MOVIE: Godzilla (1954)

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GodzillaYear: 1954Rating: Not RatedLength: 96 minutes / 1.60 hours While the Godzilla franchise often gets flack for its goofier sequels and early American adaptations, there’s a reason it was one of the most influential movies to come out of Japan in the 1950s. For its time, Godzilla (1954) had amazing special effects that actually looked good in context (again, even if later Godzilla movies did not look as good). And as for its message of post-war Japan being afraid of technologies that could be harnessed for war, Godzilla provides a perspective that feels deeply personal to everyone who made this film. Much like how Jaws (1975) succeeded by showing very little of the titular monster, Godzilla only makes a few appearances in its own film. There were a few camera tricks used in this movie that helped sell the scale of the enormous lizard. Sure, some of them were through miniatures and a person in a rubber suit—but they worked well. They...
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BOOK: Ready Player Two (2020)

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Ready Player Two Year: 2020 Author: Ernest Cline Length: 370 pages I understand that most sequels that weren't already planned as part of a larger series (or even a duology) are often just a cash grab for fans of the original work. Usually, I can forgive this if it allows me to spend more time in the world the author created in the first book. In the case of Ready Player Two, I think it goes so far into being a cash grab that it actually harms how I feel about the original Ready Player One. While the internet and online culture has changed significantly in the nine years since the first book came out, there were only a few retroactive changes to the Oasis that recognized these shifts in modern technology. And while the main idea of the plot does take a natural next step from virtual reality to capturing a lived reality in digital space, none of the excitement of the original egg...
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MOVIE: A Bug’s Life (1998)

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A Bug's LifeYear: 1998Rating: GLength: 95 minutes / 1.58 hours It’s interesting how Pixar pulled ideas from some much more serious movies for their first few films. While Toy Story (1995) has a vibe straight from The Defiant Ones (1958), A Bug’s Life (1998) more directly aligned with Seven Samurai (1954). And while the visuals of A Bug’s Life haven’t held up nearly as well over the years, the plot truly rings truer today than it did at the end of the last millennium. After all, what if we’re all suffering because a select few people are taking all our hard-earned efforts for themselves? The decision to animate bugs with stiff exoskeletons was likely because of the technical limitations of the time (similar to why Pixar chose toys for Toy Story). But with the natural scenery for this setting, you could see the need to innovate here and there to produce something that looked good. And for 1998, it looked good. A...
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VIDEO GAME: Nefarious (2018)

by benmweilertNo Comments
NefariousYear: 2018Rating: TTime Played: 3.5 hours I can appreciate when a game tries to do something different. Where most mascot platformers have the main character rescuing a princess from a villain, Nefarious flips that on its head and has the villain capturing these princesses and fighting the hero. I picked up this game because one of the artists I follow worked on it, but a few aspects of the game unfortunately underwhelmed me. After all, a novel idea that isn't fun to play doesn't make me want to endure playing it. While I played through most of this game shortly after I bought it, it languished unfinished in my backlog for a few years before I decided I was probably close enough to the end to just put it to bed. The art style was unique enough, and the music fit each of the levels well. However, the movement of all the artistic elements felt like a Flash Player game, and the...
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MOVIE: Iron Man (2008)

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Iron ManYear: 2008Rating: PG-13Length: 126 minutes / 2.10 hours After decades of superhero movies, it’s interesting to go back and watch some of the films that kicked off this whole interconnected cinematic universe. One wonders if, had a movie like Iron Man (2008) flopped, we’d even be in the aftermath of one of the most ambitious movie projects of all time. As it stands, the founding film for the MCU is a solid story that has great character growth and fun action sequences that would come to be the MCU standard for many of its films. As far as superhero origin stories go, Iron Man feels the most realistic. There’s no radioactivity. No dead parents. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) has a solid motivation to fight evil after he realizes his own technology that made him rich is being used to inflict suffering on others. Of course, this realization had to come at his own suffering to humble his otherwise cocky attitude...
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BOOK: Skyhunter (2020)

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Skyhunter Year: 2020 Author: Marie Lu Length: 718 minutes / 11.97 hours A friend of mine is a fan of Marie Lu's writing, and I thought the cover of this book looked interesting, so I gave it a shot. As a young adult dystopian novel, there's not a lot that's new here. It's your same old young people fighting a force they don't understand because those in charge tell them that the world will end if they don't maintain the status quo. Fortunately, there were enough little things that made this a unique enough story that I'll be continuing on with the second book at some point. One of the reasons I appreciate diversity in main characters is it gives me a glimpse into how their world functions. With a mute character in first person point of view, it was the perfect trope to connect to the "antagonist" with a psychic bond that could easily provide the reader with a venue to get inside both...
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MOVIE: Alice in Wonderland (1951)

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Alice in WonderlandYear: 1951Rating: GLength: 75 minutes / 1.25 hours Of all the early Disney movies based on literature, Alice in Wonderland (1951) always felt like the odd one out. It wasn’t based on any fairy tales, and the source material it was adapting wasn’t necessarily something that had a narrative plot that connected everything together (other than the main character’s misadventures). Still, its psychedelic aura lends itself well to the animation format and leaves the viewer with at least a few short bits of memorable content. Having never really sat down and watched the whole movie straight through, there’s a reason the handful of more memorable scenes have stood in place for the whole. If anything, the characters in Wonderland make it memorable. The Cheshire Cat, Mad Hatter, and Queen of Hearts all have strong showings in this movie, even if their individual contributions don’t make up the whole film. Their representations here in the Disney animation style are iconic and...
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VIDEO GAME: Isles of Sea and Sky (2024)

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Isles of Sea and SkyYear: 2024Rating: E10+Time Played: 16.6 hours Isles of Sea and Sky is another one of those games that Game Maker's Tool Kit (GMTK) introduced me to. I always appreciate when a game tries to be a spiritual successor to a retro game series in a way that makes it feel like the game could have easily come out in the late '90s. For Isles of Sea and Sky, the gameplay felt like the little dungeon puzzles in the early Game Boy Zelda titles like Link's Awakening, Oracle of Ages, and Oracle of Seasons. Ultimately, it scratched that itch and more. One of the nice gimmicks with this game was its open-world Metroidvania style of exploration. You need to collect stars to open locked areas (akin to the locked areas in Super Mario 64) but you don't need to collect all the stars to continue the plot. This means there are lots of little puzzles to solve, and the...
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