“One spark. Two sparks. Three. This is what it takes to ignite a revolution.”
A reimagining of Hans Christian Andersen’s original fairytale, “The Tinder Box” tells the story of a witch at the heart of an incipient rebellion—and all of those to come.
The year is 1915, and a young man hired to shout the words on title cards for silent films experiences the magic of movies. This spurs him to edit some of the worst dialog, leading him in a weird direction that utterly changes his life.
A forlorn teenager’s monotonous life is interrupted when a stranger draws him into the hunt for a vampiric serial killer. He will learn that while monsters are much more real than he thought, there is no such thing as heroes.
All its life, a small monster with emerald scales has been a source of never-ending food to larger and more powerful creatures who feast on the small monster’s limbs each time one regrows. This is the story of how the small monster meets an industrious artist and re-forms into someone new—someone who can’t be eaten.
When Suzy was born, her parents filled her mouth with sand. But this is normal and natural and the way things are always done.
And if she finds it uncomfortable to keep it there, to eat with it there, to talk with it there, she’s just going to have to learn to live with it.
“Sand” is a heart-wrenching tale about generational trauma and healing.
For the residents of this mycological ecosystem, creating art feeds the World around you and requires working in harmony with your inner voice. When one artist’s voice begins screaming, he’s forced to travel farther than he ever has before to reconcile with the noise in his head and find his true place in society before it’s too late.
From August 2017 – January 2020, Keith R.A. DeCandido took a weekly look at every live-action movie based on a superhero comic that had been made to date in the weekly “4-Color to 35-Millimeter: The Great Superhero Movie Rewatch.” He has been revisiting the feature every six months or so to look back at the new releases in the previous half-year. This week we kick off the latest revisiting with Black Widow, followed in the weeks to come by The Suicide Squad, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Venom: Let There Be Carnage and Eternals.
Marvel’s age of heroes started in 1961 with the introduction of the Fantastic Four, and in those early Cold War-era days, many of the villains the various Marvel heroes faced were Communists of some manner or other. Cold War sensibilities influenced the origin stories of the FF (beating the “Commies” into space), the Hulk (a “Commie” agent sabotaged the bomb test), and Iron Man (Stark was in Southeast Asia selling weapons being used to fight the “Commies”).
One of the many villains from behind the Iron Curtain introduced in those early days was the Black Widow.
Many years ago, in the long-gone era of the early 2000s, the author Nick Hornby began writing a column for The Believer with the to-the-point name of “Stuff I’ve Been Reading.” Each column began with two lists: books bought, and books read. The two lists often had little overlap.
Earlier this year, I decided to try to copy this practice. I already keep a list of what I’ve read, but what if I kept track of how many books I brought into the house on any given month? Perhaps it would be interesting. Or at least telling. Maybe it would be an effective way to convince myself to buy fewer books. (It was not.)
This lasted for about two weeks, at which point I realized I’d already ordered three or four books and not added them to the list, and that adding books to a list brought nowhere near the sense of satisfaction that adding them to my purposefully disorganized to-be-read shelf provided. But I kept thinking about it. We make lists of books we’ve read, lists of the best books of the year, lists of books to give people at the holidays, to recommend. What does a year’s worth of books bought but not yet read look like?
The answer, for me, is three precarious piles of books I still really want to read.
Have you met Skip? Skip Intro, that is.
For viewers everywhere, Skip Intro has been a savior. He saves us precious seconds (or sometimes minutes) as we’re careening through our latest streaming obsession. I’ve deployed our pal Skip hundreds of times, spanning multiple rewatches of The Office and a recent Brooklyn Nine-Nine outing.
While there’s many, many times Skip is indispensable, he isn’t always needed. There are shows that completely transcend the need for Skip Intro, begging the viewer to catch every last second of content, from the theme tune on… Before this whole “Skip Intro is a person” bit gets old, why don’t we jump right in? Here are five unskippable TV intros.
We say goodbye to Kerene, meet some new friends, and have a few reunions this week on The Wheel of Time, in an all-in-all very emotional episode.
(These reviews might contain some minor spoilers for the Wheel of Time book series. Please note that the comment section may also contain spoilers for those unfamiliar with the book series.)
[Comments will be temporarily closed over the weekend, but will be open for discussion on Monday morning.]
Prime Video’s adaptation of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series has already introduced us to the on-screen versions of many major characters. In the fifth episode of the show, “Blood Calls Blood,” we meet one more—Loial, an Ogier played by Hammed Animashaun who holds a special place in many a WoT fan’s heart.
When you’re Dave Grohl, you can kind of do what you want. And apparently what Grohl—and his Foo Fighters bandmates—wanted to do during the pandemic was make a horror movie. The result, Studio 666, lands in theaters in February, and now we’ve got the tiniest teaser.
