Reviews of books, movies, CDs, whatever.
{originally written 2013 May 23, then banished to the Drafts folder for no good reason when I never got around to finishing it.}
Spoiler-free review: A solid sophomore outing for the NuTrek crew, but it’s no Wrath of Khan. ====== Spoilers follow =========== (more…)
{This has apparently been sitting in my Drafts folder for four years. Oops. I never finished it, so it ends abruptly. -=-BLG}
It’s been a while (a real long while) since I’ve gotten to a Marc Cohn show, but this one was worth it. He played the City Winery, which is an odd hybrid of concert space, fine dining, boutique winery, and microbrewery. I ordered my ticket early and got a really good seat at the last row of tables on the floor, just before the risers to a second tier. And I snagged one that faced the stage (as about half of them face away), saving myself a tremendous crick in my neck.
I arrived well early so as to get dinner ordered and done before the show. The food selection is a bit limited though it seemed like there was lots of good stuff on the menu. I got a flatbread pizza and finished with an order of house-made pretzels that somehow or another are made from the house wine. I don’t really get how that works. The pretzels were fine (crunchy and mostly unsalted, which actually is what I wanted). Since I don’t drink, I can’t speak to the wines.
I just finished rewatching Mad Max: Fury Road. I have to say, I can understand why the film earned the online ire of the so-called men’s rights activists (MRAs). It takes all the high-octane testosterone-drenched tropes of the typical action flick, ramps them up to 11 and, in so doing, exposes the madness that lies at the heart of the culture.
amazon’s The Man in the High Castle (2015)
Insta-score: 4 out of 5.
Short form: After a slow start, this builds to an excellent show.
Spoilers below the fold.
I caught up on the end of the season for Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD. (Yes, it’s that time of summer when I get to catch up on the shows I missed.) The first season ended with the fallout from Captain America: The Winter Soldier, when the entire Marvel universe was scrambled. Could Season Two match it?
Short answer: Surprisingly, yes. Spoilers ho.
I finally caught the last episode of the weird Season 6 of Community as streaming on Yahoo! Stream, called “Emotional Consequences of Broadcast Television”. As could be expected of Community, it was wonderfully meta and self-referential. As could be expected of a series finale, it was actually quite touching.
Today the NY Times published an Upshot op-ed called “For Accomplished Students, Reaching a Good College Isn’t as Hard as It Seems“. It’s one of those article that seems to say more than it does. It doesn’t actually support the conclusion it asserts. Saying that roughly the same percentage of “top students” still get admission to elite schools is almost self-evidently circular, and does nothing to dispute the notion that “college admissions has become a Hunger Games-like tournament”. In the Hunger Games, the same number of winners happened each year — but the competition wasn’t always the same. And what constitutes a “top student” could (and does!) vary from year to year without creating more of them.
Oh, heaven above, Steve Moffat is just determined that we all love Clara, and he’s going to keep forcing tripe like this on us until we give and accept she’s the bestest, most wonderful Companion ever, isn;’t he?
Spoilers below.
Ugh. This hasn’t been a great season, and this is far from the best.
Let’s begin with the very-overused flash forward. It’s getting kind of old. Used well, it can be very effective. But Doctor Who isn’t using it very well. They’ve used it as a cheap dramatic tool. Actually the episode was full of cheap dramatic tools: The arbitrary countdown timer; the introduction of two characters whose sole purpose — almost literally — was to die to ratchet up the tension.
Perhaps the most telling flaw was the absolutely shameless theft of the idea behind Jack Williamson’s “Born of the Sun”, namely, that the solar system bodies were really eggs waiting to hatch. That was awkward in the golden age of pulp, and here it’s just recycled pulp — and not even done as well! The biology is ludicrous and the conclusion laughable. And though I know Doctor Who is not hard sci-fi, I nearly choked on the idea that the egg was just gaining mass. First of all, 1.5 billion tons would not be nearly enough to generate Earth-like gravity, much less world-ending tides. Second, of course, an egg starts off with its full mass, which is merely converted by the embryo into, well, more embryo. It doesn’t magically spawn new mass. The not-quite-spiders are just icing on the screwed-up biology cake, of course, and hardly worth mentioning, since their only role was to pose a false threat and kill the hapless Mexican miners and the two men of the expedition.
Clara is faced with a terrible choice and attempts to punt. (Turn off the lights? Really? What about the half of the planet in daylight? Who’s going to turn off the lights — individuals? Electric companies? Governments? How will it be weighted, by population or by lumens? Luckily, of course, every single human on Earth votes to kill the creature, so at least there’s no awkward need for balancing ayes and nays.) She decides to kill it, then decides not to — and is then mad at the Doctor for making her decide.
“It was cheap, it was pathetic ; it was patronising.” Here, at last, I can find something about Clara Oswald with which I agree. Oh, wait, she wasn’t talking about herself. I think her anger is incoherent and forced. I think she sounds like a spoiled child who, as the Doctor says, hasn’t even taken the training wheels off yet. The emotion of her fight doesn’t ring true to me, and I share the Doctor’s befuddlement if only in trying to understand why I should care that she’s upset.
Up until now, Clara has been meh. Now she’s small. The Christmas special really can’t get here soon enough.