A Mighty Magical Comeback for the Potterverse

So I've never been the biggest Harry potter fan. Sure, it's fun to imagine yourself in that world and to pick your houses and your pets and whatnot, but I found the world and story a little off for some reason. It never really helped that I couldn't get into the books...

But back in 2001, I was at the height of my Potter hype. So much so that I got a wonderful copy of Fantastic Beasts and Where to find Them, complete with scribblings in the margin by one H. Potter (scribblings which I duly copied and then got in trouble for, for writing in a book with notes in the margin :P ). There was no story to Fantastic Beasts, it was more like an encyclopedia of all sorts of bizarre creatures of the wizarding world (which now I think about it, opens up a whole raft of questions about the nature of magic and the world itself); no matter, I loved it anyway. I liked reading about the strange and fascinating creatures inhabiting the magical world, wondering exactly what they looked like, and wondering how they all lived.

And now, we get to see them on the big screen.

Music and Dancing in LMM's Carnival-Hip-Hop Soap Opera

Alright, review time! But this one is a little unusual, because it's not a book review or a movie review. Let's start at the beginning.

You ever hear of Lin-Manuel Miranda? In musical theatre circles, he's kinda a big deal. He's the genius behind Hamilton, the presidential hip-hop musical about US founding father Alexander Hamilton that swept the Tonys (winning 11 of 16 awards, including "Best Musical") but before that, who had heard of him?

Who, save for the people who watched his amazing debut musical, In the Heights?

Beyond Ridiculous

First off, kudos to Star Trek Beyond for having the best subtitle of any movie. I was struggling with Beyond the Pale, To Infinity and Beyond, and The Great Beyond as a title before I hit on the obvious. And it says it all, really - you remember how I said John Wick was one of those movies you should watch on a bad movie night with friends? Yeah, this tries to be the same.

Mad Max? Try Sad Max...

Okay, I'm gonna come out and say it straight away: The Secret Life of Pets (TSLoP) was better than I expected. For those of you who rabidly hate minions, you'll probably not like this as it cashes in on the same cute-factor with characters it tries to make into crowd-pleasers with one-liners and chubby cheeks. What it gives in cuteness, it lacks in depth; the plot is paper-thin and predictable, the characters act to serve the story, regardless of any motivation for how they ought to act, and I left feeling like I'd been watching the wrong dog's story for most of it. So let me re-tell it as it should have been told. Spoilers below for TSLoP, if you're interested...

In Defence of X-Men

So the X-Men movies have had a pretty rough go of it, haven't they? It's got to the point that people are in agreement, the best one is the one about time travel! When was the last time you heard about a good time travel movie??? That's right, Men In Black 3 (And hark at all who thought I was going to say Back to the Future!). But we can agree that for the most part, when introduced into a franchise in which it has previously been unacknowledged, time travel is weird and feels like a bit of a cop-out and it takes someone or something very special to introduce it and use it without it feeling gimmicky or like a quick get-out-of-jail-free card. And X-Men: Days of Future Past did that well, thanks to Bryan Singer and co. Their story was well-rounded, full of character and charm, witty but emotional and conveyed a real sense of desperation and hopelessness while still giving our characters a way out.

Not so for Apocalypse.

The New Doom and an Uncomfortable Problem with PC's Gaming Elite

So I have a cool new computer. It's another laptop, it's built specially for gaming and it means I can actually play my video games instead of them lagging to crap. To be specific, it's a HP Pavilion Gaming laptop with an Intel i5 processor and an NVidia GeForce GTX 950M graphics card. In broad terms, this is a huge step up: my old laptop (and the one I'm writing this on, because it still has functionality and I'm not above keeping this old thing so my new laptop can be a dedicated gaming PC) had an i7 processor, but the graphics card was a much older GeForce GT 640M which meant I had trouble playing games like Bulletstorm or even Doom. The original Doom. That started lagging on my laptop, it got that bad. But that's why I upgraded.

Only now, I have a new problem.

Politics, Civil War, and How Marvel's Villains are Ruining their Own Movies

I always find it so interesting how much movies reflect the feelings of their time: the Original Star Wars are widely considered far better than the prequels because the prequels were marred in the politics and corruption which gripped America at the time they were made, whereas the original trilogy were influenced by the seventies style of rooting for the little guy, the post-Vietnam era of peace and understanding rather than violence and war and the idea of promoting peace where possible and rising up against tyrannical orders who threaten peaceful ways.

In a way, I find it funny that the prequel trilogy didn't feature so much of that. Created around the rise of terrorism, we see much more of the Bush ideals of forcing democracy on a country in the Clone troopers and the Jedi as generals, something which somehow aptly fitted in with the original trilogy and gave way for that story to be told. Movies are windows into the time they are made, they show us the cultural and political landscape through which they were created and give us a way into the mindset of the people of the time.

With all that said, I suppose I should explain that this isn't just some random article about Star Wars and politics (although you might get something along those lines come Rogue One), but a review on Captain America: Civil War.

So much to catch up

So I've not been writing much on here recently, but at least this time it's because I've been hella busy: between getting a new job, trying to write several thousand words of fiction a day and vlogging nearly every day last month, it's been pretty hectic since the end of February.

With that said, shall we get on with this? We've got a lot to catch up on...

My Top Gear Fear

So you might have seen recently that Chris Evans of Radio 1 fame (not the American actor, sadly - boo hoo!) has been joined on the new series of Top Gear by Matt LeBlanc of F.R.I.E.N.D.S. Which, fair enough, is a bold move, especially since he set the fastest lap time as the star in a reasonably-priced car under the three stooges who are now ex-presenters.