MOVIE: Puss in Boots – The Last Wish (2022)

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish Year: 2022 Rating: PG Length: 104 minutes / 1.73 hours It's honestly been so long since there have been any movies from the Shrek franchise. I had almost forgotten Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022) was a sequel to a spinoff that came out 11 years ago. Animation has changed a lot in that time, and this movie shows that traditional CGI animated fare is now following a much different look. Even with the change in animation style, The Last Wish excels at the thing that made the Shrek movies great: unique takes on well-known fairy tales. It surprised me how dark parts of this film were, considering its target audience. When the titular character has to come to terms with his own mortality in the form of death as a deadly sickle-wielding wolf, it gets perhaps a bit too scary for younger children. Sure, there are comic relief characters like Perrito (Harvey Guillén) to lighten the mood....
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VIDEO GAME: Spirit of the North (2020)

Spirit of the North Year: 2020 Rating: E Time Played: 458 minutes / 7.63 hours Spirit of the North is a game about death, rebirth, and the beauty of Iceland. Without knowing much about it, I selected this as the next game my daughter and I would play through since it had no dialogue and seemed to be fairly straightforward. And while I was worried that the random corpses littering the game's levels might scare her, I don't think she fully understood what they were as we played. I enjoyed the ambiance of the music and the beautiful scenery, but the game had some issues. While the beautiful scenery was quite immersive, any time the fox interacted with any of it, the graphics felt dated, like PlayStation 2-era graphics. It was also difficult to control the fox at times, especially when requiring precise jumps to reach secret areas. I also found the portions in the caverns/caves were extremely dark, to the point of being unable...
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BOOK: The Descendants (2007)

The Descendants Year: 2007 Author: Kaui Hart Hemmings Length: 550 minutes / 9.17 hours On paper, the plot of The Descendants almost sounds like a bad soap opera. A man who has the deciding vote that could mean wealth for him and his extended family is dealing with an unfaithful wife who is in a life-threatening coma. The execution of this plot, however, brings so much humanity to the forefront that I wouldn’t be surprised if any of these events were real. While I loved the movie adaptation of this book, the first-person narrative of the book helped add so much more depth to the story. It’s difficult to get into the main character’s head when there’s no internal monologue like in the movie. Of course, with such realistic and vulnerable characters, there were bound to be a few that I didn’t like. Ironically enough, I hated the comatose wife. Sure, her husband was probably a bit of a workaholic, but he always meant well and was...
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BOOK: A Horse Walks into a Bar (2014)

A Horse Walks into a Bar Year: 2014 Author: David Grossman Length: 350 minutes / 5.83 hours Somewhere along the line, I saw that this book won the Man Booker International Prize this year and put it on my “to read” list on Overdrive. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, other than perhaps a little bit of comedy, considering the title is a basic setup for a joke’s punchline. In that sense, the book delivered on that premise by being about a stand-up comedian in a nightclub giving his routine to the audience. I did not expect, however, the deeper subtext about the character and his relation to the narrator. It’s in this subtext where we find the meat of this story. It has often been said that “Sometimes all you can do is laugh to keep yourself from crying.” A Horse Walks into a Bar epitomizes this statement by blending serious subjects like cancer, death, and the Holocaust with a smattering of jokes, physical comedy,...
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