Picoreview: Seventh Son

Picoreview: Seventh Son: I can’t tell if that was subjectively bad or objectively bad. The problem is that I’ve read the source books, but not for quite a while, and they’re a terrible adaptation of the source books but because my memory of them isn’t clear I spent a great deal of the movie going, “Wait, is that…did that…was that…okay, that’s DEFINITELY not from the books…,” which left me uncertain at the end if I’d seen your bog-standard bad fantasy film, in which case, for a bog-standard bad fantasy film…

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Picoreview: Insurgent

Picoreview: Insurgent: A lot better than Divergent. This is damning with faint praise, as I thought Divergent was pretty awful, or possibly even worse than “pretty awful” in that you could see where it could possibly be good but MOSTLY what you saw was how it Wasn’t Hunger Games. Insurgent didn’t have as much of that This Is What It’s Failing To Be feeling to it, so that helped a lot. It’s–pretty predictable, although there were a couple of nice twists, particularly with an unexpected action at the end that…

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Recent Reads: Citadel of the Sky

Make room, GRRM: Chrysoula Tzavelas knows how to bring on the pain. I’ve just finished CITADEL OF THE SKY, which Chrysoula is in the midst of Kickstarting, and, like, whoa. This is not GRRM-style fantasy, let me make that clear. You don’t spend every turn of the page in fear that your protagonists are all going to be dead on the next one. It’s a cast of several, but not thousands. It’s also under 300 pages, which is like a quarter or a third of the length of a GRRM…

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Picoreview: Step Up 2: The Streets

Picoreview: Step Up 2: The Streets: As good as your average dance movie, which means less good than Step Up, but possibly good enough to explain why there ended up being FIVE Step Up movies. It turns out this is the first one I’d seen in the theatres, and I don’t think the dancing is quite as good in it as in the first film. A lot of it seems less…controlled, although that may be deliberate, because that’s kind of the thing the main character lacks, so it may be…

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falling behind!

I’m falling behind on my Recent Reads and film commentary stuff. Suffice it to say we just got to s3e9 of Person of Interest and they could probably hear our scream of agony in Australia. And I’m not speaking in the royal We, I’m speaking of me and Ted both shrieking “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” at the television. A friend of mine says she’d read spoilers and that she will not go beyond s3e8. This is not necessarily a bad solution. #heartbreak I went to see Jupiter Ascending a second time, and liked…

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