Nope

The flying saucer movie has been a staple for over seventy years.  The first movie to feature a UFO, appropriately titled The Flying Saucer, came out in 1950.  Since then, the genre has primarily been about a flying saucer, or flying saucers, showing up on Earth causing problems for hapless humans.  There have been some great ones over the years, including The Day The Earth Stood Still, War of the Worlds, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and ET.  However, this category of science fiction mostly exists to provide cheap thrills.  Oh no, a big-headed alien has just abducted our helpless heroine!  Send in the Army and all of its tanks, jets and men with machine guns!

Continue reading “Nope”

Thor: Love and Thunder

What if all Gods are jerks who couldn’t care less about the suffering of the faithful?  For Gorr (Christian Bale), the sole surviving member of an extinct race whose daughter just died, the answer is simple: kill ‘em all!  If I didn’t know better, I’d accuse Thor: Love and Thunder (or Thor4) of appropriating Nietzsche’s most famous quote (God is dead) for a plot device.  Not to worry, this is the only deep thought the movie has to offer over its two hour run time.

Continue reading “Thor: Love and Thunder”

The Great Gatsby (novel, 1925)

I don’t remember when I first read The Great Gatsby.  It may have been in high school, or my first year in college.  I hadn’t thought about the novel much in the intervening decades.  I opted not to see the Baz Luhrmann movie (2013), although I did watch Z: The Beginning of Everything back in 2015.  (It was unceremoniously canceled after one season.)  Then, on January 1, 2021, a singular event caught my attention.  I noticed it listed among those works no longer under copyright protection.  After sheepishly realizing that the novel was almost one hundred years old, I found myself wanting to read it again.  Since my reading habits are undeniably slothlike, I accomplished that goal a year-and-a-half later.

Continue reading “The Great Gatsby (novel, 1925)”