San Diego Comic Con 2024: Welcome Back! This year’s San Diego Comic Con (SDCC) is in the rearview mirror now, and once again, it was (as usual) another grand, exhausting celebration of pop culture. As a now 20-year veteran of SDCC, I do not camp out all night in lines hoping to get seats to…
Month: July 2024
Where Nomad had gone before: Star Trek TOS’ “The Changeling” (1967)…
******STARSHIP-SIZED SPOILERS!****** An ancient Earth space probe, radically upgraded and repurposed by alien technology, now seeks to eliminate Earth’s ‘infestation’ of irrational ‘biological units.’ What sounds like the short synopsis of 1979’s “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” (ST: TMP) also happens to be the plot of a 1967 episode of Star Trek: The Original Series…
Netflix’s “Under Paris” (“Sous la Seine”) swims smartly between genuine action-horror and broad camp…
******SUMMER SHARK SPOILERS!****** I just did a column on shark movies with my recent rewatch of “JAWS,” but hey—it’s summer. And off and on since 1975, summer has meant summer shark movies. With the exception of Steven Spielberg’s legendary summer blockbuster “JAWS,” most shark flicks fall somewhere along the spectrum of disposable wastes of time…
Watching 1975’s “JAWS” with a young first-timer…
******THREE BARRELS OF SPOILERS!****** Last night, we had our friend Kathy and her 12-year old son Joshua over for another ‘garage theater’ movie night at our humble abode. Continuing young Joshua’s ongoing film education into “the classics” (“Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Jurassic Park,” “The Princess Bride,” the “Star Wars” & “Back to the…
The second season of “Star Trek: Prodigy” fires on all thrusters at Netflix…
******STARSHIP-SIZED SPOILERS!****** After its unceremonious cancellation—and inexplicable removal—from the Paramount+ streaming service, “Star Trek: Prodigy” (PRO) has safely beamed down to Netflix, where it recently dropped its entire 20 episode second season for streaming on June 1st (nice not having to wait week-to-week for new episodes). I’ve long championed this underrated series, which is one…
BBC/Disney’s “Doctor Who”; a fourteenth series overview…
******TARDIS-SIZED SPOILERS!****** With new Disney money flowing into this 61-year old series, BBC’s “Doctor Who” just wrapped its 14th series/season—or 40th, if you’re a completist. A newly bi-generated Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) has a new (temporary) companion, Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson). Orphan Ruby’s arc was more or less completed at the end of the run. A…
“A Boy and His Dog” (1975) conjures a bizarre, post-apocalypse world of, um, 2024…
******SCREAMER-SPOILERS!****** Based on one of a cycle of stories from the late Harlan Ellison, “A Boy and His Dog” was adapted into a low-budget indie film in 1975 by longtime Western-genre actor/director L.Q. Jones (“The Wild Bunch”), who was a surprisingly passionate advocate for adapting and directing this wildly offbeat dystopia story into a movie. “A…