Thirteenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #5 Oats Studio

 From the mind of Neill Blomkamp comes Oats Studios, a series of post-apocalyptic / science fiction / horror short films (some of them very short), both animated and live action.  There's plenty of violence and gore but horror purists will likely take issue with my including this here.  I don't care.  This is my blog, this is my October series, I liked most of these little films and several of them made me squirm.  Scroll on by if you must.

Rakka - This was the longest of them, I think, an alien invasion/human resistance piece.  It very much looks like District 9 (love that movie).  Violent, bloody, with body mods and holy hell Sigourney Weaver!

Firebase - Set in Vietnam, U.S. forces finding tens of thousands dead, mutilated corpses like no one has ever seen, a survivor in the tunnel, the River God.  Unsettling.

Cooking with Bill - The scary movies are interspersed with funny ones to lighten the mood.  Cooking with Bill definitely has a lighter tone but HOLY FUCK I literally gagged at the sushi.  Not for those with weak stomachs.

God: Serengeti/ Chicago - Imagine God as a bored, petty deity inflicting pointless misery on the humans laid out before him in dioramas.  This is half live action and half animation and the tiny human animation is very, very good.

Zygote - Only two miners have survived out of 98 at the installation.  Something horrific killed the rest and the survivors are trying to get to the next building where there's a possibility of safety.  The male actor was nearly impossible for me to understand, speech-wise.  The monster is AMAZING and looks really good even though I think it's mostly animation and not practical.  This one counts as space horror.

Bad President - Another "funny" segment (not very funny) about how awful the U.S. president is after the alien invasion.  My least favorite of the lot.

Adam: Episode 2 - All robots, prisoners and guards.  They're trying to remember who they were, where they came from.  All animation.

Adam: Episode 3 - A mystic requires all supplicants to renounce technology in exchange for refuge, healing and miracles.  The miracles are real but there's a twist.  Uncanny valley animation.

Gdansk - More uncanny animation (not my favorite style, to be honest) set in what looks like medieval times.  Plus there's a giant.  And the Neverending Story theme song which made me laugh.

Kapture/Locust - The final bit is more uncanny valley animation with new weapons testing on unsuspecting human prisoners.  Lots of animated blood splashing about.

I definitely preferred the live action stuff (Rakka and Zygote particularly) to the animated pieces.  Some more successful than others but generally solid stuff if you're in the mood for weird sci-fi/horror adjacent stuff.

Watchlist, late spring edition

 Since the end of March (that's really not that long and I haven't accomplished all that much, tbh):

• Russian Doll S2 - Not as mind-blowing as the first season, which was so unexpected and original, but still vastly superior to most of what's out there.  Adore Natasha Lyonne.

• Moon Knight - Liked it, wanted to love it but didn't.  Kind of dark and gloomy.  Oscar Isaac's English accent was distracting and I wanted much more of Layla, Egyptian Superhero.

• Eternals - Meh.  Felt like a missed opportunity.  Cast too big to get to know, CGI distracting.

• Happy Endings - Finished it.  Seems like it went out with a whimper, rather than a bang.

• Sweet Tooth - Really quite liked this one, having gone into it with no expectations or knowledge of the source material.  Hope it gets a second season because the ending just seemed abrupt.

Currently: almost done with The Mandalorian and am into S3 of Sex Education.  Looking forward very much to S3 of Umbrella Academy (I just rewatched S2 in anticipation) and She Hulk, Attorney at Law.

Watchlist

 Hey, y'all!  Shockingly, I thought I'd check in and update this little blog with what I've watching for the last 35 days - instead of waiting a whole eleven months.  I have been diligently working through my watchlists, finishing languishing series and plowing through whole new ones.  This is what I've done since Halloween:

