If I should die in a wombat zone

Posted on July 15, 2019  “Stranger Things” in a Strange Land : Review of Season 3 (beware demodogs and spoilers) Like the corrupting tentacles of the Mind Flayer, Season 3 took a little while to grow on me, but it eventually happened. Here's how and why.  Context: Season One of Stranger Things was some of the best television I have ever, ever seen, hitting all the right notes in my perfect-target-audience-mind and soul: 80s culture, particularly nerd culture (calling oneself a “geek” in the 1980s would be anachronistic), and 80s movies in particular. Positively brilliant in the way it both paid homage but also subverted the tropes of those movies.      The characters were well-drawn, the acting top notch, the plot compelling, the suspense heart-pounding, the musical choices inspired and sometimes downright devious…you can  read my full gushing review of Season One here . As complete as Season One felt, Season Two did not disappoin...

April 26, 2019 One of the things I loved about devotedly following every month’s adventures in dozens of different comic books which, thanks to a shared universe (generally Marvel or DC), had interrelating or at least tangentially connected plots, was becoming attached to characters and watching them grow and develop and change over time (part of why I so dislike reboots, that erase such evolution)…and every so often there would be a giant summating moment. DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths was really the first (and arguably still the best) of such grand convergence moments, but Marvel really was the master of them. Secret Wars, Fall of the Mutants, Inferno, Onslaught, Age of Apocalypse, Civil War . Superhero movies, I thought, simply had no way of replicating this sort of phenomenon, as a limitation of the medium. I mean, you only get 2 hours, right? What are they going to do, have two dozen interrelated two hour movies? Well, now we do. Watching both Infinity War and ...