Ready Player One

Thursday March 29, 2018 • Howard Tayler

Ready Player One was a visual extravaganza with a story that gave it convenient excuses to feature pop-culture icons from the past thirty years. I enjoyed it a lot, but the most innovative part about the film was that zipper thing on an expandable suitcase which allowed the producers to say “oh, wow, we can put EVERYTHING in here! And it all fits!”

It didn’t ruin my childhood, but it did aggressively strip-mine several shallow deposits of nostalgia. It comes in at number 3 for me this year, just below my Threshold of Awesome.

Pacific Rim: Uprising

Wednesday March 28, 2018 • Howard Tayler

The last fifteen years have spoiled us. Back in MY day when we heard that a movie had a sequel we were mildly enthusiastic because we knew it wouldn’t be as good as the first one. Smokey and the Bandit II, and Sister Act: Back in the Habit present themselves as typical examples.

Pacific Rim: Uprising takes me back to those days by being a “2” movie. It positioned itself for further serialization, but I don’t think they’re doing a very good job of serializing it. They simply sequeled it.

Granted, they made a fine sequel. By my “back in the day” standards we’d have been floored by how good this particular sequel was… for a sequel, of course. The movie does a number of things right, starting with fine performances by John Boyega and Cailee Spaeny. There there were several action sequences that were simply delightful, and it even had surprising-yet-inevitabe plot twist. It didn’t clear my Threshold of Awesome, but it certainly didn’t disappoint me.

Schlock Mercenary T-Shirts!

Tuesday March 20, 2018 • Howard Tayler

We’re making t-shirts again! We’re using Kickstarter, because it’s worked pretty well for us in the past, and because late last year we promised to do a t-shirt Kickstarter in February of 2018.

I know, I know. It’s not February anymore. But we were totally working on this during February, so depending on your definition of “do” (specifically, for definitions that do not require the word “launch”) we made good on our word.

Want shirts? Click here!