• Finished The 100.  I really liked the first three or so seasons but it really started dragging towards the end.  I do try to be a completist, however, and so I finished the last season.
• Finished the last season of Lucifer when the episodes were released.  When I started this show way back when I thought it was dumb, then I gave it a second chance and quite like it.  It was time for it to wrap up, though.
• Watched S1 of Reservation Dogs.  That was great and Mr. Mouse even watched it with me and enjoyed it.  Looking forward to S2.
• Got caught up on The Great British Baking Show when the most recent series was released on Netflix.  This show makes me so happy - everyone is so wholesome (although I am not a huge fan of Matt, sorry) and it's just a balm for the soul to watch.
• Watched S1 of Y: The Last Man.  I'm hearing that this may not be renewed which is too bad.  I didn't love it (could Yorick be more annoying?  I know, I have the comics, he's supposed to be) but there's so much story left to be told.  Strong cast.
• Started and am keeping up with The Wheel of Time.  I loved those books and own volumes 1-12  (Brandon Sanderson was the wrong person to finish it out - don't get me started) so I was intrigued to see how the show would be.  Again, I don't love it but it's getting better as it goes on.
• Got caught up by watching S5 of The Expanse.  This is a terrific sci fi show based on fantastic books.  I think it's getting one more season?
• Started a rewatch of the original Cowboy Bebop and have watched the first couple of episodes of the live action one.  Don't love the live action version but John Cho is certainly giving it his whole heart.  Needs more Ein!
• Watched Squid Game.  Loved it.  Hear they're making a S2 and think that's a bad idea.
• Watched Arcane only because Lindsey Stirling mentioned doing some violin work for it.  I know nothing about the game it's taken from but I really liked it lot.  Looking forward to more episodes.

Next on the list: I was going to start Wentworth (Australian prison drama, highly recommended by a friend) but I think I'm going to do Hellbound first.  I do love Korean horror and this has gotten good reviews.

What are you/have you been watching?

More meaningless lists

To update the current watch listings,

• Lucifer and The Witcher have been put on hold.  The former is fluffy entertainment that I will go back to from time to time, when I don't want to have to think.  The latter just didn't grab me although apparently everyone else with a Netflix subscription thought it was amazeballs.
• I haven't been back to Legion yet.
• Having watched both seasons of Castle Rock, I need to know if NOS4A2 is any good (to keep with the Stephen King theme).  I don't have HBO so I haven't seen The Outsider but I do hear good things about that.
• I got fed up with S3 of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina after four (?) episodes.  I find the title character insufferable.
• Legends of Tomorrow still makes me happy.
• I'm cruising through Locke and Key on Netflix.  I like it pretty well.  I read the first two (?) trade paperbacks of the comics ages ago but don't recall them well so I'm not sure how the show stacks up against the source material.
• I'm reading (again) The Expanse series.  I think I only read the first four books and have several more ahead of me to catch up on.  I'm also watching S4 of The Expanse.  I think it's really well done.
• And finally, I had to travel back east and managed to get caught up on my superhero movies on the planes: Avengers: Endgame and Spider-Man: Far from Home.  I still believe that Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is the best Spider-Man movie out there and also a contender for best superhero movie.  I did tear up a little at Endgame, however, as I'm only human.

Tenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #12 Apollo 18

How in the world did I manage twenty-two movies last October?!!?  We're almost at the end of October 2019 and I'm only up to twelve...

Apollo 18 purports to be a found-footage film of the real final Apollo moon mission, recently leaked after being highly classified for decades.  The Apollo program ran from 1963 to 1972 and was designed to land humans on the moon (and then bring them back).  Apollo 11, 12, 14, 15, 16 and 17 were successful.  The movie is about the top secret mission that went out at the end of December 1974, sponsored by the Department of Defense, to set up early warning systems in case of Soviet missiles.  Apollo 18 was a three-astronaut mission: two landed on the moon while the third remained in low orbit, to reconnect with the lunar module after the mission and return to Earth.

Nearly immediately after landing on the moon's surface, near its south pole, the crew starts picking up communications interference and the overnight motion capture cameras (this is 1970s tech) seem to catch something moving out in the rocks.  The astronauts find footprints and other tracks that are not theirs; they find an abandoned Soviet lunar module and a dead cosmonaut; and inside their own lunar module, the collected rock samples seem to be moving.  By themselves.  As you might imagine, this causes some concern for our astronauts.

Look, this was an okay movie.  The story is compelling but it barely qualifies as "horror," with just a little suspense/paranoia, only a few jump scares and a little blood.  Because of the found-footage set-up, supposedly being from 1970s film, a lot of the visuals are difficult to make out and yes, I get that this is on purpose and is the point of found-footage.  But when there isn't a lot of plot, it helps if you can actually see what you're supposed to be seeing.

Tenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #10 Event Horizon

Woohoo - space horror!  I mean, mediocre space horror, but still ...

