Sunday, February 03, 2013

A Sunday Review

TV this week:

  • Young Justice: "Agendas" - Superboy learns of another Superman clone while the league debates new membership. Lex is even nastier than I thought. And how he manipulated Connor is pretty terrifying.
  • Young Justice: "Insecurity" - When Red Arrow joins the team, Artemis feels slighted. Does everybody on the team have some deep, dark secret? I'm beginning to doubt any of them can be trusted. Yikes. Loving this show.
  • Young Justice: "Performance" - Robin episode to a big extent, with some of his history nicely explored. Good episode.



This week's movie was William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (1996). Starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes. This modern retelling keeps the Shakespeare dialogue, but sets the play in a modern Florida town of Verona Beach, with guns in the place of swords. It's a really bizarre version. I mean really bizarre. I'm not sure what to make of it overall. Part of me wants to hate it. Part of me thinks that Shakespeare the showman would love it. Having the priest deal with a "faithless" delivery service. Ha. The Prince was also an interesting choice in this version. Good acting overall, but the sheer bizarreness of some of it was off-putting for me.

The thing that always gets me about this play is how stupid everyone is, all throughout it. I've yet to see a version in which I sympathize with the characters. This one is no different. I just never get to liking any of them before their inevitable deaths.



Fortean Times #283
Fortean Times #283 (February 2012). Cover doesn't impress me much. The cover story is the first of a two-part survey on strange things that appear in movies and were allegedly caught on film without anyone being aware of it. Each of the rumors is stated, then taken apart with facts about the filming. So it's a decent bit of debunking to a lot of silly Hollywood rumors, for the most part. Movies include Arlington Road, Citizen Kane, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Godfather, It Came From Beneath the Sea, Jaws and London After Midnight.

The Science section is about recreating what people are visualizing on a computer screen. I find it oddly chilling. Ghostwatch has more about timeslips, this time focusing on houses that no longer exist that are seen by people.

Archaeology has bits about deviant burials and viking ships. Classical Corner is about books lost to antiquity and why so much didn't survive. Alien Zoo has an update on the blue spider of Kansas and information about deer and monkeys. Fairly normal stuff in the UFO files.

There's an interesting article about a 1561 woodcut that appears to depict UFOs in the skies over Nuremberg and what it really meant in the context of its time. Another article reports on people who don't feel like they are quite human, and how they deal with it.

Another article covers the collection of animal specimens of Alex C.F. that include werewolves and dragons. It's a cute little article with some fun photos.

An article in the forum talks about reptile monsters in Riverside, CA. The reviews have some good stuff, from a book on hysteria that got added to my wishlist to a book about an extinct bird. The letters start off with yet another Doctor Who reference. Police News covers the dangers of pulling pranks.

Strangedays has a picture of a guy who collects daleks, with the caption: "Memorobilia collector Rob Hull has entered the 2012 edition of Guiness World Records for owning the world's biggest collection of Daleks, even though the 49-year-old, from Doncaster, claims to hate Doctor Who." Oh c'mon, that's just silly. How can anyone hate the show?

Rob Hull with his dalek collection

All-in-all, another good issue.



1 comments:

J. L. Bell said...

The overall message of Young Justice, season 1, is: "That big secret you're hiding 'cause you're so embarrassed about it? Your friends don't care. Some of them already know (especially Robin), and they still like you."

Kind of a useful message for adolescence.