Last hour, we did some rants about the power of Authorship, the foibles of plot-first writing, and the ebb and flow of James Potter, among other things. Hour #2: p. 137-267 (from “The Wedding” through “The Muggle-Born Registration Commission”) I’ll confess that during most of my early Potter readings, Fred and George were largely interchangeable… Read More Live Blogging Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Second Hour
Sales of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows commenced in the United States at midnight on July 21, 2007 (a Saturday). I had spent the previous week in Biloxi, Mississippi, doing relief work with my church’s youth group after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita; we were to go home on the 21st. Sometime around dawn that day, I… Read More Live Blogging Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: First Hour
Once upon a time, I didn’t feel like doing schoolwork, so I read Fifty Shades of Grey instead. My girlfriend’s roommate had a copy which I borrowed, and I finished the book in an evening. This was not a terribly difficult enterprise, as you can imagine: E.L. James is not going to become James Joyce any time… Read More Fifty Shades of Grey: A Chance for Bravery
I’m going to commit a minor sin here and basically conflate The Railway Series, twenty-six books by Wilbert Awdry with a few stories apiece in them which feature different engines located on the Island of Sodor, and Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends, the filmed versions of those stories. Since I’m not terribly interested in the differences… Read More The Gender Politics of Thomas the Tank Engine
So thank goodness I watch so much children’s television on Netflix, because otherwise I may never have known that The Magic School Bus streams there. Remember The Magic School Bus? You know, that kids’ show that blended science and fiction: students went on spectacular field trips into the human body or into a volcano…meanwhile, the hardest… Read More Ms. Frizzle’s Sparkling Pedagogy
Here goes another one of my full-movie commentaries. Today, it’s Disney’s Hercules, which was perhaps my favorite movie in elementary school and is certainly responsible for the interest in mythologies which weirded the heck out of my neighbors when I was a seven-year-old. Consider, for example, this paraphrasing of my Halloween experience in 1998: Me: Trick… Read More Hercules (1997)
Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. Book by George Furth. Originally directed by Harold Prince. Dir. John Doyle. Starring Raul Esparza, Barbara Walsh, Elizabeth Stanley Writing my Wrath of Khan review in the “as-I-watch-it” style was rewarding for me, largely because I’d been trying to write any review of that movie for the past week and… Read More Company (2006 Broadway Revival)
Earlier this evening, I was struck by the fact that the students I taught in my spring practicum would be ending their school year fairly soon. I taught five sections sporadically over the course of several months. Two sections were made up of seniors taking AP Literature; two were made up of sophomores and juniors… Read More Reflections on a Practicum
Dir. Nicholas Meyer. Starring William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Ricardo Montalban We’re going to try something which I used to do for my Glee reviews…I’m streaming this movie on Netflix instant. I’m going to write down reactions I have to what’s going on as the movie occurs. This used to take me about 150 minutes with a forty-five… Read More Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)
I like to think that an omniscient God has a master list of every science-fiction film that has ever been made or will ever be made, and this list is ordered from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Plan 9 from Outer Space. While sci-fi is particularly fecund ground for bad film, Star Trek Into Darkness has to be a… Read More Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)
Seeing Things Secondhand 