc. What if someone wrote a marvelous Sherlock Holmes fanfic and got it filmed? [ Continue reading... ]
What You’re Saying