The View From The Mountain

I recently saw this model kit of the Romulan Bird of Prey (from Star Trek) online from Polar Lights. It was cheap enough, and not so large that it would take up too much room on my shelf, so I got it. It wound up being the perfect model to build during a pandemic lockdown. Not too hard, but not that easy, either. The hardest part of this kit is the water-slide decal of the bird of prey that fits underneath the ship. I wound up breaking it up into five separate sections, and that did the trick. Once all of the decals were on, it became a very striking ship. With this Bird of Prey on patrol, Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise had better watch their backs!

One of the best things to come out of 2016’s Suicide Squad --if not the only good thing to come out of that piece of shit movie--was Margot Robbie’s engaging performance as Harley Quinn. Originally created by Paul Dini and Bruce Timm for the Batman: The Animated Series as a new super villain for the Dark Knight, Harley was voiced on that show by Arleen Sorkin, who lovingly referred to her boyfriend, the psychotic Joker, as “Mistah J!” Harley proved so popular that she was officially adopted into the Batman comics. Robbie was the first live-action actress to portray Harley Quinn in Suicide Squad , and when I heard that Robbie was reprising the character in her own film, I was more than happy to see it. Although it has a goofy title, Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn is an extremely enjoyable and vastly entertaining film. It eschews the dreary and depressing ennui of the recent, extremely overrated Joker film for a more comical,...

Janis Joplin was my first dead celebrity. She was one of my parents’ favorite singers back when I was a kid, and I vividly recall being informed by my mother that Joplin had died. One of Joplin’s albums was playing at that moment on our stereo’s 8-Track player, and I went over and listened to the voice of a dead woman singing. That blew my mind as a young boy, and it also creeped me out big time, as well. I had that same creeped-out feeling while watching re-animated Carrie Fisher casually walking around and talking in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker . Although she had passed away long before her appearance in The Last Jedi , it didn’t bother me watching Fisher in Last Jedi because I knew that she was alive and well while filming that movie (and that it was one of the last things she had shot). But for Rise of Skywalker , Fisher’s performance had been created using old, unused footage leftover from The Force Awakens , and yet I could never shake the unpleasant feeling that the dec...

I added a new ship to my Rag tag Fleet. It's a starliner--a spaceship version of an ocean liner--that I made from a piece of the Galaxy Quest spaceship. I added the fin on the back. This starliner joined the Rag Tag Fleet after the fall of the Twelve Colonies, when the Cylons attacked them. Here's the starliner with the Galactica and the other RTF ships. The Galactica is the Moebius model kit. The other two Rag Tag Fleet ships were kit-bashed vessels of my own design. I plan to add more ships to the Rag Tag Fleet over time.

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.