It is 2047.  Seven years ago, deep space research vessel Event Horizon completely disappeared out around Neptune.  Official word was that it exploded, all lives lost, nothing left of the ship.  But then: it came back.  It didn't explode - its experimental [nonsensical movie science] drive bent space/time, delivering it across the universe in an instant.  And now it's back, from wherever it has been.

The search and rescue ship Lewis and Clark was sent to salvage it.  The small crew of Captain Laurence Fishburne, First Officer Joely Richardson, pilot Sean Pertwee, medical officer Kathleen Quinlan, mechanic (?) Richard T. Jones, loose cannon Jason Isaacs and some young redshirt are joined by the Event Horizon's designer, Sam Neill, who is, it must be said, rather weird.  The crew doesn't much like him and, as they board the derelict ship and progressively stranger things keep happening, they like him much, much less.  The crew suffers from hallucinations (maybe); the final ship's log is a garbled mess of shrieks and Latin; there are fluids and secretions exuding from the ship's walls.  As it turns out, the Event Horizon did not travel across the universe to [scientific star name] - it broke through space/time and went to a hell dimension.  Ooooooooo!

Despite its stacked cast, Event Horizon (1997) is a hot mess, with a confusing through-line, overacting and terrible dialogue.  It obviously steals from much better movies - Alien and Hellraiser spring immediately to mind.  The ship design is cool (see above re: Alien) but the story is pretty incoherent in places and when it switches over from what looked to be malevolent alien life to hell/evil (sans religion), it just got messy.

Science fiction state of mind

Just so you know: We are giving up cable television at the end of the month - SO THIS MEANS NO MORE WALKING DEAD RECAPS UNTIL/UNLESS I CAN FIGURE OUT HOW TO WATCH THEM, FYI - so I'm going to have to step up my game with movie reviews and maybe GASP start reading and reviewing books again. 

In the meantime, I've watched a couple of science fiction movies this weekend since I have been sidelined from skiing with an ugly cough.  Neither of them were anything particularly special but I thought I'd share a few thoughts with you here.

Extraterrestrial - After recently watching and enjoying Colossal, and mostly watching and kind of enjoying Timecrimes, I thought I should check out director Nacho Vigalondo's middle feature, Extraterrestrial (2011).  In Spanish with English subtitles, this is a slight science fiction/romantic comedy (?) hybrid in which the science fiction is almost incidental to the rest of what goes on.  Julio wakes up in Julia's bed, not remembering hooking up with her the night before.  As they try to sort out what happened, they are distracted by the sight of a huge flying saucer hovering over Madrid.  They are further distracted by Julia's creepy neighbor Angel, who threatens to rat them out when Julia's live-in boyfriend Carlos returns home.  The film's focus remains on these people, with the aliens never making an appearance and only affecting things by making people paranoid.  I think what I have liked best about Vigalondo's movies is that while they are all about people dealing with extranormal things (time loops, aliens, kaiju), the people themselves are very real and relatable.

The Cloverfield Paradox - The third of the three loosely-connected Cloverfield movies is pretty much straight sci-fi, a muddle of all sorts of well-trodden movie cliches, none of which really pan out.  The Earth is experiencing an energy crisis and as tension mount, a group of scientists on the Cloverfield Station are trying to get a particle accelerator to come up with free, unlimited energy.  Things go wrong, as experimental particle accelerators are wont to do, and the team finds itself dealing with all sorts of things that don't follow the rules of logic or science.  The movie is entertaining enough but it is not at all original and the short clips back on earth, which try to connect this movie with the other Cloverfields, are distracting and largely pointless.  The cast is solid, though: Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Daniel Bruhl, David Oyelowo, Chris O'Dowd and a cameo by Donal Logue.

Mini movie review: Colossal

Here's the plot outline of Colossal:  when unemployed party girl Gloria (Anne Hathaway, playing against type) gets tossed out of her NYC apartment by her boyfriend, she is forced to scurry back to her small town hometown, tail between her legs.  Living in her parents' empty house, she reconnects with grade school friend Oscar (Jason Sudeikis, playing against type) who gives her a job in his bar.  Gloria is a semi-alcoholic, self-destructive mess and Oscar is also a semi-alchoholic, self-loathing mess but they are rocked out of their navel-gazing when the news reports the appearance of a kaiju (giant monster) rampaging through Seoul, South Korea - which, they discover, is connected to/controlled by Gloria.

