There’s a secret to making a fantasy story work effectively. You introduce subject matter that you know is ridiculous—whether magic, fairies, monsters or other supernatural elements—and then treat it seriously. You establish rules for your fictional universe. And then . . . you follow them. In my review of Season 13 of Supernatural, I made […]
Read more "Supernatural: Season 14 — a review"Since I finished watching the entire run of Gilmore Girls (and loved it), The Crown is that series that I sometimes feel like I should apologize for being a loyal fan of. It is a soap opera. About the British royal family, no less, a subject I’ve never had the least bit of interest in. […]
Read more "Netflix’s The Crown: Season 3 — a review"It’s more than possible that I’ve watched this before. I’ve seen versions of at least parts of the documentary about the making of the “Trilogy” on several occasions. Plus, I’ve listened to DVD commentary tracks, so some of the voices are familiar to me even when the faces may not be. My Star Wars game […]
Read more "Empire of Dreams: The Story of the Star Wars Trilogy — a documentary review"Should you play Red Dead Redemption 2, if you haven’t already? Yes. Yes, you should. Okay, that’s the short version of my review of this game, which I played for the better part of a year before I deleted it from my PS4 to allow room for other games I wanted to play, like Far […]
Read more "Red Dead Redemption 2 — a video game review"When I finished with Season 1 of Castle Rock, I really couldn’t see where they could go with the story in the future. I thought that the show writers had written themselves into a corner. When Season 2 began, and featured none of the characters or apparent storylines from the first season, I thought: “Aha! […]
Read more "Castle Rock: Season 2 — a review"Here in the United States of America, we commonly use the date format mm/dd/yyyy. So, the date I’m writing this post—January 17, 2020—is commonly written out as follows: 01/17/2020 It should come as no real surprise that date formats differ around the world. China and Mongolia use the yyyy/mm/dd format. A few parts of the […]
Read more "1701 (Concerning date formats around the world)"Perhaps there was a less cryptic title for this post out there, but this is the one I’m going with. In many ways, this is a companion post to another one I put up recently, an argument against binge-watching. This one is about the polar opposite of binge-watching: Not watching at all. At least for […]
Read more "The Pause That Refreshes (the art of delayed fandom gratification)"