Stuff I Like

I’ve Never Seen A Turtle…

16 January 2013

Somehow, I ended up on a mailing list for ARCs. And I’m incredibly grateful for that, but it also makes me feel incredibly guilty. I mentioned just a few days ago that I didn’t read as much as I usually do in 2012 – only 23 books when I’ve been known to do a book [...]

Read!→

Confirmation Bias

14 January 2013

When a work of art includes a problematic subject or theme, there are always going to some segment of the audience that believes that confronting that subject is the same as condoning it. It is NEVER X to Y about Z, after all. The use of torture in Zero Dark Thirty, for instance, just glorifies torture, [...]

Read!→

Extreme Close-Up

2 January 2013

Les Miserables is a frustrating film. At its heights, it is one of the best films of the year. At its worst, it is chaotic and uneven, peopled with actors who don’t always have the vocal ability to handle some difficult parts, and perhaps worst of all, tedious in its second-half sprint toward the finish [...]

Read!→

Sinister

22 October 2012

“If you were tasked with remaking The Ring, how would you do it?” I was asking this question at a diner on a Saturday night, and it sparked a ninety minute digression on the now-faded spate of slick J-horror remakes that dominated American horror cinema for awhile, culminating in a four-way conversation about the audacity of [...]

Read!→

Tyrannosaurus Detects! in The Secret of the Petrified Plagiarism, Part 1

22 May 2012

Case Date: June 5, 2012 Case Title: The Secret of  the Petrified Plagiarism Case Difficulty: Cetaceous With only five more days of school left until summer vacation and a Jurassic level of confidence that I’d aced all of my finals, the last few days of the school year at Kirby Junior High were in major [...]

Read!→

‘Game Journalism’

23 April 2012

This morning, a flurry of people sent me a link to a story about a four-year-old Saudi boy who shot his father in the head because he refused to buy a PlayStation 3 for his son. Every iteration of this story focuses on the ‘PlayStation’ part of the story and not the part where a [...]

Read!→

Augmented

19 April 2012

Note: This post discusses something happened two weeks ago. Shame on me. Event comics are traditionally big, bombastic, dumbed-down affairs full of testosterone, kick/punching and illusory raised stakes. They are an annual ‘sweeps week’ for each publisher’s stable of fantasist soap operas. At their inception, events like Secret Wars or Crisis on Infinite Earths were [...]

Read!→

The Man From Primrose Lane

19 March 2012

Note: A copy of The Man From Primrose Lane was provided for review. This is one of those reviews that sounds like it’s sure to be a bad one at the start; it’s not. This is a book that’s fresh and weird and compelling. Keep that in mind. Less than fifty pages into The Man [...]

Read!→

Jeff Reads Comics: Astonishing X-Men #44

6 December 2011

A digital copy of Astonishing X-Men #44 was provided for review by the author. As a lifelong X-Men fan, I have learned that X-Men fans are, and this is putting it kindly, fickle. On top of this, they have an even more abusive relationship with continuity than most other fans of most other superhero comics [...]

Read!→

Things About The Thing (2011)

17 October 2011

1. Every couple of years, a horror creator just flat-out impresses me. The wheel turns, you know, so they always disappoint me eventually, but right now, I am really a fan of Eric Heisserer. He Gets It. He understands the genre, not just in a ‘and then this happens, and then this happens way’, but [...]

Read!→

← Previous Entries