TV Review: Glitch Season Three (2019)

 Glitch Season 3 (2019) created by Tony Ayres and Louise Fox

Click the links for reviews of Season One and Season Two.

Out of curiosity, I came back to the Australian zombie series Glitch. The first season was okay and the second was disappointing. My memories have gotten a little vague so I was more than willing to give the show another try.

This season opens with one character hoping his girlfriend will rise from the dead. Meanwhile, in another part of the cemetery, two other people come out of their graves. Belle is the daughter of some religious fanatics. She died 15 years ago and her family thinks she's possessed by a demon, so not a happy homecoming. Chi is a Chinese opera performer from the 1800s who came to Yoorana as a laborer in search of gold. He and Belle help each other throughout the show.

Their story intertwines with that of the main cast. Some people leave Yoorana hoping never to come back. Noregard, the chemical company that is involved with the resurrections, has some new bad guys running the show since the original ones were offed in the last season (and early this season). So all the characters get pulled back to town. Phil, who thought his purpose was to kill all the risen, has a change of heart and decides to be a family man. At the same time, William (who turns out to have been a pirate in a previous life) and local cop James decide that they do need to kill all the risen. They have a much more humane reason--since the resurrections violate the rules of nature, nature itself is unraveling and the world will end. Their zombie existence will cause the apocalypse. Signs are already appearing, like power outages, freak storms, earthquakes, and massive bush fires. 

The new reason for the risen to be rekilled is a bit of a stretch of credibility. Why didn't disasters start happening two seasons ago? The movement to the resolution of the series feels forced. The human drama of the characters is okay and more convincing than the larger apocalyptic picture.

Slightly recommended--I'm glad I finished the show but I'm not really interested in rewatching it.

All three season are currently (October 2020) streaming on Netflix.

Book Review: My Hero Academia Vol. 18 by Kohei Horikoshi

My Hero Academia Volume 18 by Kohei Horikoshi

The battle to save Eri finally wraps up as the villains try to hang on to her for her quirk-ending abilities. The heroes save the day, naturally, and then have to head back to school. The story shifts to some of the characters who have to do make-up work for their provisional licenses. They face one of the most challenging tests ever inflicted on high school students--try to get a group of early elementary students to behave for a day!

After a lot of big drama, it's nice to have a light-hearted diversion. Some new characters are introduced (as if the series needed more characters) and things end with a return to regular school time and a potential new drama.

Mildly recommended.

Movie Review: The Lighthouse (2019)

The Lighthouse (2019) co-written and directed by Robert Eggers

An old salt of a seaman (Willem Dafoe) and a young wanderer (Robert Pattinson) are left for a month to tend a lighthouse on a remote island. The old salt vacillates between a domineering Ahab and a sympathetic father figure. The young wanderer is a bit frustrated and withdrawn. Both have their secrets and the audience initially sympathizes with the young man, especially when weird things start happening. Seagulls provide the young man with problems; the old salt warns him not to harm a seabird or else disaster may strike. In a moment of anger, the young man kills a gull. A storm blows in just before they are to be picked up and returned to civilization. By this point, the young man's sanity is slipping and he has a hard time telling what's real and what's wrong. He is clearly going mad; it's unclear whether the old salt is also going mad or has been mad the whole time or is something else entirely.

The film is shot in black and white with a 1:1.19 aspect ratio, making the image almost square. The lighting is very evocative, pulling out details in their faces and eyes and making light sources flare eerily. The look is visual impressive and distinct. The score is fairly low-key except for certain moments; other sounds, like an omnipresent fog horn, give the movie a lot of atmosphere. The dialogue is also unique, with language mimicking Herman Melville and other 1800s New England patter. Dafoe is especially good at delivering long speeches in the old language and he looks the part of a salty old seaman.

The descent into madness starts gradually and picks up as the movie progresses. Both characters start losing track of reality, making it difficult (though not always impossible) for viewers to know what is real and what is imagined/dreamed/hallucinated. It's as if the filmmakers want the viewers to share the characters' experience of going mad. For me, it went on too long--I lost my sympathy for both characters and was hoping for the movie to end ten minutes before it did. As a depiction of going mad, it does the job a little too well.

