27/2022 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
One of a series of books looking at the behind-the-scenes design work for various ships in the Star Trek universe. If you’re into this sort of thing, you know. 🖖
🎥 Red Notice
Red Notice (2021): ⭐️⭐️⭐️: A perfect Sunday afternoon bit of lighthearted silliness. Ryan Reynolds and The Rock play their very comfortable default characters, and Gal Godot looks gorgeous while playing the two men off of each other. Funny, with entertaining action set pieces, and absolutely nothing that will greatly engage the brain. Just what we were in the mood for.
🎥 Spider-Man: No Way Home
Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021): ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: I really enjoyed this one, and am quite impressed that not only did they give the trilogy of Tom Holland Spider-Man movies a satisfying end (well, as much as these storylines ever end), but they also managed to give satisfying arcs and endings to both of the prior Spider-Men and their various foes. It’s an impressive bit of multidimensional storytelling, especially given that neither of the prior incarnations had anything like this in mind. Very nicely done.
📚 Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre
26/2022 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1979 Hugo Best Novel
Neat tale of a woman traveling across a far-future post-apocalyptic earth, healing others with the help of her snakes while searching for an alien snake to assist her, and finding more people to help along the way. Adventuresome, but quiet, with some interesting hints at the wider world that go unanswered as the story unfolds. Really enjoyed the (somewhat groundbreaking at the time, apparently) feminist reworking of the hero’s journey, where conflict is solved by caring and healing rather than combat.
A True Story That Sounds Made Up
Prompted by someone on Twitter asking for “a true story from your life that sounds made up“, I posted this thread in response.
So: A few years back, I was chatting with my mom, and picked up the book she was reading: Butcher Baker, about Alaskan serial killer Robert Hansen. The book has a section of photos in the middle, and I flipped through them.
Hansen would pick up sex workers, hold them captive in his basement, then fly them out to remote locations to hunt and kill them. The book had a photo of his basement room, with a pole in the middle where he would keep them tied up, and taxidermy heads on the walls. I commented on how creepy the room was (I’ve never been a big fan of taxidermy in the first place), and mom just looks at me, and perfectly deadpan says, “Yeah, you never did like it down there.”
Robert Hansen lived just a few doors up the street from the priest of our church. We were good friends with our priest’s family; my brother and I would often play with their kids. And all of us kids would play with other neighborhood kids…including Hansen’s.
So, yeah, we’d occasionally end up at his house, and apparently in his basement room. Decorated with his hunting trophies. And apparently (though never while we were there), a captive sex worker before being flown out to her eventual demise.
I have other friends who also grew up on that street and knew Hansen and his family during his active years before he got caught. It’s a weird little bit of bonding among us.
Hansen was arrested in 1983, when I was ten, so all of this was when I was pretty young, and I don’t have any actual conscious memories of knowing him or his kids (or being in that room). But full points to my mom for the perfect deadpan info drop that day.
If you’re not familiar with Robert Hansen, here’s his page on Wikipedia. There was also a movie about him with John Cusack and Nick Cage, which is…well, it’s a movie. But it was filmed in Anchorage, so I had fun seeing my old stomping grounds in it.
One of my favorite things about trotting out this story is how all of my Lower 48 friends are pretty uniformly 😲, while all of my Alaska friends have various one- or two-degrees-of-separation stories about knowing Hansen or his family, or shopping at his bakery, or being on the PTA with him. Like, knowing a serial killer is just part of living in Alaska in the late ’70s/early ’80s; this is an entirely normal experience.
📚 Smut Peddler Presents: Sordid Past edited by Andrea Purcell
25/2022 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
This latest in the Smut Peddler series of erotic comic anthologies continues the fine form of its predecessors: fun, cute, sweet, funny, sexy short tales of people getting it on in various combinations, with just as much plot as any self respecting porn needs (in other words, more than is commonly joked about, but not so much as to overwhelm the main event). As always, nicely inclusive of gender, sexuality, and body types, this collection sets all of its tales in historical ages, from just a few decades to hundreds of years ago.
📚 A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman
24/2022 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Funny, sweet, and a bit of a tearjerker towards the end (you can see it coming, but that doesn’t diminish its impact at all).
🎥 The Tragedy of MacBeth
The Tragedy of MacBeth (2021): ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: Absolutely beautiful version. The crisp high-contrast black-and-white cinematography (in Academy ratio, even) and geometric stageplay-like sets keep the eye engaged throughout. So many gorgeous shots.
🎥 Old
Old (2021): ⭐️⭐️⭐️: Right in line with every other M. Knight film I’ve seen: A neat premise that’s totally worth watching once, very engaging while you’re in it, a fun twist at the end, and very easy to start poking holes in afterward.
🎥 The Lost City
The Lost City (2022): ⭐️⭐️⭐️: Exactly what we thought from the trailers, and I mean that in a good way. It’s not a remake of Romancing the Stone, but it’s totally a remake of Romancing the Stone. The whole thing is perfectly enjoyably ridiculous, and it was exactly the right sort of lighthearted silly adventure rom-com for a Saturday afternoon.