Percival Everett offers a fresh perspective on Mark Twain’s adventure of Huck and Jim. Filled with humor, heartbreak, horror, and irony, Everett’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel is captivating, powerful and entertaining. Jim, as one will remember, is a runaway slave, and is later thought to have murdered Huck. The pair travel down the Mississippi tumbling…
Tag: hate
Farscape (1999) PK Tech Girl, and That Old Black Magic
When I got to PK Tech Girl in my original viewing of the series, this was the point that I realized I was getting hooked on the series. Written by Nan Hagan, it was first broadcast on 16 April, 1999. Moya discovers a massive derelict Peacekeeper battleship that has been lost for a hundred cycles,…
M*A*S*H (1980) – Letters, Cementing Relationships, and Father’s Day
Dennis Koenig pens Letters, which is a bit of a vignette show, that first aired on 24 November, 1980. In the midst of a huge rainstorm that is bringing down camp spirits, Hawkeye (Alan Alda) gets a slew of letters from his hometown of Crabapple Cove, Maine. One of the schoolteachers there has had her…
Enemy Mine (1985) – Wolfgang Petersen
Enemy Mine, from director Wolfgang Petersen and starring Dennis Quaid and Louis Gossett Jr., looks like a 50s era sci-fi film (particularly the model work and space suits) but it’s message of prejudice, hate, and race war, is as relevant today (and arguably more so) than it was when it was made. Feeling like a…
Shadow and Bone (2012) – Leigh Bardugo
My second foray into the Grishaverse was the first one written, Shadow and Bone. And much like Six of Crows, I got swept up pretty damned quick in the story and the characters, and can’t wait to continue to explore the rest of the realm that Bardugo created. In this novel, we are introduced to…
Saturn 3 (1980) – Stanley Donen, and John Barry
Gorgeous set and production design can’t save a film with a number of top drawer stars (Kirk Douglas, Farrah Fawcett, and Harvey Keitel) thanks to a heavily edited final cut, and flawed story. Not to mention some miniature and model work that may have worked in the 50s but looks incredibly bad in the 80s,…
Scent of a Woman (1992) – Martin Brest
Ten Bad Dates With De Niro lets me dive into some Al Pacino films, movies where he gets shouty, and the first one I get to rewatch that I haven’t previously covered for the blog is this film from 1992, and just seeing the poster art sends me back. I was just getting into the…
Near Dark (1987) – Kathryn Bigelow
If Fright Night got me into horror movies then Near Dark, the next vampire film in DK Canada’s Monsters in the Movies book showed me that the undead could be vicious, occasionally hate their existence and live on the edges of the night. Despite the ending (actually the return to humanity sequence) of the film,…
Interview With The Vampire (1994) – Neil Jordan
Moody, broody vampires are the next stop in DK Canada’s Monsters in the Movies, by legendary director, John Landis. Adapted from Anne Rice’s novel, with an uncredited rewrite by Jordan, the film headlines Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and Antonio Banderas as three of the author’s iconic vampires, Lestat, Louis, and Armand respectively. And while Cruise…
When Harry Met Sally (1989) – Rob Reiner
The first recommendation from the Great Movies – 100 Years of Film following my screening of Pretty Woman for the romance and melodrama chapter of the book is one of my favourite rom-coms of all time. And personally I think it should have been the main title over Pretty Woman. Set over the course of…
The Mind Reels 