Movie #13 of 2022: Live from the Space Stage: A HALYX Story (2020) This feature-length documentary, produced by Kevin Perjurer of Defunctland and available free on that YouTube channel, is a loving deep dive into an incredibly obscure topic: the rock band HALYX, a sci-fi themed act that performed nightly on the stage in front …
Continue reading “Movie Review: Live from the Space Stage: A HALYX Story (2020)”
Book #118 of 2022: The Diversion by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #49) I’m surprised that series author K. A. Applegate didn’t claim this volume to write herself, and particularly that it was assigned to ghostwriter Lisa Harkrader, who had previously only penned Cassie’s eminently skippable Australian visit in #44 The Unexpected. Here, the plot is …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Diversion by K. A. Applegate”
Book #117 of 2022: The Verifiers by Jane Pek A story curiously out of time. There’s a lot of talk in this debut book about online dating, corporate collection/abuse of confidential user data, and artificial intelligence, but it’s all conveyed in a fairly breathless manner to the characters and reader alike when none of the …
TV #36 of 2022: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, season 7 A curiously bifurcated run. The first half of this last year almost seems to sputter, with some episodes that are absolutely up to the usual high dramatic standards of the series and others that represent some of the laziest, most self-indulgent writing ever. (I’m …
Continue reading “TV Review: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, season 7”
TV #35 of 2022: Bob’s Burgers, season 6 I’ve now reached the point of this Bob’s Burgers rewatch where I’m caught up with the seasons that I reviewed the first time I saw it, starting in 2016. So here’s what I wrote then, at somewhat less than my now-typical length: “I feel like Bob’s Burgers …
TV #34 of 2022: What We Do in the Shadows, season 1 A confident launch to a mockumentary sitcom with the simple yet irresistible premise of several vampires sharing a house in Staten Island. (I haven’t seen the movie that preceded this, but I understand it follows a different set of characters and isn’t directly …
Continue reading “TV Review: What We Do in the Shadows, season 1”
Book #116 of 2022: The Midnight Girls by Alicia Jasinska A fun little queer enemies-to-lovers YA fantasy, but with some tonal and worldbuilding issues that are keeping me at a slight distance. The two antiheroines are teenaged assistants to rival witches, tasked with hunting down victims and ripping their hearts out to fuel their mistresses’ …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Midnight Girls by Alicia Jasinska”
Book #115 of 2022: The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice (The Vampire Chronicles #2) 1976’s Interview with the Vampire is a modern classic of the gothic horror genre, popularizing a new variety of sympathetic bloodsucker with its brooding and homoerotic immortals. Following in 1985, this first sequel isn’t nearly so good, but it still has …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice”
Movie #12 of 2022: Knives Out (2019) A decent murder mystery, albeit one I feel I might have liked better absent the years of people hyping it up so much. The colorful ensemble of plausible suspects is certainly fun, as is the steady puncturing of their bigotry towards the dead patriarch’s nurse and her immigrant …
Book #114 of 2022: The Jewish Book of Horror edited by Josh Schlossberg As usual for a genre anthology, some of these stories strike me as stronger than others, but they are collectively rather great, presenting a uniquely Jewish chorus of voices interpreting and exploring horror in that particular context. Here we find beings of …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Jewish Book of Horror edited by Josh Schlossberg”
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more