The View From The Mountain

I remember the hysteria surrounding the release of Solo: A Star Wars story. It was a two-pronged attack: the first was the hand-wringing over the fact that they released a Star Wars movie barely six months after the last one ( The Last Jedi , which managed to scare up some mass hysteria on its own), and the other being the “fact” that Solo was yet another brain-washing piece of excrement (along with The Last Jedi —jeez, that flick really knew how to make new friends and influence people, didn’t it?) that had been released by the “evil” Kathleen Kennedy, who runs Lucasfilm—and who should now fall on her sword, since Solo didn’t make the mega trillions that it was expected to haul in. But amidst all of this panic and frenzied second guessing remains a very important question. Is Solo: A Star Wars Story any good? Yes, it is. Not only is Solo good, it’s an extremely well-made space adventure that actually manages to be a fun ride. Pushing aside all of the hysteria that surrounded this...

What can I say about my love for The Shape Of Water that hasn’t already been expressed in the glowing reviews that it has already received? It’s even been warmly embraced by the Oscar voters, who gave it the Best Picture Oscar of 2017. Guillermo del Toro’s wondrous fairy tale, about an unusual love story taking place at the height of the Cold War, is at times charming, warm and loving, and extremely weird. And it’s all good. The mesmerizing Sally Hawkins plays Elisa, a mute woman who works as a cleaning woman at a government facility. One day, a special item is brought into the facility, a strange fish-man (played by Doug Jones in a performance that’s just as challenging--and silent--as Hawkins’). This fish man comes with his own jailer, the man who caught him in South America, Richard Strickland, a hard-nosed martinet played by Michael Shannon, whose black-hearted performance feels just a little over the top at times. But this story is framed as a fairy tale that’s being told to us...

I was pleasantly surprised when I saw Rampage , the latest popcorn flick starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. I initially didn’t have high hopes for it because…well, because it starred Dwayne Johnson, a Hollywood star whose films are usually big on the spectacle but short on brains. Rampage begins in familiar territory for those who have seen the recent Life , starring Ryan Reynolds: aboard a rapidly deteriorating space station, with Marley Shelton doing a superb job playing a member of the crew who is forced to rescue several of the research specimens before she’s even allowed to get on the life pod by her callous unseen bosses. Unfortunately Shelton’s character doesn’t survive, but the specimens that she got aboard the life pod wind up being scattered all over North America when her life pod explodes upon reentry into earth’s atmosphere. One of the specimen containers lands in the gorilla pen of the San Diego Zoo, where George, an albino gorilla that’s been raised by Davis Okoye (J...

I took an old Godzilla model kit (the Playing Mantis re-release of the old Aurora kit), cut him in half, and placed him in this ocean diorama. The ship is a WW II transport vessel that I tweaked slightly to make it look more like a generic cargo ship. The ship was a cheap kit, the kind you can slap together in an afternoon. The "water" was a paste from Woodland Scenics called Flex Paste. After it dried, I painted it in the bluish colors of the ocean, and then covered this (after the paint dried, of course) with Water Effects, also from WS. This was a fun diorama for me to do, one that got started when I saw the trailer for the upcoming Godzilla: King of the Monsters film. You can buy this right here.

Just how badly does Pacific Rim: Uprising suck? Pretty badly. Let’s put it this way, I was already checking the time, wondering when this piece of shit would be over, a mere ten minutes into the movie. A sequel to the charming and fun Pacific Rim , released back in 2013, Uprising never would have existed had the original not drawn huge box office numbers in China. The original Pacific Rim didn’t exactly set the American box office on fire, despite being an enjoyable pastiche of Japanese monster movies--the kind that have giant monsters stomping cities. Pacific Rim posited that there was a special force of giant robots, crewed by human pilots, that were sent out to stop these monsters, called Kaiju. The robots are called Jaegers. The sequel takes place ten years after the first film, in which the Kaiju were finally stopped. John Boyega, better known as Finn from Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Star Wars: The Last Jedi , stars here as the son of the Jaeger leader (would that make...

Last month marked the tenth anniversary of The Dark Knight , a superhero movie featuring the Batman that had become a seminal film in many ways. It’s influences can be felt far and wide throughout Hollywood and beyond, and its ‘darkness’ has been blamed for the dire, funereal tone of such latter superhero movies like Man of Steel and Batman Vs Superman: Dawn of Justice . I’ve come across many comments online where the poster wondered why people liked The Dark Knight because it was…you know, so ‘dark’ and ‘gloomy‘. Do the fans of TDK like depressing stories? Speaking as a fan of the Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy, I can honestly say that, no, I’m not a fan of depressing stories. But then, I don’t consider The Dark Knight to be a depressing tale, anyway. When director Christopher Nolan set out to reinvent the Batman with Batman Returns (which is a great film in its own right) back in 2005, he wanted to set the Caped Crusader’s exploits in a far more gritty, low-to-the-ground ve...

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 ...