Dead Birds (2004) – The title makes no sense — there is exactly one dead bird, and it occupies the narrative for about 10 seconds — but I guess they had to call it something, right? The concept has become a standard one for horror flicks, right up there with spam-in-a-cabin: A gang of bank…

Early Man (2018) – What starts out as a tale about an isolated cave-tribe with one inventive young man then changes to a tale of said cave-tribe in competition with a Bronze Age civilization for the tribe’s valley — a competition to be waged with the sacred game of “football” (or soccer, as it’s known…

Next week is the second FyreCon art/writing conference — part of what I love is the subject matter, of course, but a large part is also that it’s barely ten minutes from my front door.  None of those 75-minute treks to and from Utah Valley! In case you’re still on the fence about attending, here’s…

I’ve often been puzzled that gun-control advocates so uniformly use the phrase “common sense” to describe their proposals, whereas that phrase practically never shows up in advocacy for other causes with which those advocates are usually bedfellows.  You don’t hear so much about common-sense environmental regulation or common-sense abortion legality or common-sense affirmative action.  (And…