MOVIE: Us (2019)

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Us Year: 2019 Rating: R Length: 116 minutes / 1.93 hours I’ve been reluctant to jump on the Jordan Peele bandwagon. This has mostly been because I rarely watch horror films. What initially won me over was the social commentary Get Out (2017) provided. NOPE (2022) was an interesting take on alien films that spoke to the inherently violent nature of animals. With these two movies in mind, I finally filled in the gap and watched Us (2019). Unfortunately, my lack of desire to watch this film when it came out seems to have been justified as I ask, “What was the point?” I don’t want to spoil too much, but the twist was pretty easy to spot quite early on. Once the premise became clear, the movie seemed to be an excuse to just have the characters fight each other to the death—sometimes in the bloodiest way possible. Even the ending didn’t seem to be anything profound unless I’m missing something deeper that was...
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BOOK: The Dark Tower (2004)

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The Dark Tower Year: 2004 Author: Stephen King Length: 1,731 minutes / 28.85 hours For a series that spanned over two decades, it’s nice to see that The Dark Tower ends on a titular high note. Other series may lose steam or fade to mediocrity as the stories to tell become less interesting. Or the author dies. While this series narrowly avoided this fate, the meta subplots in the last few books were well out of the way for the grand finale that is The Dark Tower. I’m almost disappointed that more of the books in the series weren’t like this, since there were actual stakes involved. I don’t normally think of Stephen King as an “action” writer, but the fight sequences in this book were absolutely superb. These enemies had the “final boss” gravitas that made the battles so entertaining to read. That there was an incredible new superpower introduced in this book makes me wish we had more stories about that character since...
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MOVIE: The Creator (2023)

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The Creator Year: 2023 Rating: PG-13 Length: 133 minutes / 2.22 hours Knowing how rare new science fiction movies are, I was interested to see what The Creator (2023) would say about artificial intelligence. Even if we’re currently seeing a rise in generative AI tools, the AI in The Creator are more like the replicants in Blade Runner (1982). And while Gareth Edwards hasn’t had a lot of movies under his belt, he’s proven that he can handle big franchises like Godzilla (2014) and Star Wars (with Rogue One (2016)). Unfortunately, this “original” film feels highly derivative of these previous movies in his filmography. Plot-wise, much of The Creator cribs from Rogue One. The big orbiting doomsday device that looms as a threat over key battle sequences gives off big Death Star vibes. That there’s a MacGuffin that’s supposed to save the world/universe which causes the main character to undergo great sacrifice is yet another parallel that’s hard to ignore. Granted, many consider Rogue One...
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VIDEO GAME: Deepest Sword (2021)

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Deepest Sword Year: 2021 Rating: E Time Played: 41 minutes / 0.68 hours There are plenty of reasons I like Deepest Sword. It’s a simple gameplay gimmick with wide-ranging applications. It’s a quick play-through that doesn’t overstay its welcome. Most of all, it has a cute pixel art aesthetic and amusing dialogue for the dragon at the end of each level. There was a lot of love and care put into a game like this, and it shows. It almost feels nostalgic for the little freeware games I used to play growing up and I can half imagine it sitting on some floppy disk in my parents’ basement. As a physics-based puzzle game, the challenge scales with the size of your weapon. Each level increases the length—and by proxy the weight—of the sword. After the first few levels, I was hooked. While it uses basically the same layout for each level, the limitations of my sword forced me into different paths that led to the...
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MOVIE: Annihilation (2018)

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Annihilation Year: 2018 Rating: R Length: 115 minutes / 1.92 hours While I’ve never quite been fully on board with the works of Alex Garland, I recognize there’s something about his movies that makes me want to see them, eventually. I appreciated his approach to Artificial Intelligence in Ex Machina (2014), but it took a while for me to get around to his next work, Annihilation (2018). His style of science fiction borders on horror, but more importantly, it emphasizes one philosophical question in particular. What makes us human? Instead of exploring the Turing Test as he did in Ex Machina, Annihilation focuses on the larger scale of the universe to answer this question. Even if it takes a while to establish all the exposition, Annihilation does its best work in unraveling the mystery surrounding the return of Kane (Oscar Isaac). Most of this is done once the main character, Lena (Natalie Portman) arrives in the anomaly and can explore the bizarre alien effects on...
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BOOK: Infected (2008)

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Infected Year: 2008 Author: Scott Sigler Length: 684 minutes / 11.4 hours Stephen King has written most of the horror I’ve read. In deciding to branch out from the master of the genre, I saw the cover for this book in the listing of audiobooks for my library’s reader app and thought it looked interesting. While the horror here was more body/gross-out horror—which I didn’t have any issue with—there are other, deeper problems with this book. I’ll grant that in terms of audiobooks, it was an interesting recording with the sound effects and “alien voice” bits. However, I can’t say I recommend this book based on those merits alone. Perhaps this is an artifact of the times, but a book that came out in 2008 has not aged well at all. First, is the abundance of “men writing women” tropes that not only minimize the female characters to minor roles but doesn’t consider that perhaps not everything has to be about sex. Furthermore, while the...
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MOVIE: Castle in the Sky (1986)

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Castle in the Sky Year: 1986 Rating: PG Length: 125 minutes / 2.08 hours Having only seen a handful of Hayao Miyazaki films, I finally got around to some of his earlier works. Castle in the Sky (1986) might not seem special by today’s standards, but in the era when it was released, I’m sure it was quite a bold statement. As a steampunk-styled adventure, there’s a lot in this movie that has since been copied and adapted into other works (case in point, my younger brother noticed that it’s almost an identical plot to Mega Man Legends which came out a decade later). As Miyazaki’s third film, Castle in the Sky sees many of his established visual styles and themes (like flying girls) that he has used in many of his following projects. Even with a relatively simple plot, the gorgeous animated visuals are always a major draw for Miyazaki movies like this. There’s a charm that’s hard to describe, but it’s there in...
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VIDEO GAME: Mom Hid My Game! (2016)

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Mom Hid My Game! Year: 2016 Rating: E Time Played: ~1 hour Mom Hid My Game! is one of those simple puzzle games that feel like they would easily fit into a larger mini-game structure (like the WarioWare series). Its simple gameplay makes for quick rounds of play, which comes in handy for the iterative process of determining the solution. Even its simple visual style hearkens to the peculiar games in the WarioWare franchise. Of course, with such limited objectives in such a game, there wasn’t much to do in Mom Hid My Game! once I completed all the puzzles. The premise of Mom Hid My Game! is explained in the title itself. A young child is trying to find the handheld gaming system that his mother has taken away (likely due to how obsessively the child plays it). The obstacles that separate the child from his game are as simple as doors and drawers and as complicated as an enormous hole in the living...
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