MOVIE: El Camino (2019)

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El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie Year: 2019 Rating: R Length: 122 minutes / 2.03 hours While the television show Community always joked about getting "six seasons and a movie, Breaking Bad actually accomplished the feat with only five seasons of the best heart-pounding drama ever to be seen on the small screen. As an epilogue to this fantastic series, El Camino (2019) wraps up the one remaining loose end that remained from the series finale: what happened to Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul)? While El Camino is basically two episodes of Breaking Bad used to tie everything up into a nice little bow, it was nice to finally have that final bit of closure. As is the case with a lot of Breaking Bad's best episodes, there are moments in El Camino that are hard to watch. Jesse's slavery really hits home in this film as the viewer grapples with the intense psychological punishment that can break down a man and steal his motivation to...
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BOOK: Caliban’s War (2012)

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Caliban's WarYear: 2012Author: James S.A. CoreyLength: 1,190 minutes / 19.83 hours One of the things I like about James S.A. Corey’s Expanse series is how these books focus on the crew of the Rocinante. Many hard sci-fi writers try to show how smart they are by making it obvious how much math they did to explain how their sci-fi universe works. While The Expanse certainly has these moments, they’re fit in between the human drama that follows James Holden and his crew. Trouble seems to follow them wherever they go, and in Caliban’s War, they’re pulled into a political conflict that spans the solar system. I appreciate how an overarching plot with the protomolecule connects Leviathan Wakes to Caliban’s War. While the first book in the series took some time ramping up into having a cohesive collection of characters, Caliban’s War uses all four members of Rocinante’s crew in a new way that felt more interesting. Of course, this book also contains...
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MOVIE: The Lighthouse (2019)

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The Lighthouse Year: 2019 Rating: R Length: 109 minutes / 1.82 hours When Oscar season rolled around a few years ago, I heard a lot of buzz about an artsy film known as The Lighthouse (2019). Years later, I finally found the time to sit down and watch it on Amazon Prime. Now I understand why the Academy didn't nominate this film for Best Picture. It's weird. I legitimately tried to figure out what was going on but gave up when things just spiraled into chaos. I have a suspicion that a key moment in the film resulted in a character's death and that the remainder all takes place in some sort of purgatory, but that's the best explanation I can give at the moment. For a film that features two actors for almost the entire runtime, I have to say that Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson make this movie something to see at least once. In fact, I'm still half-certain that Willem Dafoe wasn't...
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VIDEO GAME: A Short Hike (2019)

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A Short Hike Year: 2019 Rating: E Time Played: ~2 hours I'm starting to like the open-world format of some video games. Sure, there's a broad goal the player is trying to accomplish, but sometimes the most fun comes from the little sidequests that you encounter along the way. Of course, the best sidequests help the player ultimately achieve the game's goal by rewarding a useful item or ability. A Short Hike is a prime example of how to do the open-world format. As an indie game, the big-name developers should take notes here. While the "low quality" visuals initially put me off, you eventually get used to them. This is basically my only gripe with the game, as it's clearly hiding some of the cut corners of its development. As someone who enjoys hiking to the top of mountains, I liked the gameplay with a somewhat loose motivation to get to the top of this island mountain. Sure, the plot is touching when you...
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MOVIE: Song of Love (1947)

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Song of Love Year: 1947 Rating: Approved Length: 119 minutes / 1.98 hours Anyone who has spent a significant amount of time with me will know that I absolutely love the story of Clara and Robert Schumann. She was such an inspiring woman and well ahead of her time in terms of her independence. In researching her life for a future historical fiction novel I plan to write, I found that Katharine Hepburn had portrayed Clara Schumann in Song of Love (1947). I already knew the story beats of the life of Robert and Clara (with some of the drama Johannes Brahms (Robert Walker) introduced), but Song of Love misses the point almost entirely. While there were some scenes in this movie that spoke to the situation of Robert and Clara's tragic love story, they were completely lost in what I can only describe as "1940s sitcom schtick." These scenes added nothing to the narrative of the implied love triangle between Clara, Robert, and Johannes....
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BOOK: The Stone Sky (2017)

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The Stone SkyYear: 2017Author: N.K. JemisinLength: 862 minutes / 14.37 hours I have to say I’m a bit disappointed with The Stone Sky. It took me some time to get used to the way the author wrote the Broken Earth trilogy, but by the end of the second book, The Obelisk Gate, I had bought into the premise. The fact that this book had a lot to live up to with the foreshadowing presented in the second book might be why I’m disappointed with the result. After all, I was looking forward to some epic moments involving the moon, which didn’t seem to materialize for me. Now that I’ve finished this trilogy, I’m starting to wonder if the reason it didn’t quite fully click for me was because I was reading it via audiobook. There seemed to be a lot that I missed that would leave me confused about who the characters were, what they were doing, and why they were doing...
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MOVIE: A Quiet Place Part II (2021)

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A Quiet Place Part IIYear: 2021Rating: PG-13Length: 97 minutes / 1.61 hours I'm not usually a fan of horror films, so when A Quiet Place (2018) came out, it was a unique enough concept to pique my interest. While I appreciated the original concept, which played off the audio-visual nature of movies, the cliffhanger ending left me wanting more. Fast forward three years, and I finally got to see the sequel. It was...disappointing. I think I had gotten my hopes up after the first movie wowed me with its suspense and PG-13-level horror but A Quiet Place Part II (2021) was basically just more of the same. What's perhaps the most frustrating thing about both these movies is that they could have easily been combined both films and still kept the run-time below three hours. With each movie being around 90 minutes long, there could have been a tighter story between the two entities if some repetitive scenes were cut out of...
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VIDEO GAME: Donut County (2018)

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Donut CountyYear: 2018Rating: ETime Played: ~2 hours Most indie games these days make up for their limitations with stylized visuals and tongue-in-cheek humor. One of the current visual styles favored by developers is the cel-shaded look that gives us games like Untitled Goose Game, What the Golf? and Donut County. While Donut County predates those two other games, it definitely has its moments of humor that likely inspired its predecessors. It might be a bit goofy at times, but Donut County is fun for a few hours of gameplay. There's not much to keep you playing past the end credits, though. The basic gameplay premise of Donut County is similar to Katamari Damacy, wherein you have to make a hole big enough to swallow up larger and larger objects until nothing is left. There's a bit of a puzzle element to some of the levels, where you have to use consumed items to trigger other parts of the level so you can...
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