Monthly Archive:: March 2017
Mar 19 2017
A Personal Look at MarsCon 2017
MarsCon is a deeply personal convention for me. I have a close connection with a number of the people who either perform for or work on the music track. I have a friend who comes in from out of state every year, and a girlfriend who comes down to volunteer with Table 27 (the table selling stuff for the musicians)…
Mar 19 2017
The Northside Celebration from Capri Theater and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra Is a Joy to Behold
Last night, in the auditorium at North Community High School, a gospel choir sang. A spoken-word poet recited a piece. A woman told a story. In between, a string quartet strummed their instruments, a woodwind quintet performed a couple of pieces, and a high schooler read a poem by one of his classmates.…
Mar 17 2017
Sword Art Online The Movie: Ordinal Scale Is a Satisfying Wrap-Up for Fans of the Series
On March 9, I had the chance to attend one of the limited-release showings of anime film Sword Art Online The Movie: Ordinal Scale. Sword Art Online is an anime series I’ve recently gotten into, and I was excited to see what direction the story would take in movie form. The movie is based directly…
Mar 17 2017
Beauty and the Beast Can’t Live Up to the Animated Classic
They say if ain’t broke don’t, fix it. And there’s very little to fix with Disney’s 1991 animated classic Beauty and the Beast.
Whatever issues it may have are tertiary nitpicks spawned from the endless stream of Cracked and Buzzfeed articles, essays, theories, parodies, and fanfics. The animation…
Mar 16 2017
Morph into Awesome with These Power Rangers Prize Packs!
It’s almost morphin’ time! Power Rangers is headed back to the big screen, and to celebrate, we’re giving away 5 color-coded prize packs: 1 themed for each of the rangers in the movie! Each pack includes the following prizes, tailored to the Black, Blue, Pink, Red, or Yellow Ranger:…
Mar 16 2017
Throwback Thursday: Dare to Visit the Forbidden Planet
Throwback Thursday examines films from the past, “classic” films that might not be in the current cultural zeitgeist but can still be important, interesting, fun, or all of the above.
Continuing our look into space opera films, we’re setting the way-way-back machine to the year 1956 and looking at…
Mar 15 2017
What’s Wrong with a Black Brit Playing a Black American?
In a somewhat lengthy interview with hip-hop radio station HOT 97, highest all-time box-office star Samuel L. Jackson offered his comments on Jordan Peele’s (fantastic) recent film, Get Out.
While Get Out has been near-universally praised as a masterful allegory for contemporary race relations…
Mar 15 2017
Dark Horse’s American Gods Comic Series Achieves a Happy Medium between Page and Screen
As a longtime fan of Neil Gaiman’s novel American Gods, I was thrilled to check out the first issue of Dark Horse Comics’ new series based on the same work, out March 15, 2017. As is usually the case when I experience something created by Neil Gaiman, I was not disappointed. It is a richly illustrated…
Mar 14 2017
Kong: Skull Island Is Almost Lost in the Mist
(Editor’s note: the following review contains mild spoilers for the plot and characters of Kong: Skull Island.)
To be honest, writing reviews for a site like Twin Cities Geek poses certain challenges for this film writer. Juggling code switches and deciding on a point of view are usually accompanied…
Mar 14 2017
The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories Are All Smoke and No Fire
I need to start this review with a confession: I am not an aficionado of the short-story format. That being said, I’ve seen my share of well curated anthologies. A good collection, to my mind, is bound together not simply by a single characteristic but by a larger uniting theme.
Every piece in The Djinn …