Picoreview: Valerian & the City of a Thousand Planets

Picoreview: Valerian & the City of a Thousand Planets: much worse than it had to be. I went to see this with a friend who’s visiting, and we agreed that it really was much worse than it had to be, which is different, perhaps a step up from, “not as good as it could have been.” The dialogue, specifically the dialogue between leads Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne, was excrutiating. They had roughly the chemistry of two wet paper towels (although that may be doing wet paper towels a disservice),…

Continue Reading

Picoreview: Beauty and the Beast

Picoreview: Beauty and the Beast: exceeded my expectations by a considerable margin. (Also, irrelevantly, I was sitting between two little girls who sang all the songs they knew, and an older woman who kept wiping her eyes, both of which I found pretty charming. :)) The showing I went to go see originally was sold out, which meant I basically spent four hours wandering vaguely around downtown Drogheda (spoiler: it hasn’t got 4 hours worth of entertainment in it) so I could go to the next one. I was pretty…

Continue Reading

Picoreview: Logan

Picoreview: Logan: worth going to in the middle of the night, which I did. :) (I had to, see, or I wasn’t gonna get to see it until THURSDAY, and that would be just AWFUL. So I got a 10:30pm ticket for last night (I guess they can get away with it because it ends on opening day that way), and took a nap yesterday evening, thus ensuring I didn’t WANT to get up and go to a movie, but I’d bought the ticket and so up I got and…

Continue Reading

Recent Reads: The Lescari Revolution

I read the first of Juliet E McKenna‘s Lescari Revolution trilogy several years ago, and really enjoyed it. Then life happened and it took me a while to pick up the second book, at which point I thought, “God, I don’t remember this at all, I don’t remember how we got here or anything,” and read a couple chapters and thought, “No, this is just too unfamiliar, I need to read the…second…book,” as it turned out. I’d picked up the third accidentally. *laughs* Anyway, by then it was all confused…

Continue Reading

Picoreview: Donegal

I was invited last week to see the Abbey Theatre‘s new play, Donegal, which is billed as a light-hearted play with music. I think the Irish have a different idea of what constitutes ‘light-hearted’ than I do. I mean, nobody dies in it, and there are moments that are funny, so I think that’s why it qualifies as ‘light-hearted’. But the play is about an Irish country-western star whose peak has passed, her son who left Ireland to very successfully pursue his own country-western career in America away from his…

Continue Reading