Father Christmas is Back (2021)- The story of the Christmas family — four grown daughters and a mother — who’ve been trying to have a proper British Christmas for decades since their father, James Christmas, walked out on Christmas long ago. Now, suddenly, he shows up at the ancestral manse one daughter has married into…
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Movies Seen Recently: The Haunted Palace, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3
The Haunted Palace (1963) – The cuckoo in Roger Corman’s nest of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, this one is named for a Poe poem, but draws most of its inspiration from H.P. Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, transplanted into a vaguely pre-now semi-European, semi-New England milieu. Vincent Price is the old sorcerer Joseph…
Passed on in 2022.
Of course, millions of people left this world in this year, and the names which aren’t famous (or at least familiar to me) are, to other people in their direct circle, much more impactful. And there were at least as many born during the same year — but there’s no way to tell at present…
There’s wrong, and then there’s impressively wrong.
Having been a studious member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for my entire life, I thought that I had encountered at least one version of every “anti-Mormon” distortion (or fabrication) of Latter-day Saint belief in circulation. But, impressively, I recently discovered some hitherto unknown little-known “facts” about “Mormon” doctrines that, stunned,…
Movies Seen Recently: Gentlemen Broncos, Samaritan, A Nightmare on Elm Street
Gentlemen Broncos (2009) – From the mind behind Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre comes a movie guaranteed from the beginning not to be nearly as popular as either of those two, because it’s aimed at a very small target demographic — namely, me. The protagonist is a home-schooled teen with a yen to be a…
Hollywood Monster
[cross-posted to GoodReads] There’s a definite appeal to this kind of in-the-trenches memoir, explaining how a familiar franchise looked to the working stiff involved from the other side. Englund spins yarns about how he ended up in acting (because of the girls), through theatre snobbery, to working character actorhood, to the random chance that sent…
Titan (Mammon Book 1)
[cross-posted from GoodReads] Terribly plausible economic and political SF: A very near-future tech billionaire (comparisons to Elon Musk are inevitable, if inaccurate) creates a public/private partnership with the U.S. government to trap a mineral-rich asteroid in earth orbit; the promise of future riches floats the unsustainable American federal government for a handful of years, until…
Not This August
[cross-posted from GoodReads] While I don’t think it lives up to the blurb on the cover from the New York Daily News that it’s “far more powerful than 1984,” it is more grounded in the contemporary geopolitical reality of its 1955 publication date. In in the then-near future, a ground war being waged by the…
Champion of Mars
[cross-posted from GoodReads] The cover lies; readers who specifically pick this up because they liked The Martian aren’t going to be happy. Rather than a straightforward, hard SF problem-solving story, this is an epoch-spanning saga told in nonlinear episodes, from the near future of the first Martian colonies to so many hundreds of thousands of…
Sketch of the Day Omnibus Post.
And I’ve caught up to my sketchbook, so no more sketches of the day for a little bit.