What makes Colossal an especially interesting movie is that there are no rom-com facets at all.  In a more typical movie, Gloria and Oscar would connect, bond over the kaiju, fight and then make up.  In this actual movie, Oscar is even more horrible than Gloria - an angry, jealous, entitled drunk.  I kept having to change how I felt about what was going on: some parts were funny, some pathetic, some infuriating, and I enjoyed the fact that things did not play out as I expected them.  There's not a lot of kaiju action in Colossal - in this movie, the monsters are much closer to home.

Eighth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #5 Lifeforce

Tobe Hooper's 1985 Lifeforce.  With a portentous voiceover to start, I was in love before the opening credits finished: with both naked space vampires and PATRICK STEWART, how could this movie not be amazing?  Lifeforce is ridiculous and waaaaaaaaaaaaay too long, but it takes itself seriously and is all kinds of mid-80s awesome.  For a horror movie about space vampires.

A joint British/American space mission on board the shuttle Churchill are exploring Halley's Comet.  They find a huge (150 miles long) alien craft that is possibly organic and of course think it's smart to send people inside to check it out.  They find a bunch of dried up space bat corpses and three beautiful naked humanoids encased in crystal boxes.  The mission commander Carlsen decides to bring the box set and one desiccated space bat back to the Churchill.  When the shuttle Columbia rendezvouses with the Churchill, there has been a fire: all the crew are dead, the escape pod is missing but the box set and the dead space bat are okay.  So the crew brings them back to London.  As it turns out, the three naked humanoids are not dead.  They wake up and go on a rampage (if one can call disappearing from the screen for long periods of time a "rampage") wherein the gorgeous Space Girl (who has really great boobs) sucks the lifeforce out of all the humans she meets.  In short time, London has devolved into a madhouse as the space vampires' victims become zombies (?).  Carlsen - who escaped the Churchill in the escape pod, did I forget to mention that? - and another dude chase the space vampires across London, including to a mental hospital where PATRICK STEWART is the head doctor.  There is a lot of fuzzy space/horror "science," vampiric victims exploding into dust, a corpse made entirely out of blood pulled from PATRICK STEWART's head and an ambiguous ending with a lot of blue lightning.

Lifeforce is much too long (PATRICK STEWART doesn't even show up until 1 hour 5 minutes and 22 seconds in (I wrote it down)) and is completely nutso.  But the animatronic desiccated victim effects are outstanding - I love that stuff.  And, really, if you can't embrace a 1980s movie about naked space vampires, you should probably just go watch Beaches again, because that's probably more your thing.

In absentia

Good lord n' butter, I went on an unintentional hiatus here.  The Walking Dead finished up its mediocre season and I just went AWOL.  Well, I'm not back in any big way yet but thought I'd check in to prove that FMS has not been entirely abandoned.

Upcoming:  Season 2 of AMC's Preacher starts back up on Monday, June 19, and I am all excited about getting back into that brand of batshit-crazy.

Ongoing:  I have been trudging through Netflix's Marvel's Iron Fist and I have to say that it is tedious in ways that none of the prior three Defenders series - Daredevil, Jessica Jones and Luke Cage - were.  The main character is a doofus, really, who is supposed to be the greatest martial artist on the planet.  Finn Jones in no way makes me believe that Danny Rand is an amazing fighter.  And I'm supposed to care about the sibling shenanigans with a big billion-dollar corporation?  The prior three "street level" heroes were all just scraping by: a blind man; a broken, abused, alcoholic woman and a wrongfully-accused black man and now I'm supposed to care about a poor little rich boy?  No thank you.  Seriously, the best part about Iron Fist is whenever Claire Temple (Rosario Dawson) is on-screen, rolling her eyes at what a twit Danny Rand is.

In print:  I've caught up on all The Expanse novels (and am also enjoying the television series on SyFy) and now what am I going to do?  When does the next one come out?  I guess I'll have to track down the novellas and short stories (or else just hope Joe Abercrombie comes out with something soon).

What about you?  What are you reading/watching these days?

