Movie #8 of 2019: Friday Night Lights (2004) Having now seen and enjoyed all five seasons of the fictionalized Friday Night Lights TV program, I wanted to check out this earlier film, which purports to tell a true story about an underdog high school football team. And maybe it’s not wholly fair to compare the …
Author Archives: Joe Kessler
Book Review: Defy the Worlds by Claudia Gray
Book #107 of 2019: Defy the Worlds by Claudia Gray (Constellation #2) I’m enjoying the blandly-titled Constellation series overall, but this sequel is nowhere near as fun as the YA space opera’s propulsive debut. The second novel is more than half over before its two protagonists are reunited, and the new stakes don’t seem particularly …
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TV Review: Veep, season 4
TV #24 of 2019: Veep, season 4 As always, Veep is a funny show that frustrates me with its petty vision of American politics and doesn’t really provide anyone or anything worth rooting for. I’ve given previous years 3-star ratings for that reason, but this one has such an uneven approach to its central campaign …
Book Review: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
Book #106 of 2019: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin (Hainish Cycle #4) There’s some interesting philosophizing in this 1969 sci-fi novel (which author Ursula K. Le Guin herself refers to as a ‘thought experiment’ in the Introduction), but the plot is scattered and a lot of its weighty, groundbreaking ideas …
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Book Review: The Gameshouse by Claire North
Book #105 of 2019: The Gameshouse by Claire North This book collects three novellas from author Claire North, previously published independently in 2015. Together they tell of a secret society who play wide-ranging games of skill and chance for fantastical stakes of extended life, memory theft, and more. North utilizes an omniscient first-person plural perspective …
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TV Review: Arrested Development, season 5
TV #23 of 2019: Arrested Development, season 5 The first three seasons of this show were so good and so perpetually rewarding of a rewatch that it’s little surprise it caught on as a cult classic after its untimely cancellation in 2006. The initial Netflix revival in 2013 was a noticeable step down, but it …
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TV Review: Good Omens
TV #22 of 2019: Good Omens A flawed yet funny adaptation of one of my favorite books, this miniseries is paradoxically strongest when it deviates the most from its source text. Whether showrunner and original co-author Neil Gaiman couldn’t bring himself to fully ‘kill his darlings’ or whether he was reluctant to alter parts written …
Movie Review: Captain Marvel (2019)
Movie #7 of 2019: Captain Marvel (2019) I love so much about this alien superhero movie: from the confidence of its sci-fi start without audience hand-holding, to the well-crafted plot beats that are satisfying even when guessed ahead of time (or spoiled, presumably), to the sheer heart of its titular heroine. Neither the throwback 90s …
TV Review: Black Mirror, season 5
TV #21 of 2019: Black Mirror, season 5 I’ve always found the ubiquitous complaint that Black Mirror is a show about “what if phones, but too much” to be funny but facile, a reductive punchline for a series that interrogates human frailty through the lens of emerging technology as much as it critiques our devices …
Book Review: The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman
Book #104 of 2019: The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman An elegant and immersive feat of first-century storytelling, culminating in the mytho-historic slaughter at Masada where Jewish resistance fighters reportedly killed themselves rather than falling to their Roman besiegers. That’s a difficult topic for any writer to approach, but Alice Hoffman paints it as a proper …
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The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 