The music that mattered.
I’ve been feeling nostalgic lately and decided to try and list off the top of my head the essential music during my formative years through college. I went to high school and college during the 80s, so a lot of that decade is represented.
I thought this might be tough to do, but I breezed pretty quickly through the list. Most of my life-changing albums were more like soundtracks to the events from age 15 to 21.
Here they are in no particular order other than when I thought of them:
KISS Alive!
My grade school friend Mark’s older brother played…
So much upcoming content.
Just a few days into September and all the new and returning network and streaming shows are getting premiere dates. This year, what I’ve noticed is there are a lot of brand new streaming shows that have caught my interest.
Although, so far, Nine Perfect Strangers doesn’t appeal to me and I think I’ll wait until Only Murders in the Building is complete before diving in. On the other hand, I was surprised by how many new shows on streamers I’m really looking forward to watching. …
The MCU adds diversity and drama in the first standalone origin story since Ant-Man.
In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there is a pretty good track record of firsts. Iron Man was the first Marvel Studios movie and set the template for the MCU. Guardians of the Galaxy was the first space-based movie with characters few in the audience had ever heard of before. Black Panther was the first movie celebrating Black and African culture. Captain Marvel was the first movie in the MCU with a woman as the lead. Now, we have the first Asian-led superhero MCU movie, Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings.
Shang-Chi opens with an incredible love story. A…
I don’t, but I should.
I should hate football.
While I admit I’m not a crazy fan of football, I do enjoy watching it. I probably shouldn’t.
Contrary to what my mother-in-law got stuck in her head a few years ago, I do not root for any NFL team. I did get caught up in the Greatest Show on Turf stuff with the St. Louis Rams (which is what my mother-in-law was referencing), but that’s about as close as I’ve ever gotten to “rooting” for an NFL team.
When I was pretty young, my Dad got me kid-sized pads and a helmet. He choose the…
Hey, remember when Mr. Mom was cast as Batman, and everyone went nuts?
Michael Keaton has been popping up lately with a significant profile story in The Hollywood Reporter, appearances on the talk show circuit, and social media posts showing telephoto shots of him playing a character he has not played since 1992. He’s one of the best living actors doing films today, and his career resurgence is, I think, long overdue.
When he was cast as the Vulture in the Marvel/Sony Spider-Man movies, I thought perhaps his return to the genre he helped usher in was a bit anti-climactic. He’s excellent in Spider-Man: Homecoming, but I never in a million years think…
How the DC Cinematic Universe Can Move Forward
The Suicide Squad is a great superhero movie (even though it technically is about the bad guys). It helps to have a great cast and an even better writer/director in James Gunn. It is up there in my list of great comic book movies. I enjoyed everything about this flick, from the action, quick deaths, interesting character moments, the characterizations of all the major and minor characters, and the wacky comic book goodness of a giant alien mind-controlling starfish from space.
It had the right tone, look, and feel of a comic book movie but had a harder edge. Of…
Cutting the Episode Count Down
Some days my mind wanders. I think about weird things like what are my favorite episodes of Star Trek and why do streaming shows now only feature eight to thirteen episodes per season?
I then started thinking if it was possible to cut down each season of Star Trek The Next Generation into thirteen of the best episodes? Would viewers miss much? I’m thinking they would not.
So, I took it upon myself to whittle down each season’s normal 26 episodes down to 13. …
Supposing it can be fixed… how can it be done?
By 2012, moviegoers had already seen Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor, Captain America: The First Avenger, and The Avengers. These films were incredibly successful, and they established the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Over five films, Marvel Studios brought in the first six Marvel heroes they could use: Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, Black Widow, and Hawkeye. Hardly anyone outside of comic book fans could have named any of these characters outside of the Hulk and maybe Captain America. However, these six are the foundation of a multi-billion-dollar movie empire.
Now imagine a newly formed DC Films…
Loki sets up the multiverse, and I can’t wait to see what happens next.
When I was a kid reading my Dad’s comics, my favorite stories were the Crisis issues of Justice League. It was nearly always a JLA/JSA crossover event, and we would see alternate Earths depicted with new heroes and villains. These stories started the DC multiverse, culminating in one of the biggest events in DC comics history: Crisis on Infinite Earths.
Relaxing, Refreshing, and Restorative.
My wife loves to binge-watch streaming shows. There are a great many shows she has never seen and new ones joining the fray seemingly every week. She slips on her AirPods and fires up Netflix on her iPad, and away she goes.
She was incredibly disappointed that Bridgerton only has one season (so far), and she tore through it so fast that she roped me into re-watching it with her, although not nearly as quickly.
She watches shows at binge speed and loves every second of them. The term binge suggests it might be a bad thing. …
