Archive for Reviews

25 Days of TNG, Day 2: Episode Review — “Encounter at Farpoint”

I find it hard to even remember how I felt, 25 years ago, sitting in the living room with my parents and waiting for Star Trek: The Next Generation to premiere. I’d seen some clips from the first episode courtesy of our VHS copy of The Voyage Home, but that was all I knew.

The day finally came. We tuned in WCIX. We waited for the news-at-eleven tease. And then…

Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Her continuing mission: to explore strange, new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no one has gone before.

Stretch. Snap. Zoom. Flash. And an era began.

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Book Review: Wrayth by Philippa Ballantine

The following contains spoilers for Geist and Spectyr, the first two books in the series.

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Well, I finished reading Wrayth, the new novel by Philippa Ballantine.

I tried several different thematic ways to approach this review, but I had a lot of difficulty doing that. There’s a lot going on in this book, and I couldn’t really find any singular thing to tie it together because, the moment I thought I was on that path, things changed.

Let me explain.

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Book Review: The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter

I’ve only seen a few episodes of Sliders, and it’s been a while, but as far as I can remember the premise of the show was quasi-similar to Quantum Leap: a team of scientists slides sideways into an alternate version of Earth, does something that can be resolved in a 42-minute episode, and slides on. A quick check of Wikipedia tells me that I’m more or less on the money there.

And that kind of explains to me why parts of The Long Earth, by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter, felt vaguely familiar.

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Short Film Review: Play Dead

It’s not easy to come up with a new way to look at the zombie apocalypse. I mean, the topic’s pretty well mined at this point. Now, I’m not going to say that I’ve seen every single zombie apocalypse show, film, story, or musical, but I’ve heard about enough of them.

And I hadn’t heard of anything like Play Dead.

Play Dead is the story of the survivors of a zombie apocalypse in Miami, Florida. A short film made on-location, it follows this unlikely group of survivors as they escape the zombies, band together, and seek out a place where they can ride out the chaos until it ends.

Oh, yeah, and these survivors? They’re all dogs.

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Web Series Review: The Booth at the End

The concept of “one person at the center of a spider’s web” isn’t new in fiction — from the mob boss who pulls everyone’s strings to something as simple as the network of interconnections in the film Love Actually, we’ve all seen it done before.

But as the Hulu series The Booth at the End shows, there’s a reason why it’s still being done: because it’s really damn compelling.

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Book Review: Ink by Sabrina Vourvoulias

In certain parts of the US, immigration policy and illegal alien rights are forefront. In other parts, they exist only as issues upon which to campaign. Regardless of your opinion on the subject, it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that we’re moving in one of two directions: full amnesty or full illegality.

Ink, which will be released on October 15, tells one such story. Or, more precisely, four of them.

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Film Review: Griff the Invisible

Fans of True Blood know Ryan Kwanten as Sookie’s buff but not too bright brother, Jason Stackhouse. He plays the role really well, and the writers do a good job with him. But Kwanten isn’t just eye candy. Sometimes, he plays a man with cripplingly-bad social anxiety disorder who just wants to be invisible.

This man is named Griff, and the movie about him is called Griff the Invisible, which I watched last week.

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Film Review: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

This review contains spoilers for both the filmed and televised versions of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

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Twenty years ago today, a film called Buffy the Vampire Slayer opened in theaters to unimpressive reviews (and only a 32% on the Tomatometer). At that point, no one could possibly have expected that Joss Whedon’s story about a California valley girl would morph into a television show that even today is still impacting fans in powerful and meaningful ways.

From the most humble beginnings, eh?

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Web Series Review: “Harry Potter and the Ten Years Later”

The following review contains spoilers for all seven Harry Potter books and the eight films that followed them. There are also minor spoilers for HPplus10, because when you only have a nine-minute episode it’s really hard to write a review without talking about the entire plot.

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The Harry Potter phenomenon has spawned countless fan-created works of written fiction, musical awesomeness, and re-cut music videos. It has inspired thousands of people to be more awesome than they might otherwise have been. And that’s good.

But now it’s over. The last film was released in 2011, and if you don’t subscribe to the EWE school of thought, we know what’s happening 19 years later: Harry and Ginny are married with three children, Ron and Hermione with two, Draco with one, and so on. However, lots of good fan-fiction* has changed the outcome of that epilogue.

Harry Potter and the Ten Years Later is the latest entry in that oeuvre, and, so far, it looks promising.

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Book Review: “Death’s Daughter” by Amber Benson

Okay, I’m not going to lie to you: I got myself a copy of Death’s Daughter by Amber Benson because, hey, Tara wrote a book.

Yes, I know, I know, the actor is not the character. And yes, I’ve seen other work Benson has written, performed, and directed. I was kind of expecting a certain type of novel, and to a certain extent, I did get it.

I also apparently stumbled into chick-lit. How did that happen?

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