Fear of a Ghost Planet

Book Review: Ever After (2013)

Megan Purcell — Thu, 09 May 2013 00:55:24 +0000

Urban fantasy is a minefield full of mind-numbing exposition and ridiculous ideas. Even authors who develop a compelling mythologies – and keep those mythologies straight over the course of several books – can still fail spectacularly. Maybe reader demand keeps the story going long past it’s natural conclusion. Maybe one or more of the characters [...]

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Movie Review: Iron Man 3 (2013)

Paul Arrand Rodgers — Mon, 06 May 2013 04:27:03 +0000

The narrative purpose of any post-Avengers Marvel movie is not to majorly shake-up any of the characters at the core of the franchise—regardless of what Iron Man 3’s closing narration has to say about Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) and his place in the world, everything you know about him going in remains the same [...]

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What Now?

Paul Arrand Rodgers — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 14:54:08 +0000

I know I got a little huffy on Facebook this past Monday when Brian Williams compared the events of the Boston Marathon bombing to The Town, so excuse me for just a moment while I make reference to another particularly recent bit of popular culture. One of my main problems with Lincoln was that, like [...]

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Two White Writers Discuss VIDA, With Alcohol

Paul Arrand Rodgers — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 13:43:42 +0000

Over at The Missouri Review‘s blog, I talked about VIDA’s annual Count with my friend and sometime contributor to this blog, Alison A. Balaskovits. The Count, if you’ve never heard of it, is VIDA’s annual reckoning of the vast divide that exists between men and women when it comes to getting their work published or reviewed [...]

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Movie Review: Room 237 (2013)

Paul Arrand Rodgers — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 23:24:33 +0000

The theories held by the crackpots who are given time to talk about their obsession with Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining during Room 237‘s investigation of the film’s many supposed secret meanings are all crazy, but, in a way, they aren’t. More than any Kubrick film beyond 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining has inspired so much writing, diagramming, [...]

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Comic Book Review: Young Avengers #1-3

Aaron Weiss — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 06:00:38 +0000

As it would turn out, graduating from college and applying to jobs takes up a lot of time, especially when punctuated with episodes of crying and wondering what the hell you’re going to do with your life. However, I have been able to keep up with some of Marvel’s new series, and few series got [...]

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The Balcony Is Closed

Paul Arrand Rodgers — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 18:20:46 +0000

I met Roger Ebert in 2010, but, like most people who’ve written something about him in the days following his death, I’ve known of him for much longer. He and Gene Siskel, along with Mr. Rogers and the Sesame Street gang, were part of my afternoon television childhood. Unlike Cookie Monster, Oscar the Grouch, and [...]

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Movie Review: Dredd (2012)

Paul Arrand Rodgers — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 05:29:06 +0000

Let’s clear the air: Dredd 3D is so unlike Sylvester Stallone’s execrable Judge Dredd that, were it not for the title character and the iconic helmet worn by both Stallone and Karl Urban, the two wouldn’t appear to share the same source material. Dredd, though not half as smart as the 2000 A.D. comics that [...]

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Movie Review: Gangster Squad (2013)

Paul Arrand Rodgers — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 06:17:01 +0000

There’s nothing new to Gangster Squad, Ruben Fleisher’s amalgamation of and fetishized love letter to the Hollywood mafia movies of the 1990s. Outwardly, there’s little wrong with Fleisher’s approach—the film looks and feels like a theme park noir, approximating the style, tropes, accents, and dames in red dresses of the pulpy, lurid dramas that continue to pump their dark [...]

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The Problem With the Oscars Is the Oscars

Paul Arrand Rodgers — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 04:09:31 +0000

I knew before Seth MacFarlane was announced as the host of this year’s Academy Awards that I would not be watching the ceremony. If Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, two incredibly talented women whose shows 30 Rock and Parks and Recreation rank among my favorite of all time, couldn’t convince me to watch the Golden [...]

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