Dragons: Riders of Berk (premiere)
{4.5/5} “An egg’s an egg, right ladies?… Until it explodes.” The Vikings and dragons are getting along fine, but even though dragons just eat fish the farm animals are spooked by the scary-looking fire-breathing dragons. The yaks aren’t giving any milk and the chickens aren’t laying any eggs. Stoick asks Hiccup to do something about […]
Picnic at Hanging Rock
{4/5} “People don’t sit on cold steps in the dark unless they’re weak in the head.” It’s 1900 in Australia — on Valentine’s Day students from an all-girls school go for a day trip to a place called Hanging Rock. Four of them don’t come back — three students and one teacher. No one knows […]
Movies I really don’t want you to see
There are 2 movies I really don’t want you to see for the same reason — because they are unfunny adaptations of funny source material. Of course, there are people who disagree with me — who like these movies — but if you trust my judgement please avoid them. {2/5} The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the […]
Darius Jones & Matthew Shipp in concert
I saw a double bill performance as part of the Guelph Jazz Festival. I didn’t choose this concert myself, and I will pay more attention to what I’m going to in the future — it turns out there are concerts I’d rather I didn’t attend. The first act was a group called Brew, consisting of […]
Dragons: Gift of the Night Fury, etc.
There have been three short films (16 to 22 minutes) that are sequels to How to Train Your Dragon, a movie I loved. The first appeared on the DVD with the original movie in 2010, and the other two appeared on their own DVD in 2011. A TV show, Dragons: Riders of Berk, has just […]
Batman: Cacophony
{4/5} “My whole life… all of this. It’s all because I never want to see death first-hand again.” A villain who kills superheroes (those who are normal humans) is after Batman. This mysterious person only speaks the sounds of fighting like “pow” and “blam” — one might call him Onomatopoeia. He breaks the Joker out […]
Counting Tadpoles
{4.5/5} “One heard of Flying Box People. They were ignorant, of course, of People’s ways, and did some awful things, not knowing any better. But they seemed to intend friendship. ‘No knowing what harm we may do them in ignorance,’ Levery said to Eblio. Eblio agreed. One could make awful mistakes through ignorance, even among […]
The Visitor
{5/5} “I pretend that I’m busy, that I’m working, that I’m writing… But really, I’m not doing anything.” Walter is a college professor whose wife has died — now he’s not connecting to much in his life. He’s been trying to learn to play the piano but finds it difficult. When he has to travel […]
Permanence
{4.5/5} “The mountains were gorgeous, all limpid shadow and fogbound majesty and she found it easy to forget her problems here. Sheer rock walls rose from the plains to ice-capped peaks, sunlit on one side during the artificial day, long shadows sloping into apparent nothingness on the other side. Half the sky was a gorgeous […]
Stargate Atlantis (season 4)
{4.5/5} “Perhaps the future is predetermined by the character of those who shape it.” In “Tabula Rasa” almost everyone gets sick — and the symptoms include amnesia. How will they solve the problem if they can’t remember there’s a problem to solve? In “This Mortal Coil” Sheppard gets a cut that heals immediately, so he […]