The View From The Mountain

Nostalgia can be a great thing, especially in hard times like now. Re-watching your favorite movie or TV show during a particularly rough patch in your life can help you get through the worse of things. Sometimes, a reboot of a classic movie or TV show can be even more satisfying, because it feels like your old friends have returned to give you comfort during dark times. And so, when CBS All Access offered their pay-walled channel for free for a brief period during the 2020 Pandemic (which was a classy move on their part), I jumped at the chance to be able to finally watch Star Trek: Picard . I had been a fan of the original Star Trek series from the 1960s (I watched it in reruns as a boy in the 1970s), and had watched every incarnation of Star Trek --both movie and TV show--that had been produced since. I was really looking forward to going on new adventures with the calm, cool Jean-Luc Picard, in the hopes that his new series would take my mind off of these troubling times, if just...

I wasn’t expecting to love Underwater as much as I did. In fact, I was in no hurry to even see this movie at all were it not for the rave reviews for it from John Squires, editor of Bloody Disgusting, as well as reviewers from several other horror outlets. They championed Underwater so much that I rented it digitally, and I wound up loving it myself so much that I promptly bought a physical media copy of the film the day after seeing the rental. Underwater deals with the crew of an undersea drilling rig--a massive, ringed city at the bottom of the Pacific that houses several hundred--that suffers a cataclysmic event in the opening few minutes of the film. Norah Price (wonderfully played by Kristen Stewart), is so caught off guard by the crushing devastation that it’s all that she can do to just run to the nearest safety zone barely in time without her shoes. Stewart, who proved her acting chops in such great films as Personal Shopper , is fantastic as the cynical Norah--a young w...

I always liked the Ents from the Lord of the Rings. They were basically these big, talking trees with faces. And so I made my own Tree Beard. I sculpted him out of Sculpey. Once it hardened after I baked it, I painted my Tree Beard in the basic colors of a tree. The face has a beard that I carved to look like moss. I painted this green over a black undercoat. Granted, he's not an exact replica of the Tree Beard from LOTR, but he's my interpretation of the character, and I like him all the same.

2020 mark the 80th anniversary of Robin, aka the Boy Wonder, as well as Batman's sidekick. He's been in comics (including his own series) movies, and TV shows for a long time now. This is the 1/8th vinyl figure of Robin from Horizon Models. I built and painted this kit over twenty years ago. I always liked the dynamic pose he's in. Happy Birthday, Robin. You look good for an eighty year old.

What's up, danger? One of my favorite movies in recent years is Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse . I had a Spider-Man metal figure in 1/32 scale from Andrea Models. A re-watch of Into The Spider-Verse inspired me to create my own Spider-Man Diorama. While I was deep into this diorama, I realized that Spider-Man looked lonely. So I made him a playmate: The Lizard. Spidey's worst nightmare is made from a blank 1/32 figure that had the head and tail from the Tamiya raptor set. I used Apoxie Putty for his clothes and feet. I was a little worried about the Lizard when I put him together, but after painting him, I was pleased with how he looked. The brickwork on the building is also from Tamiya. It's their 'brick wall set.' The roof, back wall and trimming were made from sheet styrene. The Andrea Spider-Man has a nice, dynamic pose. I figured Spidey is leaving this bad situation with the Lizard because he wants to draw the Lizard away from a populated area befo...

There have been so many films made about Robin Hood that it’s impossible not to hit one of them if you were to randomly shoot an arrow into a field. Hell, even Doctor Who has done a fun episode, Robot of Sherwood , that deals with the Robin Hood legend. But the most recent big-budget Robin Hood film, starring Taron Egerton--along with a weird assortment of costumes that looked like they were ripped off from a Star Trek episode--was a huge bomb, which might as well have brought the noble Legend of the Hood to an abrupt end. But Robin Hood is an extremely tenacious fellow who should never be counted out, as proven in Robin Hood: The Rebellion , a thoroughly enjoyable and scrappy little film with a big heart that stars Ben Freeman as the Prince of Thieves. Finding out that his beloved Marian (Marie Everett) has been taken captive by the Sheriff of Nottingham (James Oliver Wheatley), Robin Hood plots a rescue. However this rescue involves storming the Sheriff’s castle stronghold. The ...

Warning, this here review has spoilers. Terminator: Dark Fate was a big bomb at the box office back when it was released to theaters in November of 2019. And that’s a shame, because I thought the film was very good. Perhaps it was the film’s extremely dark opening, where they kill off John Connor within its first five minutes, that turned some people off. This is understandable, since the previous film that DF is supposed to be a direct sequel to, Terminator 2: Judgment Day , is now considered a classic of the SF/action film genre. And for DF to coldly kill off one of T2 ’s main characters must have made its detractors think: “what was the point of wiping out everything that had gone down in T2?” But the Terminator series has always been about the underdog. Each Terminator movie--at least the better ones--deal with a disparate group of people who come together to try and prevent a nightmarish dystonian future from ever happening. And killing off John Connor was the right move, b...