Book #25 of 2019: Kill the Farm Boy by Delilah S. Dawson and Kevin Hearne (The Tales of Pell #1) This novel aspires to be a tongue-in-cheek fairy tale sendup a la Discworld or Shrek, but it doesn’t have anywhere near the heart or cleverness to pull that off. Instead it reads more like just …
Continue reading “Book Review: Kill the Farm Boy by Delilah S. Dawson and Kevin Hearne”
TV #46 of 2018: ReBoot: The Guardian Code, season 2 I ultimately gave the first season of this show a 2-star review, feeling that although it was significantly worse than the original ReBoot cartoon, it had occasional flashes of quality that showed promise. Unfortunately, I can’t be as generous to this second season (which was …
Continue reading “TV Review: ReBoot: The Guardian Code, season 2”
TV #30 of 2018: The Mindy Project, season 6 I know I’ve been complaining about this show’s inconsistent characterization and plotting for its entire run, but this abbreviated final season somehow makes those issues even worse. Everyone feels two-dimensional, there’s no emotional core to any of the story developments, and Hulu’s budget has apparently required …
Book #66 of 2018: Star Wars: So You Want to Be a Jedi? by Adam Gidwitz This junior novelization of the second Star Wars film is a significant step down from The Princess, The Scoundrel, and the Farmboy, which was author Alexandra Bracken’s similar take on A New Hope. Whereas Bracken splits her story into …
Continue reading “Book Review: Star Wars: So You Want to Be a Jedi? by Adam Gidwitz”
Movie #5 of 2018: The House (2017) This comedy about yuppie parents running an illegal casino to pay for their daughter’s college tuition is more memorable for some gross blood spurt effects than for any particular cleverness in its writing. The cast is great, but they aren’t given much to work with; Jason Mantzoukas ends …
Book #49 of 2018: Out of Orange by Cleary Wolters The Netflix prison dramedy Orange Is the New Black began as an adaptation of a true-life memoir, with the character Alex Vause based on a figure from author Piper Kerman’s past. Out of Orange is that woman’s own account of her time as a smuggler-turned-prisoner, …
Continue reading “Book Review: Out of Orange by Cleary Wolters”
Book #35 of 2018: Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe This classic man-versus-nature castaway novel has been hugely influential, but it’s pretty rough for a modern reader. 300 years after its initial publication the plot feels threadbare and glacially slow, with little to distract from the author / narrator’s racist views on the inferiority of Africans …
Continue reading “Book Review: Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe”
Book #28 of 2018: Warp by Lev Grossman It turns out this short first novel by The Magicians author Lev Grossman went out of print for a reason, and the success of that later work doesn’t really justify this new edition. You can almost see the origins of Magicians hero Quentin Coldwater in its aimless …
Movie #24 of 2017: Bad Santa 2 (2016) It’s hard to really justify this movie’s existence. The first Bad Santa movie (2003) wasn’t exactly a modern classic, but it was a funny spin on the darkness that can underlie the holidays with a surprising amount of heart to it. This one is mostly just mean …
TV #45 of 2017: House of Cards, season 5 We had watched all but the last two episodes of this season before the Kevin Spacey news broke, and we finally got around to finishing it up. Even if you set aside everything we now know about the star actor, this was a pretty awful season …
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more