Eggers is the same writer/director of The Witch, which has a similar attention to period detail and dialogue, along with a distinct visual style. In The Lighthouse, everything is turned up to eleven. If you liked The Witch, this is even more so. If you thought The Witch was overdoing it, this is even more overdone.

Not recommended--I did rewatch The Witch once, but I am not going to rewatch this.

Book Review: Swords Around the Cross--The Nine Years War by Timothy O'Donnell

 Swords Around the Cross--The Nine Years War: Ireland's Defense of Faith and Fatherland 1594-1603 by Timothy O'Donnell

The Irish have almost always been at odds with their neighbors to the east. The late 1500s saw a particularly hard oppression of the Irish by the United Kingdom under Queen Elizabeth. Red Hugh O'Donnell of Tirconnaill in the northwest and Hugh O'Neill of Tyrone in the north raised an army to fight against the British invaders. This book chronicles the Nine Years War, fought from 1594 to 1603. The conflict was not just about nationalism. England had just established the Anglican Church and wanted to impose their own system on other subjects. The Irish were fiercely Catholic and bristled under a foreign power that took their lands and their churches while requiring them to accept the queen as head of the church. The Irish appealed to the pope for moral authority to fight and to Spain for material resources to fight. They received both and spent nearly a decade fighting for their independence.

At the time, Ireland was still not united. Many different clans had authority over their regions; no central authority existed. O'Donnell and O'Neill established The Catholic Confederacy and worked to unite the various clans against their common enemy. The war raged on in various parts of the country. The Irish did well even with the unsteady support of Catholic Spain. The final major battle of the war was the Siege of Kinsale in 1601 and 1602. The Irish had a chance to smash a large English army but on the day of battle several things went wrong, resulting in a humbling loss. The armies retreated and the leaders were eventually driven from Ireland. 

The narrative is written in an exciting style and includes many extended quotes from the correspondence and writings of the people involved in the war. The book unabashedly takes the Catholic point of view, which gives the story a dramatic sweep and enables O'Donnell (the author) to take in the larger picture. The facts of what happened in Ireland aren't the only relevant ones. England spent a lot of their resources fighting this war, which meant they had much fewer to devote to conflicts on the European continent, where Protestants and Catholics were in conflict as well. Spain spent fewer resources while being involved in those other conflicts as well as their development of colonies in the New World. The Nine Years War was more than just a local conflict with an unhappy ending.

Recommended.

Birthday Celebrations October 2020

Our eldest had another birthday, which wound up being celebrated several times. The first celebration was on the Sunday before the actual day, during which an aunt and uncle visited and we had yummy homemade cupcakes.

Ready to blow

A good job

On the actual day, we went to The Cheesecake Factory for dinner. He's been wanting to eat there for ages and ages. He ordered a dish that combines his favorites--mac and cheese burger. The mac and cheese was deep fried as a second patty on top of the hamburger patty. He was very happy.

A fine burger

The weekend after, we planned to go mini golfing outdoors but rain threatened. Instead of cancelling, we went to Monster Mini Golf, an indoor course. The dark, monstrous course was a nice prep for the Halloween season. We played with two aunts and an uncle. The indoor course is under blacklights and featured a bunch of scary bits.

A bit hard to photograph under the lights

White clothes really stand out under the blacklights

The radio station in the corner

The final hole

How to rate yourself

We had a good spread of scores, from 59 to 75. The birthday boy was somewhere in the middle. The place gave us a card for a free round of golf, obviously enticing us to come back as a group. 

Some of the scores and strokes were controversial. At one point, the birthday boy hit his ball into his sister's ball, sending hers into the hole. She only had one stroke before, so she immediately declared that she scored a hole in one. Technically accurate, but controvertible. I was the scorekeeper, so I gave her a 1 with an asterisk next to her score. On one hole, my ball was stuck in one of the tunnels. Instead of the usual standing putt, I opted for a pool cue shot out of the hazard. Is there a rule that the ball needs to be hit by the head of the club?

