A good gangster movie does two contradictory things at once. First, it must show how the gangster is just like everyone else. Second, it must show how he is like no one else. Black Mass (2015), a biopic about real-life gangster James “Whitey” Bulger, achieved both. It’s the best gangster movie I’ve seen in...
We know this story. We’ve seen it on CNN, tracked it on the Internet, commented on it in Facebook. A young woman goes missing, and her handsome husband becomes the main suspect. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn retells this story with imagination and skill, but the novel left me more puzzled than satisfied. Though...
I have an image of Sherlock Holmes in my mind. On a dark and foggy night, following the trail of a murderer, Holmes and Dr. Watson wander narrow London streets. Where does this image come from? For years I wondered. I knew it wasn’t from any movie or television show. It must’ve been something...
Sense8 is an original Netflix series about eight people around the world who become aware of each other. These sensates, as the show dubs them, share sensual perceptions–sight, sounds, tastes, etc.–visit each other psychic visions, and adopt each other skills to solve individual and group problems. It is an interesting show that is a...
A long time ago… 1977 …in a galaxy far far away… Hoquiam, Washington …I took a high school literature class in science fiction. (Please don’t ask me to remember the teacher’s name. Like I said, it was a loooooooong time ago!) One day after school, the teacher loaded us into a school bus and...
Returning to London from the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878-1880), Dr. John H. Watson seeks a flatmate to share expenses. After a colleague introduces him to Sherlock Holmes, the pair rent a flat at 221B Baker Street. Watson finds Holmes curious, an enigma, but one morning, Holmes confesses to being a consulting detective. That same...
When Fantastic Four opened with a young Reed Richards (Owen Judge) in class on career day, saying his career goal was to be the first person to teleport, I knew the filmmakers had taken a false step, and the movie would suffer from it. Maybe it is just a prologue, I try to console...
I have always been lukewarm to the Mission Impossible movies. Action is not my favorite movie genre, because I find the plots simple-minded, the characters stereotypical, and the action scenes–the genre’s bread and butter–overdone and predictable. (Car chases! Wow! Fist fights! Pow! Gun fights! Whoa! Who would’ve ever thought there would be a gun...
In a quiet, upper-class neighborhood in Groose Pointe, Michigan, a family tragedy draws the fascination of an anonymous group of boys and their parents. When the teenaged boys suffers their first angst of sexual desire, their eyes turned to the Lisbon girls. Five in number, ranging in age from 13 to 17, these blond...
Confession: I like sex. Well, duh! More relevant to my blog, I enjoy erotic scenes in books. That is not to say that I enjoy erotic books. I enjoy erotic passages, the operative word being passages. I have learned to be wary of erotic novels, those novels where sex and sexual relationships define the...
