Review – The Great Wall

Because the title would be too long if the movie was called The Great Amount of Money We Can Make If the Cast Appeals to Markets in Both the United States and China. Matt Damon, Pedro Pascal and (briefly) Willem Dafoe supplement an otherwise mostly Asian cast in what would otherwise have been a standard, big budget Chinese fantasy action movie. Mildly amusing

Review – Zombie School

This comes so close to being so bad that it becomes charming. Amazon’s AI dubbing didn’t help matters, though I suspect the dialogue wasn’t exactly Oscar bait even in Korean. For the most part I was able to sit back and let the sheer plotless stupidity wash over me. Unfortunately a handful of scenes involve violence against animals, including some B roll of pigs in which they appear to actually be harmed. Cut that crap out and the rating would have gone up. See if desperate

Review – Hiroshima: Out of the Ashes

This is one of those dramas where you hope against hope that it isn’t going to go the way you know it will. And then of course it does. The inclusion of Max von Sydow as a German Jesuit priest went a bit overboard just to find a way to get a white actor into the cast. On the other hand, I appreciated the inclusion of stories that didn’t have happy endings; anything else would have been blatantly dishonest. The filmmakers do a good job of recreating the disaster as best they were able with the budget they had. Mildly amusing

Review – Hiroshima (2003)

This two-part BBC production follows the final stages of the Manhattan Project up to the dropping of the bomb on the title city. Back in 2003 they were still able to find several people on the American and Japanese sides willing to talk about their experiences, and the dramatic reenactments were a good complement to the interviews. Worth seeing

Review – The Equalizer (2014)

The folks who made this know the revenge movie formula and are good at sticking to it. Denzel Washington is a proven success playing the everyday Joe who falls back on his government assassin past when a friend is threatened. It’s emotionally satisfying to see him keep the upper hand pretty much the whole time, and it doesn’t exactly hurt that the villains are sex-trafficking Russian mobsters. Mildly amusing

Review – Valley of the Dolls

Cliché characters (especially the women) . Hackneyed plot. Dreadful dialogue. Wretched musical numbers. How has this never been turned into a Drag Race Rusical? Though this is nobody’s finest hour, it’s a particularly unfortunate moment for Patty Duke, who tried to use this wretched stinker to move from comedy typecasting to weightier roles. And Sharon Tate’s turn as an actress done in by decadence adds an unintentional creepy spin to the production. Whether this is just plain bad or so bad it’s funny may depend on how seriously you take Hollywood’s 60s-era drug problems. Or maybe just what mood you’re in. See if desperate

Review – Superman (2025)

What an aggravating movie. For better or worse, a big part of Superman’s charm is that he consistently wins fights against the bad guys. But here our hero starts out on the losing end and rarely gains the upper hand until the very end. If the character needed to be reimagined this way, at least they should have used a different villain. In real life we’re all taking a constant beating from vile tech billionaires, so it would have been a lot more fun to watch Lex Bezos Musk Luthor take way more frequent lumps. And the animal peril is genuinely excessive, insufficiently offset by the meticulously happy ending. The cast of newcomers and semi-familiar faces do their best with what they’ve got, but overall this is hard to watch. See if desperate

Book Review – The Fiends in the Furrows

The Fiends in the Furrows: An Anthology of Folk Horror by David T. Neal
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Though I could’ve done worse for a quick summer read, overall this anthology wasn’t great. It got off to a good start with the first story or two, but then the problems set in. I abandoned two of the stories, one for excessive world building and the other for excessive (and frequently kinda random) adjectives. Animal abuse was also a frequent theme, which automatically isn’t a relaxing reading experience for me. One of the stories I liked had proofreading problems that made the flow choppy. And so on.

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Book Review – 101 UX Principles

101 UX Principles: A definitive design guide by Will Grant
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

At last someone wrote a book about UX principles that’s actually about UX principles. This is aimed at designers, coders and other folks working directly in the title realm, not at mid-level managers trying to wedge user experience into a project management scheme. All of Will Grant’s advice is excellent. Even the points I didn’t entirely agree with were well made and worth at least considering. And though my focus tends to be more on the graphic design part of the process (roughly 20% of the book), I nonetheless gave enthusiastic amens to the technical points I don’t work with directly. Grant’s principles tend to focus on how to improve user interfaces rather than how to create them, so this might not be the best starting point for absolute beginners. But anyone who has mastered the basics and wants to get better at what they do will find plenty of useful tips here.

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Book Review – White Coat, Black Hat

White Coat, Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine by Carl Elliott
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I may be in a bad position to review this book. I picked it up as part of a research project on medical ethics that’s more focused on the Nazi krankenmord programs. And no matter how bad corporate dishonesty and greed get, they still don’t reach quite that far down. That said, Carl Elliott makes some excellent points about some of the pharmaceutical industry’s practices that definitely need to stop. However, he also points out some places where dancing with the big pharma devil has produced laudable results, such as cooperative efforts with AIDS activists back in the 1980s. Thus the narrative often washes the coat and hat in the same load of laundry, with a resulting tendency for things to come out looking grey.

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Book Review – Fulvia

Fulvia: The Woman Who Broke All the Rules in Ancient Rome by Jane Draycott
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Jane Draycott does an excellent job of giving a second chance to one of ancient Rome’s most reviled women. Of course for a woman to be remembered by Rome’s rabidly sexist historians was almost certainly to be reviled, most likely either for being avaricious or promiscuous or both. It was also Fulvia’s particular bad luck to be married to husbands who were themselves wildly unpopular with contemporaries in a position to heap scorn upon them (particularly Cicero). But what emerges here is a more even-handed portrait of a woman possessed of great wealth and married thrice to great power. In this light, Fulvia’s efforts to protect and advance the interests of her family are more understandable, even if not universally sympathetic. The text is both readable and enjoyable, making this worthy of consideration for anyone interested in writing women back into history.

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