Niblets

There's been a smattering of media consumed in the Mouse house lately, although nothing earth-shaking:

The Shallows - A decent, short, survival horror flick of the hot chick vs. man-eating shark variety, starring the gorgeous Blake Lively.  Her surfer girl is catching some waves on a secluded Mexico beach when she is attacked by a shark and must fight for survival, clinging to a rock and a buoy with only a wounded seagull for moral support.  There was a squirm-inducing self-surgery scene and I jumped a couple times.  I do question how much a person could actually have their eyes open underwater in the ocean, but that's a minor quibble, really, for an inoffensive B-movie.

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency - Douglas Adams's book is in fact nothing like the television series, other than there's a character with the name of Dirk Gently and he's British.  Everything else is different.  Everything.  In the book, there's ghosts and robots and ... I liked the show much, much better, actually.

All You Need Is Kill - This novel, by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, is the source material for the Emily Blunt/Tom Cruise movie, Edge of Tomorrow, recently seen and enjoyed.  The movie does differ from the book in some respects, although it is fairly faithful.

I've tried a couple of episodes each from a couple of Netflix originals, Trollhunters and Crazyhead, but was not impressed enough to explore further.  There is so much out there that if I am not immediately drawn in, a la Stranger Things or Jessica Jones, I lose patience.  The next one I'm going to try is The OA, which has gotten good reviews so I'm hopeful.

Finally, Mr. Mouse and I are doing a New Year decluttering around the house and I've been going through all our books.  We have a lot and we're trying to only keep the ones to which we have a personal connection.  While I was going through the stacks, I found the first three books of Madeleine L'Engle's Time Quintet: A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door and A Swiftly Tilting Planet.  I plowed through the first one and am on the second already.  But I don't think I've ever read the last two books so now I'm thrilled to be able to finish the series.

Midseason break

We're in the midseason break after all the "fall finales" - when did that become a thing, by the way? - and all of a sudden I have all this time on my hands since I'm not watching all the television.  We (both Mr. Mouse and I) have enjoyed Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, Search Party and People of Earth and as mentioned here previously, I found Sweet/Vicious to scratch an itch I didn't realize I had.  Westworld was decent as well; the latest run of Black Mirror was excellent; and while I didn't love Luke Cage as much as I did Jessica Jones, I would still rank it higher than Daredevil's second season.

I've also been able to watch a couple of movies, neither of which have moved me to do full reviews here but each which at least merit a mention.

Guillermo del Toro's mismarketed and under-watched Crimson Peak was gorgeous, with amazing set design, costuming and atmosphere.  It definitely suffered from a lack of plot, I thought, and was clearly more of a Gothic romance than a ghost story as the movie's marketing team would have had us think.

I did enjoy Edge of Tomorrow with Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt.  I am not a Tom Cruise fan but he was pretty good here, a darkly funny Groundhog Day-esque sci-fi thriller in which the day the European ground forces are annihilated by the invading alien menace gets reset each time Cruise's character dies.  As the A.V. Club said, there was something satisfying about watching the guy get shot in the head over and over and over again.  And I put Emily Blunt's "full metal bitch" character up with Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor as kick-ass science fiction movie heroines; she doesn't get the depth the other two do (plus they have multiple movies/a television series to build on) but she's pretty great.

Farscape, where have you been all my life?

I recently got chastised by several scifi/fantasy loving friends for not having tackled Farscape yet.  In my (admittedly thin) defense, I have been busy watching BtVS, Angel, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, The X-Files, Fringe, Dollhouse, Battlestar Galactica, Firefly and a whole bunch of other genre shows.  I am currently working on this deficit, having just finished S1E16, and I just like it more and more as it goes on.

For those who don't know, Farscape is a science fiction television show that ran for four seasons (1999-2003 (or 1998-2002, depending on what source you use)) before being abruptly cancelled.  Nutshell summary:  an American scientist/astronaut gets shot through a wormhole during an experimental flight and ends up on board a starship with a bunch of on-the-run aliens.  Yes, it is a show about a bunch of people on a spaceship flying around the universe and having adventures ... which pretty much describes every other science fiction television show ever made (Star Trek in all its iterations, Firefly, BSG, etc.)  What makes it different is that when we start, none of the characters like or even know each other, plus half of them are puppets a la The Jim Henson Company.  The CGI is pretty weak but there isn't much of it and the practical puppets and make-up effects are phenomenal.  Each of the characters is developed and they all change and grow - even though they are the "heroes," they all do unlikable but perfectly understandable and in-character things.  It's quite amazing, actually, for a show like this.

