Category: Reviews
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Shakespeare Is Not Dead, But Alive, For He has Risen
No blasphemy intended by the title, just borrowing a phrase. Allow me to share just a small sample of a single contemporary work set in America’s 1920s to make my point. Let me describe some scenes, so you can tell me what this work is all about. A young woman is a waitress on a…
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Shakespeare in 1923
I’ve mentioned Taylor Sheridan’s 1923 before. The end of this, his second prequel to Yellowstone, just aired (or streamed?), and, by all that is holy, I can’t say enough about it. I could not believe it when I found out this was going to be the last episode of the series. “There’s no way Sheridan…
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1883 and 1923
I just finished streaming the ten episode miniseries 1883, and I have to say I’m really impressed. It is a truly profound meditation on life and death. Elsa’s monologues are some of the most moving prose ever penned. A sample follows: Here, there can be no mistakes. Because here doesn’t care. The river doesn’t care…
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What Color is Your Blood? Also a Discovery
Shameless, useless introduction As someone who should have better things to do, I spend a lot of my time catching up on TV series that others have seen long ago, but I wanted to make some random observations. First, a whimsical observation about the state of television these days. I’m someone who quit watching live…
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Haters Gonna’ Hate
Last night I took the plunge and rented the video of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, and it is rather amazing. Normally I wouldn’t spend $20 to rent an online video, but I certainly wasn’t about to pay $450 to get a bad seat in a large stadium for one of her concerts, surrounded by the…
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Undercover Christmas
One of the Christmas movies I like to revisit almost every year is Undercover Christmas. It’s a neglected and deceptively good movie. At first glance, it’s just another Lifetime or Hallmark Christmas movie, and some jaded critics have seen only that. What makes the movie enjoyable for repeat watching though, is the depth of its…
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Homer’s Hotel?
I’m sure Hotel California‘s meaning has been dissected many times by many people. The song is so obviously rich with metaphor and other poetics that analyzing it is hard to resist. My previous efforts at enhancing the meanings of songs have focused on songs that are less well known. Nevertheless, there are some aspects of…
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Never Mind, We’ll Do It Ourselves
Never Mind, We’ll Do It Ourselves is a book about turning the Predator drone from a platform limited to line-of-sight navigation into one capable of flying hundreds of miles to a target area directed and controlled by satellite communications, feeding its live feed directly to intelligence analysts 8,000 miles away in real-time while hovering for…
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The Last Days of Night
I became aware of Graham Moore’s book, “The Last Days of Night,” through what I thought was the ambiguously and poorly named film version of it (The film in question turned out to be based on a different book about Tesla and Edison). I had intended to use my normal process of watching the movie…
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Growing up in the Lair of Supervillains
A Review of Becoming Superman, by J. Michael Straczynski This is an autobiography of a man who has lived his adult life in the Hollywood film trade, and the book came out in 2019, so is it appropriate to call things spoilers? This is not a work of fiction, just as his screenplay for Changeling…
Musings of a Restless Mind 