TV And Films

The shows and movies I like (or don’t).

📚 The Edge of the Sword by Kevin Ryan

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63/2022 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️

TOS events as seen trough the eyes of a disguised Klingon operative serving as part of the Enterprise’s security crew. On the one hand, it’s a combination of common tropes: the outsider/enemy coming to understand humanity through living among them and a “lower decks” view of life on a starship. On the other hand, it’s done quite well, without being too “wink-wink, nudge-nudge, remember this bit?” when the book’s events intersect with known missions. A good start to the trilogy (or hexology, I suppose, as there is another trilogy following the events of this one).

Michael holding The Edge of the Sword.

🎥 Spirited

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Spirited (2022): ⭐️⭐️: This shouldn’t have been a musical.

It’s a good cast, an amusing take on the Christmas Carol story, some very clever lines, and several fun nods to several other famous Christmas Carol adaptations (plus at least one other famous Christmas film). And yet, every time they break into song (with one exception), it all drags down to a rather painful slog — and they break into song a lot.

It’s not a bad film, but it’s also not nearly as good as it could have been. It either needed to be just a comedy, or perhaps different songwriters, but the most enjoyable parts — save for a very rousing “good afternoon” — were the non-musical parts.

📚 Past Prologue by L.A. Graf

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52/2022 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️

More time travel shenanigans to get everything wrapped up means more opportunity to get a little confused as to which version of each character is in which setting, but it works out in the end. And the final scene is actually a nice way to finish things off.

But once again, the back cover blurb is wrong, but has just enough relation to make me think that there were some major rewrites and the blurbs were written from the original pitch instead of the final work for some reason.

Michael holding Past Prologue

📚 Future Imperfect by L.A. Graf

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51/2022 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Part two of this trilogy involves a lot of time travel, or dimensional travel, or both, which occasionally makes it a bit difficult to keep track of who is where/when, but for the most part tracks decently.

The back cover blurb is somewhat closer to the plot of the book than with the first book in the series, but still has some notable differences. Maybe the blurbs were written much earlier in the planning process, before rewrites and editorial adjustments? The cover image also has no relation to the story.

Michael holding Future Imperfect

📚 Present Tense by L.A. Graf

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50/2022 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Set directly after “The Naked Now”, the Enterprise decides to use their extra three days to do a low-stakes check on an away team on a boring planet. Suddenly, everything goes wrong! The first book in a trilogy, so nothing gets wrapped up here, but it’s the usual Trek adventures. Some extra points for having cave exploration scenes that were claustrophobic enough to wig me out a little.

Weirdly, the summary blurb on the back of the book (and thus, on this site) is entirely unrelated to the actual plot.

Michael holding Present Tense

🎥 The Man Who Killed Don Quixote

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The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018): ⭐️⭐️⭐️: Well, it’s definitely a Gilliam film, and I do tend to like those, even when I don’t entirely “get” them right off the bat. His tendency to slip in and out of reality at any given point always engages well with me, and this is no exception. I’m just not sure what the actual theme of this one is; I may just need to rewatch it again.

I will admit that, as much as I enjoy both Gilliam and Pryce, casting Pryce as a Spaniard is questionable at best. But then, Gilliam does fall into the realm of “problematic fave” for me, and this is one more instance why.