Adam Selvidge's Website Blog
Inheriting your uncle’s supervillain business is more complicated than you might think. Particularly when you discover who’s running the place. Scalzi remains one of my favorite authors, even if his writing style has settled into an extremely easy to read but unchallenging flow of witty dialogue that flows perfectly from page to page, making this a quick read. As a consumer of his personal website, it was fun to see some familiar names of the secret agents and I enjoyed a couple of the subplots and how they were resolved. What’s funny though is that there was a “bonus” story...
Journey into the near future, and an unknown nation that was once the United States of America-a land that’s become shrouded in mystery after walling itself off from the rest of the world without explanation over thirty years ago. I wasn’t sure what to expect with this series, but a deep dive into what makes American the country that it is wasn’t on the menu. Charles Soule and Scott Snyder have spun a story set in a philosophically deconstructed country that’s been at war with itself since the day of it’s founding, but in their version 30 years ago it...
The Right Stuff: Directed by Philip Kaufman. With Sam Shepard, Scott Glenn, Ed Harris, Dennis Quaid. The U.S. space program’s development from the breaking of the sound barrier to selection of the Mercury 7 astronauts, from a group of test pilots with a more seat-of-the-pants approach than the program’s more cautious engineers preferred. I swear that I’ve seen this in the past and I sought it out to watch whilst constructing space themed LEGOs, though that plastic plan fell apart due to completing the task during my last binge of LEGO meditations. I had no memory of the film though,...
Alien: Romulus: Directed by Fede Alvarez. With Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson, Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced. While scavenging the deep ends of a derelict space station, a group of young space colonists come face to face with the most terrifying life form in the universe. Watch again with my wife, and she enjoyed it just fine. I enjoyed it just fine again. Buy On Amazon!
What if… Carter Burke had lived? For years, fans of James Cameron’s legendary Aliens film questioned whether Carter Burke, a company man more hateable than the Xenos themselves, had actually survived the traumatic events on the terraforming colony Hadley’s Hope. Now the actor behind the beloved villain, Paul Reiser, joins his son Leon and a star-studded team of writers and producers for the twisted escape of a man who should have died! Thirty-five years later, Burke is eking out a cursed existence on a backwater asteroid. With his once-promising career in the toilet, Burke’s only remaining purpose is to care...
What If…?: With Jeffrey Wright, Terri Douglas, Matthew Wood, Fred Tatasciore. Exploring pivotal moments from the Marvel Cinematic Universe and turning them on their head, leading the audience into uncharted territory. Every television series has to continuing moving in a direction or it’s going to get stagnant, and most comic book shows or movies have to constantly one up the season that came before it. The third (and final) season of “What if” takes that to the extreme with transuniversal, omnipowerful powerleveling of characters taking to their over the top logical end points in which everyone involved has more power...
The launch of a new science fiction adventure series–by the New York Times-best selling author of the Safehold series and the Honor Harrington series The Galactic Hegemony has been around a long time, and it likes stability–the kind of stability that member species like the aggressive, carnivorous Shongairi tend to disturb. So when the Hegemony Survey Force encountered a world whose so-called “sentients”–“humans,” they called themselves–were almost as bad as the Shongairi themselves, it seemed reasonable to use the Shongairi to neutralize them before they could become a second threat to galactic peace. And if the Shongairi took a few...
Dune: Prophecy: Created by Diane Ademu-John, Alison Schapker. With Emily Watson, Olivia Williams, Chloe Lea, Jade Anouka. Two Harkonnen sisters combat forces that threaten the future of humankind and establish the fabled sect that will become known as the Bene Gesserit. A worthy entry into the modern adaptation universe, the story is solid and the actors are all amazing, and the tv budget only peeks through infrequently and isn’t all that noticeable. Buy On Amazon!
Lulu Belle: Directed by Leslie Fenton. With Dorothy Lamour, George Montgomery, Albert Dekker, Otto Kruger. Lulu Belle and George Davis marry despite opposition. Financial struggles lead Lulu to work at a club, causing George’s jealousy and imprisonment. Lulu becomes a Broadway star but chooses George over a wealthy suitor upon his release. Movie from 1948 starts with a show in which two people are shot and the rest of movie is told in flashback, with the exception of the final scene in which we discover it was the obvious person that shot them all along! Lulu Bell is played by...
When Una Chin-Riley and Christopher Pike meet at Starfleet Academy after one of his lectures, they immediately become friends. A stellar student, Una is the “poster girl” of her class, and Pike is determined to become a Starfleet captain with his own ship, rhetorically assembling his dream crew. As their friendship evolves, Pike also suspects Una is involved with the Euxhana, a Chionian cultural minority, who are seeking asylum in Federation space, leading to more questions than answers. Twenty-five years later, Una and Pike are working together on the USS Enterprise to settle a Chionian trade agreement when a pro-Euxhana...
