Category: Review
July 14, 2018
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Review
A Quiet Place (John Krasinski, 2018)
Loved it. A slow-burning Cloverfield.
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Review
My Absolute Darling (Gabriel Tallent, 2017)
This was fantastic. Very dark and disturbing, but essentially redemptive in the end.
July 10, 2018
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Review
I, Tonya (Craig Gillespie, 2017)
I have no interest in this as an attempt to rehabilitate Tony Harding’s reputation, but as a film, it managed to rise above the thoroughly unlikeable characters and present something worthwhile. Allison Janney is spectacular as always.
July 8, 2018
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Review
Hot Fuzz (Edgar Wright, 2007)
Still funny watching a decade later.
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Review
Echopraxia (Firefall, #2) (Peter Watts, 2014)
Still full of fascinating ideas, but didn’t work for me the way the first book of the series did. The Vampires and Gods and what have you were a bit too fantastic for me and take the foreground in this installment, leaving me less satisfied.
July 7, 2018
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Review
Northern Soul (Elaine Constantine, 2014)
This was so much fun. Watching the boys get swept up in the passion for sweet soul music got me to reminiscing about my discovery of punk at about the same age.
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Review
July 6, 2018
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Review
Roman J. Israel, Esq. (Dan Gilroy, 2017)
July 4, 2018
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Review
Ocean’s 8 (Gary Ross, 2018)
A fun fluffy summer distraction. You definitely don’t want to think too hard about movies like this.
July 3, 2018
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Review
The Colonel (Firefall 1.5) (Peter Watts, 2014)
A short story that tells us what’s been happening on Earth while the Firefall saga continues in space. Onward to book two in the series!
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Review
Blindsight (Firefall 1) (Peter Watts, 2010)
Hard SF with… vampires? Okay, sure. I love books that can stretch my understanding of what’s possible – real flights of imagination. Not just “West Wing on a gas giant” or “King Arthur, but robots” stuff. This fit the bill quite nicely. If there are aliens in the story I really want them to be, well alien.
June 29, 2018
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Review
The Freeze-Frame Revolution (Peter Watts, 2018)
Got to love a novel that measures time in millions of years. This is my first encounter with Watts, but I’m diving into one of his bigger, more challenging novels (Blindsight) immediately after reading this.
June 27, 2018
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Review
In The Distance (Hernan Diaz, 2017)
I’ve read a few novels about the final days of the American frontier, but none have given me this visceral sense of the immensity and the brutality of that landscape.
A (very) rare five-star review from me.
June 24, 2018
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Review
Convenience Store Woman (Sayaka Murata, Ginny Tapley Takemori (Translator), 2018)
A short glimpse into the very odd existence of a misfit in a world with little room for misfits. I’d mention Catcher In The Rye and Confederacy of Dunces as American counterparts, but this feels less grand and more subtle.
June 22, 2018
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Review
American War (Omar El Akkad, 2017)
Reading this during the Trump-induced immigration crisis and creation of internment camps made this a difficult respite from the news. Still, what a fantastic read.
El Akkad spends little time on exposition about this climate-shocked future America. Instead, he focusses on the impact of geographic and political upheaval on a small group of climate refugees in the American south some 70 years from now.
I found it fascinating, compelling, and beautifully written.
June 19, 2018
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Review
Annihilation (2018, Alex Garland)
I had to think long and hard about how I felt about the movie adaptation of Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation which I loved. I was a big fan of Alex Garland’s “Ex Machina” too but thought the psychedelic and literary novel was going to be pretty much impossible to film without major reworking.
Visually the movie is absolutely stunning and ultimately I feel that Garland’s decision to drop some of the more out-there stuff in the book (including some major plot elements) was probably wise.
On first viewing (in the theatre) I couldn’t get my head around the lighthouse scene. This felt nothing like the book and looked so oddly out of keeping with the organic mutations earlier on in the film. But on second viewing I’ve decided that everything in the lighthouse is metaphorical because it is beyond our comprehension – much like the acid trip Jupiter and Beyond scene in 2001. With that in mind, I decided the film was great.
June 11, 2018
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Review
Sea of Rust (C. Robert Cargill, 2017)
This was loads of fun. Having killed all humans, robots now need to worry about being killed by global AI.
June 6, 2018
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Review
The Outsider (Stephen King, 2018)
King mixes real-world police fiction with supernatural horror with greater success in The Outsider than the Mr. Mercedes series. I got mad at the latter because it flipped genres without warning and I felt cheated. I knew what I was getting with The Outsider, so it didn’t bother me.
June 1, 2018
May 31, 2018
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Review
It was fun watching Jennifer Lawrence’s slow descent into madness via claustrophobic close-up as mayhem steadily increases all around her. I’m not sure if it’s about loss of control, the sacrificial role of muses, or something entirely different, but I didn’t really care in the end because it felt very fresh.
May 18, 2018
May 13, 2018
May 12, 2018
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Review
The Overstory (Richard Ford, 2018)
Absolutely wonderful. Such rich language, such wonderfully explored characters.
May 5, 2018
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Review
It’s best to think of this as a mid-level Black Mirror episode. Lots of fun stuff if you don’t think about it too hard and some nice graphic design used for the ubiquitous AR everyone in this world has embedded in their noggins.
