[Books] Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? Audible Review

So Tobie introduced me to the genius that is The Office, particularly the US adaptation of the British series. Watching the show together was one of the highlights of our first few years together and I'll always treasure the experience. A part of watching The Office is discovering the quirky comedic genius of Mindy Kaling, who played Kelly Kapoor.

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? is her first effort at writing something other than a story of a television show episode in the form of a memoir. But the book is distinctly written in her voice and style that you also rather realize that maybe a lot of her work thus far has involved a lot of herself to one degree or another.

And as I strongly feel that autobiography audio books are best read by the authors themselves, I had an extra layer of enjoyment here.

[Movies] London Has Fallen (2016) Review

Well this is a movie that I didn't expect to find myself watching but when you're with family you can end up with weird things. And it's not like this is already a statement of this movie being good or bad - it's just not the sort of thing I'd choose to watch on my own.

London Has Fallen surprised me that it's actually part of what is now a franchise - in fact a trilogy of movies where governments keep "falling" in one way or another. I like to think of them as flashier, less cerebral versions of the Jack Ryan stories, so to speak.

The movies in this franchise have a particular feel to them that is a bit of an acquired taste I guess? So if you enjoyed the first one, things movie then gives you more of the things that sort of worked and other bits that they thought worked but didn't quite do so in my opinion.

But hey, this is not meant to be quite a serious a movie so we just run with it.

[Comics] Star Wars: Darth Maul - Son of Dathomir Review

The premature end to the Star Wars: The Clone Wars animated series because of the Disney acquisition of Lucasfilm and all of its related properties resulted in a lot of stories going untold. The cancellation had come while the sixth season had still been in production and thus a lot of scripts had already been plotted out but the episodes themselves had gone unproduced.

Star Wars: Darth Maul - Son of Dathomir was one of those stories that found new life beyond the show. Part of what is known as the Clone Wars: Legacy, the multimedia project that tried to salvage what it could of the unproduced stories from that final season. In this case this story arc became a comic book instead of a piece of animation.

The lost status of some of this is sort of moot now that some of the final stories will be brought to life thanks to a recent announcement by Dave Filoni. But still you have to appreciate these stories and the work that went into finding a way to get these stories out there beyond the end of the series.

[Movies] Alex Strangelove (2018) Review

For one reason or another, Tobie and I didn't get to catch Love, Simon in theaters, which was a bit of a disappointment since I was curious about the film. But the convenience of Netflix made it a heck of a lot easier to catch Alex Strangelove once it was added to the regional content library. And that is pretty much how Netflix functions - by making content fairly convenient to access.

Now I wasn't quite sure what to expect from this movie since it seemed to fit the mold of yet another classic LGBT coming of age story complete with the protagonist eventually coming out as being...not straight, at the very least.

But early reviews for the movie were pretty positive and that just piqued my curiosity even further. Was this movie in fact more than your typical LGBT fare that we've gotten over and over again? Does this movie try to do something new?

In a way, I guess they did. It wasn't a big shift, but it was certainly something noticeable.

[TV] Quantico: Season 2 Review

So we had managed to survive the first season of Quantico in order to get to this second season because of Russell Tovey. I know, I know, even we can fall into pretty simple motivations at times. And to be fair, the show was more intriguing than expected, so that helped things along.

So where could the show go in this seconds eason after generally resolving things in the first run? Well, what we get is both a soft reboot of the status quo and yet a continuation of some off the intrigue from the first season. It was an interesting approach that provided a new venue for all the usual antics of the show and more drama centered around its protagonist.

But there's a lot of the same mistakes or all the usual challenges that come with the way they deal with things in this setting. But this discussion may be moot as the end of the show is in sight with its cancellation.