Just the Ticket

I've been feeling rather aimless lately. Maybe it's the onslaught of five average-to-barely tolerable monster movies that I assigned myself to reviewing. Maybe it's the dreary atmosphere that takes over this time of year. Or maybe its a sort of post-partum side effect of having finished reading Stephen and Owen King's Sleeping Beauties  and not being inspired to do anything afterward, like I summitted a particularly formidable mountain and lack the desire to take in any particular view, no matter how beautiful, nor to immediately make my way back down. I'm simply here, at a peak that feels more like a valley, waiting for the winter chill to eat my toes. Don't get me wrong; I don't mean to say, in this age where saying "Stephen King books are too long" has become an understatement of the impossible, that Sleeping Beauties  was as insurmountable to me as Mount Everest would be to, well, me . I only mean that having accomplished such a literary fea

So, as I was working on my review of the Tremors  Anthology, a funny--strange, not actually funny--thought went through my head about the inconsistent use of the word "shelter." A shelter is a structure that keeps bad things out and good people safe. Or, like many nouns or adjectives, shelter can be an idea of safety; a quality of shelter that you attribute to a person, place, or group--that may or may not be a physical shelter--simply by your act of seeking out that person, place, or group. But what if you brought explosives into  a bomb shelter? If they blew up inside of it, would anyone on the outside know what happened? Would it have served its purpose as a shelter under those circumstances, if not as a bomb shelter? And wouldn't that completely upend the usage of the word "shelter?" If "shelter" meant the same thing in all cases, wouldn't that create some post-apocalyptic society where the rich and unabused lived in an impenetrable room wh

Hey, Ticketholders; what's shakin', Bacon? It's finally time to tackle Tremors , the series about ever-evolving, giant, monster worms that attempt to consume some of the least enjoyable movie stereotypes ever written. Case in point, Tremors  stars Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward as two incompetent handymen/farmers who settle their disagreements with rock-paper-scissors and exchange such poorly scripted witticisms as "I wish I could stampede up your ass." And no, this is not a Cinemax prequel to Brokeback Mountain . Elsewhere, Michael Gross and Reba McEntire play a survivalist couple, complete with bomb shelter, homemade explosives, and a crap-ton of guns. And of course, because this is a monster movie, there is the requisite prankster who nearly gets shot several times and whom we wish would just hurry up and get himself eaten. The setting is the ironically named "town" of Perfection, Nevada, a sparse collection of roughly seven buildings, half of which

In my review of Spider-Man: Homecoming , I made a point of mentioning the erroneous critical quotation that claimed the movie and/or Tom Holland was the "best Spider-Man ever!" The Dark Tower  came out last week on video, and after hearing what a waste of budget, inconsequential, unfaithful, disjointed, unrelatable, and other ways of calling it generally awful as a movie, I felt compelled to see what positive words might be present on the cover in this instance. Turning over a gritty-verging-on-bland black-and-white cover image featuring Idris Elba, Matthew McConaughey, the title, and not much else, I found a single critical quote without so much as a single star to accompany it. And here it is, straight from Forbes magazine contributing writer Scott Mendelson: "It delivers Idris Elba as an action hero." So, apparently The Dark Tower  is so bad that a neutral, obvious, generic character description like this is the most positive thing that any critic, prof

♫Down here at the pawn shop!♫ Welcome, Ticketholders, to another Sublime issue of the Grimm Fairy Tales  Retrospective ! '90s reference, y'all! Must stop using exclamation points! Keep reading! The  Grimm Fairy Tales Short Story #5: Pawns  is about as much of a story as Wicked Ways was a story: merely a dialogue with accompanying visuals. The first page (left) displays the Snow Queen, the Wonderland beast, the evil knight last seen in Sela’s Rip Van Winkle dream sequence, Sela dressed as Snow White, asleep in a glass coffin, and what appears to be Tinkerbell (less scantily clad than in Rip Van Winkle ), with a man in green brandishing a hook standing next to her. Looming above all of this is a huge, ominous hand, showing that, like the title implies, all of these figures are pieces in some elaborate board game. The looming hand is that of The Dark One, and the dialogue in question is with his assistant, both of whom were last (or will later be, if we’re talking actu

This is your morning wakeup call, Ticketholders! It's time for today's edition of the Grimm Fairy Tales Retrospective . Grimm Fairy Tales #30: Rip Van Winkle  is another mind-trip issue, with the reaper figure from the 2008 Annual coming to pay his respects to Sela following her death at the end of Snow White and Rose Red . Though Belinda ran her through from behind with a very long sword (Excalibur, if I remember correctly), Sela is not bleeding. Either it’s been awhile since she was killed and the wound coagulated shut, the artist was lazy and/or forgetful, or because magic. Keep that third option in mind. As seems proper to the reaper--and it is, because this is Grimm Fairy Tales , after all--he says goodbye in the only way Sela would respect (or find blasphemous): by telling her a story from Sela’s own book. In what he calls "Sela’s version" of Rip Van Winkle , it turns out that Robert wasn’t her first love. Long before Robert (assuming this is a fla

Welcome to November, Retrospectres! Tradespeople? Pageturners? Hmm. I've unintentionally given myself over a day and a half to think about this, and none of these really feel right. I guess we'll stick to retronym territory for now. So let's start again. Good afternoon, Ticketholders! So, as I said while I was thinking, I'm what feels like at least a day and a half late at following up on the end of the last Retrospective  post . And since the average modern attention span doesn't last beyond this post's first use of punctuation, I'll remind you here that the last issue of Grimm Fairy Tales sucked. Badly. It was the standout oddball for all the wrong reasons; the blackest of black sheep among a mostly gray flock that is nonetheless interesting because who doesn't like animal videos? Weird analogy, I know. But the Ugly Duckling  issue was uninspired, cliche, detached, and otherwise so noticeably bad that the proverbial Boy might choose not to cry wolf