The View From The Mountain

I didn’t care for Ready Player One , the novel written by Ernest Cline. It was a vapid, empty-headed excuse for an adventure story with a main character that was so thinly written he could have been a cardboard cutout. Taking place in 2045, in an economically depressed United States where most people live in trailer parks that have the trailers stacked one on top of each other, the only reason for living for most is the Oasis, an online “world” that’s created by a deceased Steve Jobs-like genius named Haliday. Before he died, Haliday created a game within the Oasis where players had to collect “keys” by solving riddles and surviving endurance tests. The player who received all of the keys would then become the ruler of the Oasis (as well as becoming set for life, financially). As can be expected, many people have been on the hunt for these keys, including a multi-billion dollar corporation that wants to further commercialize the Oasis once they seize control of it. The problem that ...

William Cameron Menzies was an art director on seventy films going back from 1917 to 1956, but he’s probably best known for just one of the twenty four films that he directed, Invaders From Mars . Released sixty five years ago in 1953, Invaders From Mars remains a classic thanks to Menzies’ tight direction and imaginative use of settings and costumes. A young boy named David (well-played by Jimmy Hunt) sees what looks like an alien spacecraft land in the sandy field behind his house at night during a violent thunderstorm. Of course his parents don’t believe him—yet when his father (Leif Erickson) goes out to investigate, he comes back the following morning acting very weird. In addition to being cold and distant, this normally loving and gentle man now resorts to hitting David when the boy doesn’t immediately obey his orders. David notices that his father has a strange wound on the back of his neck, and this becomes a telltale mark of those who have been “taken” by the aliens that ...

Katee Sackhoff is a goddess. There, I’ve said it. I freely admit to being a huge fan of this actress, whom I first came across in the Battlestar Galactica reboot that aired on the Sy-Fy Channel (back when it was more appropriately known as the Sci-Fi Channel). Her performance as a gender-changed Starbuck was superb; she brought such humanity and depth to a character that could very easily have been very one-note. After Battlestar Galactica ended, I followed Sackhoff’s career, watching her go on to play deputy sheriff Victoria ‘Vic’ Moretti on the enjoyable Longmire , and as the rascally Amunet Black on the most recent season of The Flash . And that was why I happily settled down to watch Katee in the recently released 2036: Origin Unknown . A science fiction opus, 2036: Origin Unknown deals with a manned mission to Mars that goes horribly wrong. But this isn’t the mission that Katee’s character is on; instead, her father was aboard the doomed ship that crashed without warning, wit...