Why “The Martian” is the perfect film (and book) during safe-distancing and quarantine…

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought many parts of the world, including my own (sunny southern California), to a virtual standstill.  My wife and I are both home right now in self-quarantine, and many conventions we’d planned to attend, such as WonderCon and others that I’d planned to cover for this site, have been indefinitely postponed or…

“Solo: A Star Wars Story” is no scruffy-looking nerf-herder…

Like many Star Wars fans of ‘a certain age’, I’ve weathered my share of Star Wars disappointments; substandard paperback tie-in novels (“Han Solo at Star’s End” “Splinter of the Mind’s Eye”), the dreaded “Star Wars Holiday Special”, as well as the long-anticipated but soul-crushingly disappointing prequels.  What’s kept me going as a fan was an unshakable…