The Last Starfighter review

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The Last Starfighter is an 80’s feel-good teenage movie about a boy who uses his video game skills to save an alien race. The movie was moderately successful for it’s time, but never really took off like some over science fiction movies. But it was fondly remembered enough to have spun off a musical in 2004 and there are rumors of a sequel (with the same writer, director and lead actor). But is it worth seeing?

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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K Dick

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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K Dick is one of Dick’s best known novels. Unfortunately it’s mainly known for the movie it inspired, Blade Runner. The book does a lot more than the movie and ultimately does it better. We get a better sense of Deckard, the people he had to deal with and the civilization that he inhabited.

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Toy Story 3 Review

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I went to go see Toy Story 3 this weekend. Having seen and enjoyed the firsttwo, I was wondering how the trilogy would end. It would be an understatement to say that the first movie reinvented movies. It was the first computer animated feature film and the humanity it showed made everyone believe that computer animation could be as good (if not better) than hand drawn animation. So was the third movie any good?

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American Tabloid by James Ellroy

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American Tabloid by James Ellroy was a giant curveball by the hard-boiled detective writer. Those of us who loved his L.A. Quartet didn’t know what to expect when Ellroy finished with the 50s and started on the 1960s. The writing stayed as hard-boiled as ever, but Ellroy upped the scope from Los Angeles to the entire nation with a book that covers Kennedy’s campaign through his death. And what a ride we are on.

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Straczynski Unplugged by J. Michael Straczynski

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 Straczynski Unplugged by J. Michael Straczynski is a collection of short stories, some of which are unpublished. Most people know Straczynski from his TV series Babylon 5 or from his comic books. But this is a different side of of Straczynski’s writing and it’s an interesting view into some of his earlier stories.

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Astro City: Confessions by Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson

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Yesterday we discussed the first Astro City book which was a collection of one off stories. Astro City:Confession is the first multi-chapter story arc in the Astro City universe. Where in the first book we dealt with a Superman stand-in, here we deal with a Batman stand-in: The Confessor. This is the story of The Confessor’s new sidekick (and much, much more).

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Astro City: Life in the Big City by Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson

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Astro City is Kurt Busiek’s baby. The culmination of his comics career and a damn good read. Busiek loves superheros. Really, really loves them. So he’s created his own superhero universe, stocked with all the typical superhero archetypes and has spent the last 15 years rewriting the superhero mythos. And it all started with a dream of flying in Astro City: Life in the Big City.

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Marvels by Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross

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I remember when Marvels came out and don’t honestly remember which struck me more, the amazing story or the amazing painting. Kurt Busiek had been overshadowed by his boyhood friend Scott McCloud (author of Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art), but had carved himself a nice career jumping from title to title for decent runs without ever sticking on one title for too long. Alex Ross had a couple series under his belt, but nothing that had caught anyone’s eye. But after this, everyone knew both their names.

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Noir by Robert Coover

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Noir by Robert Coover was a challenge for me. I approached it with a sense of anticipation as well as dread. Coover is a post modernist writer (and I usually detest post modernism), but the basic concept seemed interesting. A noir novel interpreted into a post-modern spin. And it’s a book that some will love, but others (like me) will have to fight to get through all the post-modern annoyances.

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Contact by Carl Sagan

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Contact by Carl Sagan is an interesting view into the scientific mind. The book deals with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) and the relationship between science and religion. Sagan was a well-known and popular scientist in the 1980s for his show Cosmos and his public appearances on TV shows. Sagan’s public celebrity probably made Contact one of the more read science-fiction novels by the general public.

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