We had a lot of fun and look forward to going back again, if we don't lose the card.

My son also went to Terrapin Adventures with his best friend and his sister (two different people). That will be the subject of another post!

Book Review: Marvel Masterworks: X-Men Vol. 3 by C. Claremont et al.

Marvel Masterworks: X-Men Volume 3 written by Chris Claremont, penciled and co-plotted by John Byrne

Magneto attacks again, this time kidnapping the X-Men and taking them to his Antarctic base underneath a volcano. While they are trapped, he works on his orbiting base. The X-Men just barely manage to escape, though they are split up and each group think the other has died. Beast and Jean Grey make it to the Antarctic surface where they are discovered by a search plane. They return to New York where Jean tells Professor X the others are dead. Xavier closes up the school and leaves with the new love of his life, the space queen Lilandra. He leaves for her kingdom while Jean goes to Scotland. Beast goes back to the Avengers.

Meanwhile, Cyclops, Storm, Banshee, Colossus, Nightcrawler, and Wolverine have escaped by tunneling away from the base. They wind up in the Savage Land, an Antarctic pre-historic jungle heated by geothermal sources. They have adventures with the local inhabitants, finally escaping to the sea where they wind up on a Japanese science vessel that's in lockdown until they return to Japan. Six weeks later, in Japan they try to contact Xavier only to find no one answering. That's just as well, because a supervillain threatens Japan. The X-Men team up with Japanese superhero Sunfire to take out the threat. They almost make it back to America--the Canadian government detours their plane so they can get Wolverine back. He was a multi-million dollar experiment and part of a plan to develop a Canadian superhero team.

The world-travelling nature of the story keeps things interesting, as does the human drama of dealing with the supposed deaths of their comrades (even by the end, no one finds out the others survived). The plotting is fantastic and fun, making this a very enjoyable read.

Highly recommended.

TV Review: Doctor Who: The Keys of Marinus (1964)

Doctor Who: The Keys of Marinus (1964) written by Terry Nation and directed by John Gorrie

The First Doctor (William Hartnell) lands on a strange island on a strange planet called Marinus. The beach has sand and glass, the ocean is acid. One-man submarines (they look more like torpedoes) deliver some locals to the island. One of those locals menaces Susan (Carole Ann Ford), so they must be the bad guys. The Doctor and his companions head to the only building on the island. Inside they discover Arbitan (George Colouris), the last scientist in charge of the Conscience of Marinus, a machine that eliminates evil inclinations and thoughts from the planet's population. The machine was shut off when the Voord (those are the guys from the subs) rebelled and started taking advantage of the people who would not fight back against the Voord's violence. The scientists have decided to restart the machine with a stronger setting to overcome to Voord. The only problem is that four microchips from the machine have been scattered across the planet. All the other scientists, including Arbitan's daughter, have gone to get the chips but never came back. Arbitan enlists the Doctor's group to help him. Well, he throws up a force field around the TARDIS so they can't leave until they help him. They reluctantly agree.

They travel all over the planet, encountering different people in different situations (a forest full of evil plants; a trapper on a frozen mountain; a big city). They eventually join up with the daughter who helps them out. The story follows the standard solve problems/get captured/escape from capture routine that is in a lot of Doctor Who stories. The variety of problems is nice and viewers get a sense that the planet has all sorts of people on it. That part is fun. They could have been stand-alone single episodes except for the overarching mission.

The sets exhibit a variety of quality from well-done to barely finished. One city treats the TARDIS crew to a luxurious life and the room has plenty of statues and hanging decorations. On the other hand, there's an ice cave that looks like plastic wrap on cardboard boxes. The rubber-suited bad guys at the beginning are locals wearing rubber suits to protect themselves from the acid ocean, so it is not as bad as it looks.

Recommended--I found the show entertaining and I make allowances for their low-budget.