I'm getting through episodes as fast as I can, and hopefully won't get derailed too badly by returning network shows (or Galavant, which was just raved about by one of the aforementioned friends).  What I really need is a rainy sick day so I can just immerse myself in the Farscape 'verse.  And you should too, if you haven't already (it's streaming on Netflix so go for it).

Mini movie review: Cube

Cube is an odd little Canadian movie, not really nasty enough to qualify as horror but with a little more gore than a straight thriller, plus a touch of science fiction.  There's not a whole lot of plot to worry about:  six (technically seven but one gets killed off REALLY quickly) strangers regain consciousness, trapped in a construct made of cube-shaped rooms.  There are hatches on each wall, floor and ceiling and when they go through, whichever way they go, they find themselves in another cube-shaped room.  Some of these rooms are booby-trapped, which thins the herd as these people try to move from room to room, attempting to escape; even more troublesome is that they have neither food nor water, so they will need to get out - or definitely die trying.  None of the people know each other or how they ended up in the cube but several of them have useful skills: one is a doctor, one a cop, one has escaped from several prisons, one turns out to be a math whiz.  They don't particularly like one another but they'll all need to work together to get out of the cube.

Cube is from 1997 but it seems older.  The acting is not that good and no questions get answered - you never learn why they are there, or who put them there, or what is going on in the outside world - not even at the very end, but I found myself getting sucked in nonetheless.  You could do better than this movie but you could also do much, much worse.

Mini movie review: The Martian

I'll just come right out and say it: while this movie is pretty good, it is not as good as the book.   The Martian, by Andy Weir, was a surprise bestseller, a terrific science fiction book where even NASA said that the science was spot-on.  It is a very funny book too, in addition to all the science and suspense, told in first-person by Mark Watney, stranded on Mars after a mission gets scrubbed.  You can read my mini review of the book for plot summary, if you like, because the movie does stick pretty well to the narrative.

The Martian-movie version is a little too long and just not as funny or as suspenseful as the book.  Although he does a decent job, I'm not convinced Matt Damon was the right choice to play Watney.  It's a tough role, seeing how so much of the story is just Watney, alone on Mars, doing calculations and science-ing the shit out of stuff.  The rest of the cast is good, filled by surprisingly big names who don't get all that much to do.  I'm glad I watched it but if you have a choice, read the book.

Mini movie review: The Maze Runner

Here's another post-apocalyptic dystopian YA novel-turned-movie for you, along the lines of The Hunger Games except there's no love triangle (no love interest at all - amazing!) and no one emerging with Jennifer Lawrence's Katniss charisma.  I don't know how much of that is due to the source material, however: THG books are so strong; I don't know anything about The Maze Runner series by James Dashner. Still, TMR is a decent little movie, even if it fizzles out towards the end.

Thomas (our hero) wakes up, retching and amnesiac, in a subterranean elevator as it rocks to the earth's surface.  Once above ground, he is met by a group of boys/young men who are trapped in a wooded glade surrounded by a shifting, murderous stone maze.  The boys have set up a nice little society in the three years they have been there: building living quarters, assigning jobs; following rules.  Thomas (who remembers his name but nothing else in a day or so) immediately starts questions things: who keeps sending boys to the surface once a month in that elevator?  Who were the boys before?  Where are they?  Who made the maze? And most importantly, how the hell do they get out of here?  Thomas earns a job as one of the titular maze runners: fast, brave and clever boys who go out into the Maze every day, memorizing its layout.  Within no time at all, Thomas has upset the status quo by surviving a night in the Maze, killing one of the giant, robotic/flesh spider monsters called greavers, and figuring out how to escape.  As expected, his actions shake up the fragile glade society.  But Thomas has sparked something in many of the other boys and they make a break for it.

None of the characters are all that deeply developed and the dialogue isn't anything to write home about.  But The Maze Runner is a passable entry into the genre, particularly since it isn't dragged down with the romance typically inserted in other YA science fiction.   The plot moves steadily forward; the named characters are distinguishable and relatable; the action, while depending overmuch on CGI (see above re: giant robot spider monsters), is decent, if a little confusing and dim sometimes.  My biggest issue is with the very ending where after keeping my attention for the run-time, the movie has no sort of resolution for its characters, instead going out on a "this story will be continued in the SEQUEL so no point in resolving anything NOW" note.  The Maze Runner did pique my interest enough to add the SEQUEL to my Netflix queue tho, so well-played, movie.

