Category Archives: Reviews

Please Re-cut This Film! An appeal for Atlas Shrugged: Who Is John Galt? (Part Two)

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AtlasShruggedNote: If you haven’t seen the film, take my word for nothing in here. PLEASE see it and draw your own conclusions. It’s still running in 65 theaters around the country.

Continuing my review of Atlas Shrugged: Who Is John Galt, I wish to pause for a disclaimer and a shout-out. First, the disclaimer: I am speaking frankly about this film because I believe in the project. I respect the passion of the creative team behind it. I understand the obstacles they had to overcome to bring an overwhelmingly popular book to film under the eye of a film industry that largely holds its audience in contempt, and believes that this book is only popular because most of the reading public is too stupid to know what’s good for them. I admire their effort, and I hope it will ultimately pay off.

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Please Re-cut This Film! An appeal for Atlas Shrugged: Who Is John Galt? (Part One)

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imageI don’t want to write this review, but, dammit, I feel obligated.

Actually, I feel torn. One the one hand, I supported this movie financially via Kickstarter. I think very well of the producers and creative team who have, thus far, brought us one excellent film and one pretty good one in this trilogy. Criticizing them in public feels a bit like airing dirty laundry, disloyalty to the cause. And yet… When I see something done poorly, by people who want to do a good job, and I know how it could be done better… I feel like I have to say something. Even though saying something seems to put me in the ranks of the many film critics who will say this movie is a desperate, laughable attempt to bring recognition to a set of lunatic fringe ideas, and that the poor quality of the film is just a testament to how unsound their thinking is.

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Review – Space: 1999 – To Everything That Was

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space1999_classicI happened upon this volume almost by accident. I’ve always been a huge fan of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s 1975 – 1977 science fiction series, Space: 1999. I’ve got a bit of a chip on my shoulder about it, in fact, because the show seems to provoke resentment from most corners of Fandom. If you’re a fan over the age of about 35, you remember how it felt to like Star Trek or comic books, back before Fandom became just another cash cow for Hollywood? Before the Marvel Movies conquered the box office? Before The Big Bang Theory? (The show, not the actual theory. Note the italics. Punctuation is key.) Before geek was chic?

Yeah, it was a bad feeling to be a fan in those days. Everyone looked down on you, to include your peers, siblings, teachers, sometimes even your parents! Well, as bad as that felt for, say a Star Trek fan, it was worse for a Space: 1999 fan. Everyone looked down on us, including all other fans! To this day, I’m careful at cons and on panel discussions about mentioning my love of this series, because people actually groan in revulsion.

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Review: The Search for Maggie Ward

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TheSearchForMaggieWardI suppose it’s appropriate, when reviewing a book by a priest, to open with a confession. Here’s mine: The Search for Maggie Ward made me rethink my status as a confirmed agnostic.

Before, I had not encountered very much gentle Christianity.

I had not encountered clerics, much less a celibate cleric, who had anything to say about sex. Greeley not only had a lot to say about sex, what he had to say was also overwhelmingly positive.

 

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Review – Tribute: Frank Capra

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frank-capra-comic-bookI somehow missed this when it came out in time for Christmas, 2012. In fact, I’m not 100% sure how I stumbled across it last week. Other than their Logan’s Run adaptations a while back, I don’t read too many Bluewater comics, so I doubt it was a house ad. Alas, that’s the nature of the Internet, especially when you’re as ADD as I am. Searching for one thing can lead to something you didn’t expect, which sets you on a mission. In this case, surfing around for something unrelated brought up a stray reference to a Capra tribute done in comic book form, and I had to find out what that was about. So whatever I’d been searching for was forgotten, and I had to jump on ComiXology and buy this.

Frank Capra is one of my heroes. I have a list of four big personal heroes, and a list of, I guess, “others.” Mostly right now the distinction between “big” and “other” is that the “others” are still living, or that their principal body of work falls within my lifetime.

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Review – Something Wicked This Way Comes – The Book, The Movie, The Graphic Novel

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Okay, I’m a journalist, and journalists put the most important fact in the first sentence: I cried listening to the last chapter of this book. Not because it was sad. Because it made my soul soar. Because it made me cry out, “Yes! This is what a story should be!” Because it grabbed me by the emotions–my happiness, my insecurity, my fear, my memories of and hopes for triumph–and it didn’t let go until I was weeping in an ecstasy of satisfaction.

This is the book I want to read out loud at cons when they’re crazy enough to give me a slot to read… not my stuff! This.

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Review – Marvel Masterworks: Marvel Two in One Volume One

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2in1-05Marvel Two-In-One. The title kinda says it all, doesn’t it? You buy this book, you’re getting two for the price of one. In this case, two super-heroes. On a smaller scale, it’s the logic that, in the 1940s, led National Comics and All-American Comics to create the Justice Society, or, later, DC Comics to create the Justice League. It’s like this: Some kid has only one dime, and doesn’t know if he wants to read The Flash or Green Lantern. Hey, kid, suppose you could get both for one thin dime? And a bunch of other characters besides? Wow! It’s like getting free super-heroes!

And of course, what you don’t say to the kid is that you hope he’ll get hooked on the “free” super-heroes, and, instead of one thin dime a week, start spending five or six dimes a week, so he can keep up with all those new characters he’s been introduced to. It’s the same principle by which drug dealers give away free crack. (I infer. Do drug-dealers give away free crack? I’ve never met a drug dealer. That I know of.)

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Review – Ultraman Mebius

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Mebius-and-gesuraSo Balticon happened. I’m not really going to do a full rundown of it here. Not that it was bad. It was a very full, very successful weekend. But I’ve tweeted all the good stuff, and I prefer to keep the stuff which set my teeth on edge between, well, me and the people who set my teeth on edge. And there were only really two of them, and I don’t think they can be trained to not set my teeth on edge, so…

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The Communist Manifesto – A Completely Subjective Response

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marx-bioIf I disagree with someone, I don’t like to do it out of hand. I like to hear their argument first. Sometimes I only need to hear a few words of it to decide that this person is too stupid to formulate an opinion, or has formed an opinion without adequate information, or is plainly and simply divorced from any concept of reality. There’s no arguing with such people, there’s only coping. It’s impossible to change their opinions. Opinions can only be altered if they’re based on reason and adequate information.

Most opinions are not based on reason and adequate information. In America, most opinions are based on what our parents taught us and on what we heard on television. Because God knows the guy who hosts the evening talk show is a much better public policy analysts than a philosopher, a political scientist or any of America’s Founding Fathers.

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More thoughts on Jim Shooter’s first run on Avengers

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Continuing my review (Part One was last week) of the first six Avengers issues written by comics legend Jim Shooter… For those who just want to dive in without reading part one, know that I like Jim Shooter. He did phenomenal work on the Legion of Super-Heroes as a very young teen, and he did a nice job with these issues. But, later, he wrote some phenomenally bad Avengers issues. I’ve often wondered why his second visit to the Mansion was so unsuccessful. So I revisited some of those early, favorite stories of mine to see if I could see the seeds of the bad in what I thought was the good.

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