Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
The shows and movies I like (or don’t).
66/2022 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Picks up directly after the end of the prior trilogy, with tensions between Starfleet and the Klingon Empire continuing to deteriorate. Moves the larger story along, while also using flashbacks to revisit events in the prior books from another viewpoint. This continues to be a strong series.
65/2022 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
A strong conclusion to the trilogy, culminating in an all-out battle between invading Klingons and Starfleet defenders on a starbase that takes up the majority of the book. Something of the literary equivalent of the final act CGI battle of any given Marvel movie. The threads wrap up satisfyingly well, with a few nicely placed ties to future events and characters. Though I rated each standalone book at three stars, taken together, the trilogy as a whole is definitely above average for Trek novels. (Though all books do suffer from occasional typos missed in the editing passes; in this one, the starbase’s first mention is given the designation Starbase 43, but in the next paragraph it becomes Starbase 42 and remains there for the rest of the book.) Also, keep an eye out on the character names — many throughout the series are named for notable people in Trek’s real-world past.
Glass Onion (2022): ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: A good twisty mystery, a perfect cast, and a hilarious script. Absolutely excellent, across the board. Daniel Craig is so much more watchable as Benoit Blanc than as James Bond, Janelle Monaé is flawless, Ed Norton as Elon Musk is perfect…the whole thing, really. Just excellent.
And has probably my favorite line from anything I’ve watched recently: “It’s a dangerous thing to mistake speaking without thought for speaking the truth.”
Elvis (2022): ⭐️⭐️⭐️: On the one hand, it’s my least favorite of Baz Lurhmann’s projects. On the other hand — I still liked it; even a “least favorite” Baz Luhrmann is still pretty good.
Pros: As always, the music and the visuals. Within the first five seconds, it’s obvious that this is a Baz Lurhmann film, and it doesn’t let up. I’ll definitely be looking up the soundtrack; as can be expected from one of Baz’s films, there are some really neat blends of Elvis’s songs with contemporary sounds.
(Admittedly, much of the above could be a con rather than a pro, if Baz’s style doesn’t work as well for you as it does for me.)
Con: I’m not entirely convinced it really had to be nearly three hours long. As much as I like Baz, that’s a lot of Baz to sit through. While it’s not quite his longest — Australia gets that prize by six minutes — it is his longest music-focused film. I definitely think he works better when constrained to about two hours or less…or has the space to really make a longer format work, as he did with the TV series The Get Down.
As I continue to think about this, I wonder if part of why this one didn’t rank as high for me is that part of what I love about Baz’s work is how incredibly good he is at using music as a palette, and taking all sorts of different artists, genres, and styles, blending them, mashing them up, and creating something new.
Where here, because it was all focused on a singular artist, there wasn’t as much of that. While I enjoy Elvis, the tracks that stood out to me the most and that I’m most interested in finding on the soundtrack were those that combined his music with the blues and country influences and with modern pop beats and rhythms.
Maybe — for me, at least — focusing on a single artist actually worked against the film, because it didn’t allow Baz to do some of what he does best.
64/2022 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
As with many mid-points of trilogies, not quite as strong as the first, though still better than average. Some flashback scenes are written in with the main narrative and occasionally mildly confusing when scenes switch between present and past battles, and there are a few unfortunate typos swapping similarly named characters. Once those are accounted for, though, a decent enough middle chapter.
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).
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.
A Christmas Story Christmas (2022): ⭐️⭐️⭐️: A bit slow to start, but found its footing midway through. Definitely not a rewatch-every-year classic like the original, but it’s sweet and has its moments. And it was really impressive that they got all the original kid actors back to play their adult selves.
Bullet Train (2022): ⭐️⭐️⭐️: Thoroughly entertaining action movie goofiness. Really enjoyed all the close-quarters improvised-weapons fight scenes — Brat Pitt isn’t Jackie Chan, sure, but he and the rest of the cast gave it their best, and I was definitely entertained.
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.
