April 6, 2009

Quick Movie Reviews (2009): Volume Four

World in the Satin Bag

Reading Time

And here are some more quick reviews from GeorgeMichael. Okay, so only the first four are from him, but still. He’s apparently seen a lot of movies this year. As have I!

Anywho, enjoy:

Bride Wars
Pros: Both Anne Hathaway and Kate Hudson are great actors who do their very best with the mediocre script that they’ve been handed. Their performances are the highlight of this otherwise disposable movie in which two best friends get their weddings planned on the same day in the same place and fight with everything they can to ensure that their own wedding wins out. Let theoretical hilarity ensue.
Cons: It’s not funny and it’s not romantic. Anything that you could possibly want in a rom/com is completely absent here. You have a two hour long catfight for sure but it’s all loosely wound by a poorly written script and horrible execution.
Rating: 1.5/5

I Love You, Man
Pros: Paul Rudd and Jason Segel give amazing performances as Peter and Sidney in the most recent bro-mance for all to enjoy. The premise surrounds Peter getting engaged and realizingthat he doesn’t have a best man so as a result he begins his search for male bonding. The script is amazing and the movie works flawlessly. Paul Rudd is great as the awkward “only had girl friends” guy who gets nervous around Sidney when he tries to be cool. Jason Segel is equally impressive as the yin to Paul’s yang as the outgoing party dude.
Cons: Like many Apatow-like movies (he has nothing to do with this particular film) the movie runs a tad too long but other than that it is an amazing movie that is easily worth double the price of the admission ticket.
Rating: 4.5/5

Last Chance Harvey
Pros: Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson give great performances in this substantial feel good film. Harvey (Dent… he he…) is a commercial jingle composer who travels to England for his daughter’s wedding and everything goes wrong. First he finds out that he has been left at a hotel all alone because his entire family are staying at a house that his ex wife rented out. Then his daughter tells him that she wants her step father to walk her down the aisle. To place a cherry on top of it all he gets fired. While sulking at a bar he comes across a delightful woman in misery named Kate. The feel goodiness begins.
Cons: The movie moves a little slow at times and can drag in certain places. It plays the plot safe for the most part and in any other instance would be a pretty general feel good movie. What elevate Last Chance Harvey above the rest are the superb performances of Hoffman and Thompson.
Rating: 4/5

Slumdog Millionaire
Pros: A perfect love story set in the slums of India that tells the tale of Jumal Malik as he searches his whole life looking for the girl that he lost as a child, Latika. The movie is perfectly cast, directed, written, and shot. To add to all of that the movie has amazing music to go along for the ride. A movie that opens with the main character being tortured turns into one of the happiest and greatest movies in recent years. Who knew?
Cons: A perfect love story. There are no cons. All Oscars were deserved.
Rating: 5/5

Sex Drive
Pros: A couple hilarious moments, but really this is sort of a typical teen comedy/romance. Not much else to say, unfortunately.
Cons: The best moments were the ones we already saw in the previews. The Amish scenes were mediocre at best and the plot was pretty much an idiotic “I’m a teenage virgin male and I need to get laid” rehash. Basically it’s unoriginal and overdone. We need more interesting teenage comedies…
Rating: 1/5

And there you go!

Shaun Duke

Shaun Duke is an aspiring writer, a reviewer, and an academic. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Digital Rhetoric and Writing at Bemidji State University. He received his PhD in English from the University of Florida and studies science fiction, postcolonialism, digital fan cultures, and digital rhetoric.

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A Reading List of Dystopian Fiction and Relevant Texts (Apropos of Nothing in Particular)

January 22, 2025 No Comments

Why would someone make a list of important and interesting works of dystopian fiction? Or a suggested reading list of works that are relevant to those dystopian works? There is absolutely no reason other than raw interest. There’s nothing going on to compel this. There is nothing in particular one making such a list would hope you’d learn. The lists below are not an exhaustive list. There are bound to be texts I have forgotten or texts you think folks should read that are not listed. Feel free to make your own list and tell me about it OR leave a comment. I’ll add things I’ve missed! Anywhoodles. Here goes:

Duke’s Best EDM Tracks of 2024

January 18, 2025 No Comments

And so it came to pass that I finished up my annual Best of EDM [Insert Year Here] lists. I used to do these on Spotify before switching to Tidal, and I continued doing them on Tidal because I listen to an absurd amount of EDM and like keeping track of the tunes I love the most. Below, you will find a Tidal playlist that should be public. You can listen to the first 50 tracks right here, but the full playlist is available on Tidal proper (which has a free version just like Spotify does). For whatever reason, the embedded playlist breaks the page, and so I’ve opted to link to it here and at the bottom of this post. Embeds are weird. Or you can pull songs into your preferred listening app. It’s up to you. Some caveats before we begin:

2025: The Year of Something

January 9, 2025 No Comments

We’re nine days into 2025, and it’s already full of exhausting levels of controversy before we’ve even had a turnover in power in my home country of the United States. We’ve seen resignations of world leaders, wars continuing and getting worse and worse (you know where), the owner of Twitter continuing his tirade of lunacy and demonstrating why the billionaire class is not to be revered, California ablaze with a horrendous and large wildfire, right wing thinktanks developing plans to out and attack Wikipedia editors as any fascist-friendly organization would do, Meta rolling out and rolling back GenAI profiles on its platforms, and, just yesterday, the same Meta announcing sweeping changes to its moderation policies that, in a charitable reading, encourage hate-based harassment and abuse of vulnerable populations, promotion and support for disinformation, and other problems, all of which are so profound that people are talking about a mass exodus from the platform to…somewhere. It’s that last thing that brings me back to the blog today. Since the takeover at Twitter, social networks have been in a state of chaos. Platforms have risen and fallen — or only risen so much — and nothing I would call stability has formed. Years ago, I (and many others far more popular than me) remarked that we’ve ceded the territory of self-owned or small-scale third party spaces for massive third party platforms where we have minimal to no control or say and which can be stripped away in a tech-scale heartbeat. By putting all our ducks into a bin of unstable chaos, we’re also expending our time and energy on something that won’t last, requiring us to expend more time and energy finding alternatives, rebuilding communities, and then repeating the process again. In the present environment, that’s impossible to ignore.1 This is all rather reductive, but this post is not the place to talk about all the ways that social networks have impacted control over our own spaces and narratives. Another time, perhaps. I similarly don’t have space to talk about the fact that some of the platforms we currently have, however functional they may be, have placed many of us in a moral quagmire, as in the case of Meta’s recent moderation changes. Another time… ↩

Dr. Shaun Duke, Professional Nerd

Editor. Writer. Professor. Host.

Quick Movie Reviews (2009): Volume Four

Reading Time

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