Mini movie review: Never Let Me Go

Adapted from the Kazuo Ishiguro novel of the same name, Never Let Me Go is a sadly quiet science fiction movie with ruminations about genetic engineering and the meaning of life.  And there's a love triangle.  Although the novel apparently holds onto its secrets for much longer (and I've just requested the book from the library to see how it compares to the movie), the movie does not SO SPOILERS AHEAD EVEN THOUGH THE MOVIE COMES RIGHT OUT WITH IT: we open with title cards telling us that in the late 1950s, a scientific breakthrough meant that most diseases that were previously unsurvivable were now curable and that by the mid-1960s, human life expectancy was in the 100s.  This progress comes at a price and we are first introduced to Kathy (Carey Mulligan), Tommy (Andrew Garfield) and Ruth (Keira Knightly) when they are pre-teens in 1978, at an English boarding school, Hailsham.  These children have no parents: they are human clones, formed in a lab to provide clean and healthy organs for sick, natural humans.  From their childhood, they are kept safe and sheltered and are told what an honor it is to be Donors.  The film follows Kathy, Ruth and Tommy to 1985, when they move to a group home, meet other Donors from other places and learn a little about the world before their required donations begin when they are in their mid-20s.

Never Let Me Go is calm and measured, much like these Donors' lives, and chooses to focus on the relationships among the three main characters, their hopes and dreams, and just touches on the moral issues surrounding their lives (are these cloned Donors humans? is it right to give these young people life, only to take it away from them?).  One of the saddest scenes, I thought, takes place when Kathy, Tommy and Ruth are still little, living at Hailsham.  The students collect tokens and every so often, a delivery van will bring boxes of treats and toys for them to purchase with their tokens.  A small group of students waits eagerly at the door, asking the deliverymen if it is "a bumper crop" this time.  The men say, yes, it is, but when the contents of the boxes are spilled out onto the tables, it's nothing but old dolls, broken toys, decks of dog-eared playing cards and other castoff bits of rubbish that the real people have donated.  The little donor children don't know that this is rubbish and it is heartbreaking to see how happy they are to have new things to play with.

This blog has not been abandoned, believe it or not

Part of the problem here is that I haven't been reading very much.  Over the weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year's Eve, I've been working through a lot of my lunches.  Since I do the bulk of my reading during work lunches, this has really cut into my page count.  Now that the holidays are over, I should be picking some books back up.

This brings me to another problem: what to read.  I'm sort of in the mood to catch up on all the Neil Gaiman that I haven't read yet.  But I'm also watching Syfy's The Expanse and so now want to go back to that series, rereading the two I've already read (Leviathan Wakes and Caliban's War) and then go on to the rest of them.  And I also want to go back and reread the first two books of the Millenium series (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire), go on to The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, and then finish with The Girl in the Spider's Web, by David Lagercrantz, which continues the series and which I received for Christmas.

Watching-wise, I'm enjoying The Expanse, although half the time I'm wracking my brain, trying to remember what happened in the books.  I certainly like it better than Syfy's miniseries Childhood's End, which I found a little disjointed, dropping and picking up characters willynilly.  I am all caught up with Sherlock and have just one episode to go with Master of None, which I have really enjoyed (the episode "Mornings" is an entire, sweet, well-done, intelligent, funny, heartfelt rom-com in and of itself).  I've got just a couple more episodes of S4 of Game of Thrones (that fight between the Mountain and the Viper!) and I'm still loving Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries.  And then there's television coming back, and the return of Agent Carter and  Better Call Saul, and OMG the return of The X-Files ...

At least I should be able to consume enough to merit some more regular posting soon.

So busy

I don't mean to derail the True Blood momentum - and, in fact, I have watched the next two episodes and will get to recapping them soonish - but there's some other stuff I've read and watched recently that is pretty damn good.  (And, frankly, when compared to True Blood, very damn good.)  Take a gander and let me know if you've partaken of any of these.

