VIDEO GAME: Lego Pirates of the Caribbean (2011)

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Lego Pirates of the Caribbean Year: 2011 Rating: E10+ Time Played: ~25 hours I have to give props to Lego for making perhaps the best movie franchise video games that have ever existed. Sure, there were a few good Disney games for the SNES back in the day, but the scope of Lego's video game adaptations of famous film franchises makes any official video game adaptations of these movies pale in comparison. Sure, it's basically the same game over and over again with a different skin, but if it's a fun formula, why change it? Lego Pirates of the Caribbean may only cover the first four films in the franchise (which I'd consider a good thing), but it's certainly enough content to enjoy a solid playthrough. These games are fairly easy to get 100% completion on, and this one is no different. Gameplay is still the standard "collect items in each level" and "unlock upgrades and characters with studs" that most Lego video games had...
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MOVIE: Chip ‘n Dale – Rescue Rangers (2022)

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Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers Year: 2022 Rating: PG Length: 97 minutes / 1.61 hours Nostalgia can be tricky to balance. There's nostalgia that feels pandering, even to the demographic it's aimed at. Then there's nostalgia that's so meta that only those deep scholars of the source material would get the inside jokes. As a Millennial, I found Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers (2022) scratched an itch for balanced nostalgia I didn't even know I had. It's a shame that Disney tossed it onto Disney+ instead of getting a wider theatrical release because the comedy in this movie was top-notch. This movie was so smartly written that I laughed out loud more often than not. All the brief references it hid in plain view, but without drawing a cringey, eye-winking nod to it, was a welcome change to how most movies handle nostalgia reboots. Even modern references like Ugly Sonic were hilarious, mostly because they "went there." Of course, the movie still brought attention to...
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BOOK: Renegades (2017)

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RenegadesYear: 2017Author: Marissa MeyerLength: 1,018 minutes / 16.97 hours After having finished Marissa Meyer's Lunar Chronicles, it pleased me to learn that her next major series was about superheroes. After all, the fairy tale sci-fi retelling was great, but its source material always felt like it was for girls. Just like getting the choice of a girl's toy or a boy's toy in a Happy Meal, Renegades felt like it was meant for the guys. Obviously, I'm being a little facetious, as both series are definitely for all genders. The twist with this book is that the main character is a villain in a world filled with superheroes. Renegades feels like the pendulum swing away from the superhero purism that saturated the market with the rise of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Shows like The Boys and Invincible—both of which started as comics themselves—bring up interesting thought experiments when questioning the legal and moral repercussions of superheroes in the real world. Renegades does...
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MOVIE: The Nutcracker and the Four Realms (2018)

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The Nutcracker and the Four RealmsYear: 2018Rating: PGLength: 99 minutes / 1.65 hours A staple of the Christmas season, The Nutcracker is recognizable in many formats. Whether it's the ballet, the music, or just the story itself, most people have probably encountered a portion of The Nutcracker at some point in their lives. While most of these recognizable bits are classic representations of this work, these are the bare minimum used in crafting the Disney adaptation, The Nutcracker and the Four Realms (2018). And I use "adaptation" fairly loosely here. Some things remain untouched, like a girl named Clara (Mackenzie Foy) being transported to a magical realm filled with toy soldiers, rats, and fairies. The trouble is that someone at Disney churned this familiar story through a "YA filter" that makes the whole thing feel like a generic adventure. Sure, there's some great visual storytelling in these four magical realms, but the narrative mostly follows the same "fight villain to learn about...
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VIDEO GAME: LEGO Batman – The Videogame (2008)

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LEGO Batman: The Videogame Year: 2008 Rating: E10+ Time Played: ~30 hours LEGO Batman: The Videogame is a little bizarre because it came out well before The LEGO Movie (2014), where Will Arnett made LEGO Batman his own meme-able character (and eventually starred in his own movie spinoff). It also came out the same year as The Dark Knight (2008), which is arguably the best Batman movie in existence. However, this video game came early enough in the LEGO movie adaptation run in the late-2000s that it still had some of the rough edges that they hadn't smoothed out by later games in the series. This video game doesn't quite fit in the "movie adaptation" formula LEGO had created with hits like LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga. Instead, they seemed to pull from the iconic Batman the Animated Series for the game's episodic structure. We can all be grateful that the Tim Burton Batman films influenced this game much more than the Joel Schumacher...
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MOVIE: Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022)

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Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of MadnessYear: 2022Rating: PG-13Length: 126 minutes / 2.10 hours It's a sobering thought that Spider-Man (2002) came out 20 years ago, cementing the age of the superhero movie in a time before the Marvel Cinematic Universe even existed. Sam Raimi's distinctive visual style worked for that movie and its two sequels (Spider-Man 2 (2004) of course being one of the best ever made). This is what makes Raimi's return to the superhero genre exciting in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022). Nostalgia is a heck of a drug, after all. What was interesting with this Doctor Strange (2016) sequel was how Marvel allowed Raimi to connect to more of his roots in the horror genre. The scariest scene in the original Spider-Man trilogy was in the operating room with Doctor Octopus (Alfred Molina). In contrast, the amount of horrific things shown in this movie creeps closer to his Evil Dead trilogy. Nothing so bad as...
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BOOK: Public Works Steampunk presents Jane Eyre (2021)

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Public Works Steampunk presents Jane EyreYear: 2021Author: R.A. Harding and Charlotte BronteLength: 941 minutes / 15.68 hours I heard about this book during a convention I attended earlier this year. Jane Eyre was required reading for one of my High School English courses, so it intrigued me that someone would make steampunk additions to this literary classic. The original book naturally fits into the steampunk timeframe, so I'm a little surprised this mash-up hasn't been done before. Unfortunately, because Jane Eyre is so compatible with steampunk, it didn't feel like Steampunk Jane Eyre added anything to the narrative. Perhaps my expectations were skewed for this modified classic from my experience with the "Classical Literature Monsters" series from Quirk Books. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters only add a little eldritch horror to a mostly unmodified book that's in the public domain. However, these minor changes make a significant shift in tone that ends up creating a...
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MOVIE: The Bad Guys (2022)

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The Bad Guys Year: 2022 Rating: PG Length: 100 minutes / 1.67 hours I honestly love that computer technology has improved so much that animated movies like The Bad Guys (2022) don't have to use super-realistic visuals and can instead have a stylized animation that gives it a lot of personality. What's a little astonishing to me is how this film is the first animated movie I can think of that takes the "heist" genre and runs with it. I love a good heist, after all. And while the twists are a bit obvious and the moral is a bit hokey, The Bad Guys is still a lot of fun. There's no reason to blame The Bad Guys for making a movie that children can figure out. It's loosely based on a series of children's books, so I get that some twists are going to be obvious to the adults in the audience. The thing that strikes me weird is that all the characters that...
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VIDEO GAME: LEGO The Lord of the Rings (2012)

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LEGO The Lord of the Rings Year: 2012 Rating: E10+ Time Played: ~15 hours In the early 2010s, the one franchise I could trust to create faithful adaptations of movies into video games was none other than LEGO. Their formula of action, puzzle solving, and exploration worked for other franchises like Star Wars and Indiana Jones, so when it came time to adapt what is arguably one of the best cinematic trilogies to grace the big screen, I was all on board for the LEGO The Lord of the Rings video game. Following the events from the three films that came out a decade before this video game, LEGO The Lord of the Rings captures the feel of those movies in the individual level segments that follow the plot. As per usual, you need a variety of characters to reach all the collectibles in each level, which sometimes necessitates re-playing levels after beating them the first time. Using these collectibles, they can buy upgrades that...
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