[TV] Marvel's Agent Carter: Season 1

When it comes to US television, mid-season filler shows often seem like the red-headed stepchildren of television. They're often strange, quirky shows that the network is sort of gambling on, but in a safe manner that is clearly all about hedging their bets. But then these short season runs also tend to be pretty intense as we're talking about less time to tell a good story - you know, like the standard season lengths of British TV shows.

Marvel's Agent Carter felt like a fan dream made real. A lot of folks responded positively to her character in the first Captain America movie and she even got a Marvel One-Shot film as part of the DVD release of Iron Man 3. But I don't think any of us really expected Marvel to take a lot of the fan talk seriously enough to put up a TV series, even a limited one.

But we got it, and man did we get something special indeed. I think Marvel learned a lot from the challenges that Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. faced during its first season.

[Games] Seventh Hero

As much as our game choices are typically driven by research and careful scrutiny of the various entries on sites like Board Game Geek, there are still those moments when a game surprises us when we encounter it in a store and we take the gamble and just pick it up.

We first saw Seventh Hero on the shelves of Paradigm Infinitum. The store was pushing it a little hard at the time - I guess it had just arrived or something like that. And since it was an AEG-published game, it felt like something that we had to look into given they've been publishing some interesting games as of late.

It was hard to tell what this one was going to be about, but clearly it was another card game. But what rather intrigued me was the rather dramatic box text talking about the need to gather seven heroes and such. We eventually got the game and it has proven to be a fun little bridge game between heavier games during game nights. It's really easy to learn and the strategy is pretty savvy.

[Books] Grave Peril (The Dresden Files - Book 3)

By now I'm pretty keen on the books in The Dresden Files given they're quite a good amount of fun with a few surprising twists and turns here and there. Of course not every book can be as totally awesome as one hopes, but they're all generally good, at least given the books that I've read this far.

Grave Peril is another interesting addition to the series, although admittedly not exactly my favorite one in the series so far. But it does introduce an interesting mix of characters along with trying to describe more the details of the sort of political situation that defines the world of the Dresden Files.

This far into the series, it's readily apparent that Jim Butcher has a few Dresden tropes that seem to come up in pretty much each and every book. As much as Dresden is capable of great feats of magic, he's also only human and Butcher has a penchant for depicting him at his weakest. And this is but a single example of things that are readily apparent at this point and there are a good number out there.

[Movies] The Imitation Game (2014)

For this particular Oscar season, I'm pretty sure I wasn't the only one who initially drew parallels between (or were confused by) The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything. Both are generally biographical movies after all and both involve key figures in different fields of scientific study. But the two movies are worlds apart in terms of tone and execution.

The Imitation Game is story that I've been generally curious about since Alan Turing is quite the great geek figure and also an inspiration for gay geeks as well. But his contributions to computer science history tend to be relegated to single sentence summaries here and there and there haven't been too many efforts to really explore his life.

One of the challenges of a movie like this is the fact that few people know what Alan Turing was like. We don't know how he talked and we don't know how he moved about and thus we instead get an actors like Benedict Cumberbatch and we see him and the way he portrays roles. And as much as he brings something new to each on-screen performance, one can't help but see just how consistent he acts and the little quirks of his acting style. Whether or not this did justice to the role is something to be determined by every member of the audience as they finish the movie.

[Movies] Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros (2005)

So when I wrote my review for the stage musical version of Ang Pagdadalafga ni Maximo Oliveros, I realized that the Geeky Guide still didn't have a formal review for the independent movie that the play had been based on. It has been quite a while since I've watched this movie and admittedly the theatrical production is largely more memorable except for certain aspects.

But Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros is a special film and one that was rather unique in terms of its subject matter and tone. And this movie came out around the time just when the whole rush of local independent LGBT movies was just beginning to gather steam and thus the few efforts were pretty solid. These days there are so many crazy LGBT movie projects, many of them feeling like little more than badly-acted soft porn.

This wasn't anything like that despite the potential complexity of the story and its subject matter and related themes. After all, beyond being a coming of age story, it's also a story of a young gay boy with some rather adult feelings for a much older crush. There were so many ways that this movie could have gone wrong, but instead we ended up with a movie that ended up being so right.