• Black Mirror - A satirical British science fiction anthology series from the mind of Charlie Booker, Black Mirror is a dark and twisted treat.  Each episode - and there are only a few - has a different story and a different cast, and all of them involve technology that is not that far away from us right now.  As an X-Files, Fringe and Twilight Zone fan, as well as a fan of dystopian fiction, it's like this show was made for me.  It's got a great cast too, which made it great fun to recognize people (from Sense8, Agent Carter and the U.K. version of Skins, among others).  
• Howl's Moving Castle - I read the book.  I don't think I even realized there was a book and thought it was just the acclaimed Miyazaki animated movie.  But no, it was a book first, by British author Diana Wynne Jones.  It's a lightweight YA fantasy novel about Sophie, the eldest of three sisters and, in the world of fairy tales, thus doomed to a boring and unfulfilled life.  When Sophie inadvertently pisses off the Witch of the Waste, the Witch turns her into an old woman.  Her only chance at breaking the spell is the Wizard Howl, he of the titular moving castle.  Sophie insinuates herself into Howl's household and then the adventures begin.  Howl's Moving Castle is stuffed full of fire demons, jilted lovers, fancy outfits, animated scarecrows and plain old magic.  I got sucked in against my will and now I'm just going to have to move the movie up to the top of my Netflix queue.
• Doctor Who - It wasn't as though I was actively resisting Doctor Who, I just figured that I needed a chunk of time to watch a bunch of episodes in a row to really gain appreciation for it.  Everything I have read said that the 2005 revival, with Christopher Eccleston as the Ninth Doctor, is a good place to start - that those of us new Whovians don't really need to delve into the classic episodes.  I'm almost all the way through the series (I understand that Eccleston only played the Doctor for the one series) and I'm really quite liking it.  It has some fairly scary monsters for such a silly show (the Dalek, the Empty Child zombies, the Autons).  I have a big ol' girl crush on Bille Piper, who plays the Doctor's companion, Rose.  And Eccleston does a very nice job with the Doctor: he's got some darkness to him, this incarnation.  Good fun.  I'm anxious to finish out this series and see what fan-favorite David Tennant does with it.
• The Revolution was Televised  - This non-fiction book by Alan Sepinwall covers the shows that changed television into the amazing landscape that we now know it to be.  Sepinwall discusses in detail the following shows, which include several of my all-time favorites:  Oz (which I now have to watch), The Sopranos, The Wire (which I definitely have to watch), Deadwood (love love love), The Shield, LOST, Buffy the Vampire Slayers (!!!!!!!!!), 24, Battlestar Galactica (love love love), Friday Night Lights (love), Mad Men (it's on my list) and Breaking Bad (love love love).  Those are some seriously excellent shows right there.  The Revolution was Televised is easy to read, packed with information and interview tidbits and just fascinating to any of us who love good television.  Highly recommended.
• Mr. Robot - I also watched USA's Mr. Robot which is just great.  Rami Malek, as main guy Elliott Alderson, is phenomenal as the brilliant, damaged untrustworthy narrator.  The plot moves along quickly - a hacker group, fSociety, is looking to take down the largest corporation (Evil Corp) in the world, thus fomenting chaos - but it's the character beats that are the most compelling.  Great stuff and a wonderful change of pace from USA's usual blue sky programming.

Mini movie review: Under the Skin

To say that the recent movie Under the Skin is based on Michel Faber's novel of the same name is not quite accurate; "very loosely based on" would be more accurate.  Scarlett Johansson drives around Glasgow, picking up men, finding out if there is anyone who will miss them and then taking them back to her place.  She is not quite human, ScarJo's character, and there are nefarious ends for the men she picks up.  (And that is where the "very loosely based on" changes to "a whole different story, really.")

Divergence from the source material aside, Under the Skin is a wonderful little genre movie, beautiful and slow and creepy.  There is hardly any dialogue.  The music is atonal and alien, as though filtered through the main character's not-quite-human senses.  There is very little plot, although there is a clear beginning, middle and end to the story.  It is tense in parts, melancholy in others, awful and squicky in a couple more.  It appears that Scotland is a very grey and rainy place. And yes, this is the movie where ScarJo goes completely bare nekkid.  It is unmomentous and not played for titillation.  She has a very real woman's body: beautiful, yes, but hardly unrealistic.  And the way she wears this body, carefully, awkwardly, as though it doesn't exactly fit, is part and parcel of this role.

With Les Revenants, this movie is the second bit of visual media that is classified as genre but doesn't line up exactly as horror/science fiction/fantasy.  You don't need to have read the original novel to enjoy the movie version of Under the Skin but it is my recommendation that you do both, since the two make good companions, different as they are.