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.

Movie Reviews, Movie Roulette

Throwing Grendel to the Vikings: Reassessing a 90s Adaptation

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Imagine, if you will, the 1990s. You’re making a movie. A movie that doesn’t satisfy your test audiences and requires numerous re-edits that drag your production roughly $15 million over budget. A movie whose director will be replaced by the creator of the novel you’re adapting. A movie whose film composer, Graeme Revell, will be replaced by Jerry Goldsmith. A movie starring Antonio Banderas at, arguably, the height of his popularity. A movie that Roger Ebert will pan and which will bomb so horribly at the box office that fuzzy studio math puts it as the #32 or #1 worst box office flop in history (adjusted for inflation). A movie with so many production problems that it caused Omar Sharif to temporarily retire from acting (1999-2003). In Sharif’s own words: I said to myself, ‘Let us stop this nonsense, these meal tickets that we do because it pays well.’ I thought, ‘Unless I find a stupendous film that I love and that makes me want to leave home to do, I will stop.’ Bad pictures are very humiliating, I was really sick. It is terrifying to have to do the dialogue from bad scripts, to face a director who does not know what he is doing, in a film so bad that it is not even worth exploring.” IMDb (2003) If you imagine all of that and think it’s just not possible that this movie could be shockingly pretty darn good, well, you’d be wrong. You see, the movie in question is The 13th Warrior, based on Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead (1977)(itself a loose adaptation of Beowulf and the historical writings of Ahmad ibn Fadlan). And The 13th Warrior, I’m here to say, is surprisingly good in a campy “full of heart” sort of way. Why? I’m glad you asked.

The Bookening

The Bookening: New (At Bay Press) Reads in the Region of Rumblings

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Time for more books! This evening, I’m going to highlight some books from a lovely Canadian small press: At Bay Press.[efn_note]Disclaimer: I have worked for this press before.[/efn_note] A lot of the work ABP releases crossing genre boundaries, as you’ll see from the books below, which wander through poetry, weird fiction, short fiction, graphic novels, and more. Also: these books are gorgeous and have a delightful feel to them (I like touching them). So what did I get?

Movie Reviews, Movie Roulette

28 Days Later and the Delicious Comfort of Disaster

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Living during a pandemic makes watching movies featuring pandemics particularly weird. Yet, there’s also something, well, comforting for some of us. After all, if you plugged into Netflix a few weeks ago, you might have noticed that Outbreak (1995) was one of the top viewed films. I have to think that people were watching for reasons other than morbid curiosity. And when I put out a call to pick a movie from my DVD collection for me to watch and discuss, a number of people gravitated immediately to 28 Days Later (2002) because of its relevance to the now. 28 Days Later is easily one of my favorite films, horror genre or otherwise. For those who haven’t seen it, the film opens with a group of animal rights activists (Animal Liberation Front without the name) raiding a government animal testing facility, which results in the spread of a deadly virus called “rage.” Flash forward to Jim (Cillian Murphy) some 28 days later, who wakes up from a coma to find himself in an empty hospital and no knowledge of what is going on. We learn pretty quickly that the rage virus has overtaken the UK, leading to mass infections, mass evacuations, quarantine, and the eventual breakdown of society. Jim is rescued from certain death by Selena (Naomie Harris) and her ill-fated friend, Mark (Noah Huntley), and together (sans Mark) they meet up with Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and his daughter, Hannah (Megan Burns), who encourage them to drive north to a supposed safe zone lead by Major Henry West (Christopher Eccleston; a.k.a. the Doctor). Naturally, things aren’t as they seem there… Not one bit.

The Bookening

The Bookening: New Reads in the Palace of Pandemics

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More books have arrived in my pandemic apartment of doom! Honestly, this is going to be endless because I buy books faster than I can organize them. After all, I am a book dork. Today’s lot features a few new novels and two academic works that might be of interest to some of you. Not that we’ll get to read everything given how utterly wonky the world is right now. But I’m certainly going to try! Here’s what I got:

SF/F Commentary, The Bookening

Dreaming of Uncle Hugo’s

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Bookstores bookstores bookstores! All book dorks love them, and yet not enough of us have easy access to them. Up here in Bemidji, the closest thing we have to a bookstore is the used games and DVD store, which has a fairly meh book collection and a business name that doesn’t really fit what it is, and the comic book store, which, as you’d guess, mostly carries comics and has a fairly small but reasonably OK book collection (the comics collection is awesome, though). Beyond that, the next best thing is a trip to Park Rapids for Beagle & Wolf or to Brainerd for Emily’s or CatTale’s, all decent small bookstores. Otherwise, you gotta go to Duluth or Minneapolis for a really big bookstore experience! Since I’m stuck up here in Bemidji during a pandemic, I’ve started reminiscing about some of my favorite bookstores in Minnesota — of which they are many. When it comes right down to it, though, there is one bookstore that stands above them all: Uncle Hugo’s!

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