There are two main obsessions in my life: books and music. You can usually find me hunched over a book with a pair of headphones slapped securely over my ears. Both obsessions have lead me to wonderful things; I am an avid writer and a truly abysmal guitar player. They’ve also started to mix together in my weird, wormy brain. Books have begun to take on soundtracks of their own as I read them. Words become notes and chords, narrative themes become bands, and soon I can’t read a certain book without having to pair it with an album or playlist, like pairing wine with a specific dish.
November began in Florence with friends, and then on the ninth I flew to Chicago, where I still am, with friends, so a great month, with travel and books and good company. I read thirteen books, and I have a lot to say about them.
The slow drip of Peacemaker content is turning into a steadier stream as the Suicide Squad spinoff’s January premiere date approaches, and DC’s latest offering is a full-length trailer that makes it clear this isn’t a story about your average heroic dude. “That guy is a clown” Emilia Harcourt (Jennifer Holland) says of John Cena’s Peacemaker. And she’s not wrong. But as her colleague Leota Adebayo (Danielle Brooks) replies, “There’s something about him that’s… sad.”
We’re back and ready to watch some Entertainment that will unfortunately serve as catnip to the Lords and Ladies.
Science fiction often assumes particular bundles of technology, even when the components of that bundle are not causally linked and might not appear at the same time. For example, authors generally assume energy-generating technology will keep pace with propulsive technology. To put this less obscurely, they assume that by the time faster-than-light drives show up, so will cheap, affordable, reliable fusion power plants. No doubt this is only partly driven by narrative convenience. We’ve been told fusion is only thirty years away for sixty years now. One can forgive authors for believing what turned out to be hopelessly optimistic predictions…although I am not sure why said authors also seem to expect fusion plants to be conveniently low mass, extremely efficient, and aneutronic.
However, some authors eschew the dream of commercial fusion (at least, of the variety that can be crammed into a spaceship hull) without abandoning the dream of interstellar travel. Not many, admittedly, but enough that five examples can be found.
When I first read Girls of Paper and Fire in 2019, I was in awe of the intricately built fantasy world and the compelling narrative of two queer girls falling in love and fighting against patriarchal oppression. The final book in the trilogy, Girls of Fate and Fury, brings these characters’ journeys and the revolutionary conflict to a dramatic and emotional close. Lei discovers the insidious plans the Demon King has for her, while Wren is thrust into sudden leadership positions as part of the rebellion. The book further develops ideas of power and strength, explores the tragic choices which are inherent in war, and demonstrates how love enables resistance, no matter the circumstances.
The screen adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven is set to premiere in a couple of weeks, and HBO Max released a trailer today that’s slightly less pandemic-focused than the show’s first teaser.
Cursed princes are nothing but ancient history to Fi—until she pricks her finger on a bone spindle while exploring a long-lost ruin…
We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Leslie Vedder’s The Bone Spindle, a fast-paced and adventurous retelling of Sleeping Beauty—publishing January 11th with Razorbill.
Earlier this year, Janelle Monáe’s The Memory Librarian: and Other Stories From Dirty Computer was announced, marking the blazingly talented singer/actor/songwriter’s first foray into prose writing. The book, the announcement explained, “follows a character named Jane 57821, who breaks free of a worldwide system of thought control ruled by a nebulous group that believes it has the power to decide all creatures’ fates.”
One intriguing detail was mentioned, but not explained: that Monáe would be collaborating with other writers. Now, we know who at least some of those writers are: Alaya Dawn Johnson, Yohanca Delgado, Eve L. Ewing, Danny Lore, and Sheree Renée Thomas.
There’s a lot to like about “Choose to Live,” but my personal favorite moment is toward the very end, when Vance and Burnham discuss the final disposition of the episode’s antagonist. Oded Fehr is simply brilliant here, aided by a superb script by Terri Hughes Burton, providing a canny and clever analogy that reminds Burnham—and the viewers—that there’s a bigger picture beyond the titular ship and its concerns.
Indeed, that theme—of characters thinking primarily of their own issues and missing the bigger picture—runs throughout the episode.
Finally, the robot manaissance is upon us. For years, movies have given us men drawn to AI women, from Blade Runner to Her to Ex Machina. But this year, Dan Stevens played a dream robot in I’m Your Man, and now, Jordana Brewster of Fast and Furious fame (pictured above) is set to reject the robot version of her dead husband in Hello Stranger.
Have you met Skip? Skip Intro, that is.
For viewers everywhere, Skip Intro has been a savior. He saves us precious seconds (or sometimes minutes) as we’re careening through our latest streaming obsession. I’ve deployed our pal Skip hundreds of times, spanning multiple rewatches of The Office and a recent Brooklyn Nine-Nine outing.
While there’s many, many times Skip is indispensable, he isn’t always needed. There are shows that completely transcend the need for Skip Intro, begging the viewer to catch every last second of content, from the theme tune on… Before this whole “Skip Intro is a person” bit gets old, why don’t we jump right in? Here are five unskippable TV intros.
