BOOK: The Optimist’s Daughter (1972)

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The Optimist's Daughter Year: 1972 Author: Eudora Welty Length: 239 minutes / 3.98 hours The Optimist's Daughter is yet another short piece of Pulitzer Prize winning prose that I failed to connect with. Sure, the writing is solid, if not flowery at times. The problem with these kinds of books (Housekeeping also coming to mind here) is that I don't feel it has anything significant to say. Contrasting Chicago from New Orleans is so common that culture clash is an inevitable trope for any character who ventures into the south from their home in the north. Family drama always seems to attract prize-winning status. Here, we see the titular optimist's daughter as she grapples with the death of her optimist father. The death of a patriarch always brings out the worst in people as they try to get as much of the remaining estate they can get their hands on. Not that the titular character isn't without faults either, as her judgmental nature of her...
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MOVIE: Furiosa – A Mad Max Saga (2024)

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Fuirosa: A Mad Max SagaYear: 2024Rating: RLength: 148 minutes / 2.46 hours Having seen most of the original Mad Max films, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) was such a shocking visual smorgasbord that it only made sense to capitalize on its success. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) attempts to give us more of the setting, characters, and aesthetic from Fury Road, but with less of the tight octane-fueled pacing of its predecessor. It's not bad by itself, but its premise certainly rides on Fury Road's coattails for much of its runtime. While it's crazy that it's almost been a decade since Fury Road came out, I can accept that Anya Taylor-Joy was a passable version of a younger Charlize Theron. The real surprise was how much Chris Hemsworth stole the show, leaning heavily into his Australian roots to give some amazingly authentic craziness to Dementus. That there were so many common elements to Fury Road here meant that it was entertaining...
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VIDEO GAME: LOVE (2019)

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LOVEYear: 2019Rating: ETime Played: ~1 hour When it comes to retro-inspired video games, most seem to pull their influences from the 8-bit or 16-bit systems like the Nintendo Entertainment System or Sega Genesis. Rarely have I seen something that seems to take their cues from further back in the video game pantheon. For all their limitations, Atari or Commodore 64 games still had a distinctive style that made them stand out prior to the boon in the home gaming space dominated by Nintendo and Sega. LOVE feels like an extremely polished Atari game—which is both a good and bad thing. Platformers have always been a simple game to make on limited hardware. All you need is a few pixels that the player can move around on the screen and a variety of platforms to jump onto. LOVE takes this common idea and puts it into a mostly monochromatic, heavily pixelated space that could have been pulled straight from the home video game...
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MOVIE: The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (2024)

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The Ministry of Ungentlemanly WarfareYear: 2024Rating: RLength: 122 minutes / 2.03 hours It feels like I've been waiting for a Guy Ritchie film that is a return to form. I loved his earlier works, but have found his latest projects mostly disappointing. The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (2024) Feels like one of those early Ritchie films, which I truly appreciated. However, despite being based on actual events, it felt a bit like a watered down Inglorious Basterds (2009). The cast and action were great, but the stakes somehow felt shallow and forgettable. I truly enjoyed the parts of the film that held onto Ritchie's original style. The ridiculous action sequences and the machismo of the main cast (Henry Cavill, especially) are the kinds of things that I enjoyed in Ritchie's earlier works. That any of this was even close to what really happened makes it an impressive event that should inspire people to learn more about the history. Including the brief reference...
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BOOK: The Ledge (2011)

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The LedgeYear: 2011Author: Jim Davidson and Kevin VaughanLength: 288 pages Humans are incredible creatures. There's a resilience for life that shows up in the most dire of circumstances. This is prevalent in many mountaineering books—especially the ones about climbing disasters. The Ledge is the harrowing real-life story of survival against the odds on Mount Rainier. Granted, most stories like this are usually framed with the benefit of hindsight, which can also highlight the risks that led to the disaster. It's amazing that anyone survived this situation, which is what makes this book an entertaining read. There are a lot of extreme outdoor people in Colorado. My risk tolerance is usually low enough that I think what they do is crazy. I know it's easy to judge when things go wrong, so it s comforting that the situation that led to the titular ledge was mostly because of bad luck. An alignment of poor conditions can take even the most experienced mountaineers by...
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MOVIE: Civil War (2024)

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Civil WarYear: 2024Rating: RLength: 109 minutes / 1.82 hours With Alex Garland's latest film, Civil War (2024), I still maintain my belief that his films use the medium of movies to ask, "What makes us human?" In his previous sci-fi works like Ex Machina (2014) and Annihilation (2018), the genre did most of the heavy lifting with that question. For Civil War, the current heated political climate is the backdrop that shines a harsh mirror on humanity during armed conflict. The framing, however, is truly what makes this film stand out—and it's not about politics at all. As a photographer, I understand what it takes to capture a moment without being part of the moment. You need to be present, but neutral. Civil War pushes this concept to its limits within the context of war photography. How does the press capture these atrocious moments while standing by to let them happen? Is documenting the war more important than stopping it? On top...
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VIDEO GAME: Loop Hero (2021)

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Loop HeroYear: 2021Rating: TTime Played: 2,842 minutes / 47.37 hours While it seems like every third game these days is a Roguelike, I have occasionally come across a few like Loop Hero, which successfully makes the iterative gameplay loop fun. As a metanarrative on the larger Role Playing Game structure, Loop Hero is strangely fun for a game that automatically fights every battle for you. After all, everyone knows the best part of an RPG is finding better gear and trying to determine which one provides better stats for their character. This is Loop Hero in a nutshell. Perhaps it's the combination of Roguelike, Deck Builder, and RPG genres that makes this game stand out. With each round, the player character walks around a randomly generated path. By playing cards obtained through battle, the landscape can change to help (or hinder) the hero. If the hero can survive long enough, a challenging boss appears. It's sometimes a gamble to obtain more materials...
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MOVIE: Boy Kills World (2024)

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Boy Kills WorldYear: 2024Rating: RLength: 111 minutes / 1.85 hours Video game movies are gaining some respect after the disastrous jump to the silver screen in the 1990s. It's interesting, then, that Boy Kills World (2024) takes all the cliches of the beat-'em-up and hack-and-slash video games from the arcades and makes a movie out of a game that doesn't exist. The problem is this movie also adheres to a lot of the tropes that made the video game movies of the 1990s sub-par to the ones that exist today. Don't get me wrong here. Boy Kills World is fun if you just turn off your brain and enjoy the ridiculous ride. Bill Skarsgard is great as the "silent protagonist"—made even better by H. Jon Benjamin's narration of the character's internal thoughts. The action is intense and there are a few set pieces that play to the strengths of the more interesting characters. And as a video game movie, its structure of...
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