The Last Jedi’s Canto Bight Sequence: A Defense

Rose and Finn at Canto Bight

“Failure, the greatest teacher is.”

- Yoda


I love Star Wars: The Last Jedi. I wrote a non-spoilery review soon after seeing it, and in another post on my favorite movies of 2017 I promised to write a defense of a particular part of the movie. In both posts I mentioned the extreme nerd rage directed at the film. Having watched The Last Jedi again recently, I find this rage even more perplexing.

Re-Reading for Fun and Profit

The Dune section of my bookshelves

Once upon a time I rarely re-read anything. After all, life is short and my to-read list is long.

But at some point I changed my mind about that, both in fiction and philosophy. I still only re-read a small fraction of the books I read (life is getting shorter all the time), but I am much more likely to do so than I once was. In some ways, I think this is partly a result of getting older. Maybe life is too short to read bad books, and if I choose to re-read something it's usually because I either enjoyed it the first time or didn't understand it but got the sense that there was something valuable to be understood.

Movie Round Up: Doctor Sleep, Terminator: Dark Fate, and Ad Astra

I haven't posted movie reviews in a few months (since September or July or even April). I have been seeing movies during this time, but somehow life and other matters have gotten in the way of writing reviews. Well, no more! The time has come to rectify this problem with reviews of three movies I've seen recently: Doctor Sleep, Terminator: Dark Fate, and Ad Astra. There's not much that unites them besides the facts that they are all broadly "speculative fiction" and they are all movies that some people didn't like, but I did.

Keep On Shining: Doctor Sleep by Stephen King

Reading The Shining about five years ago set me down the path to my recent obsession with Stephen King. I'm not sure why it took me so long to read Doctor Sleep. Reading the whole Dark Tower series may have had something to do with it. But with the Doctor Sleep movie coming out soon I figured it was finally time. And I loved it. It's a different sort of book than The Shining (less visceral but more reflective, less traditional horror and more weird fantasy). Nonetheless, it's a worthy sequel precisely because it adds to rather than rehashes the original.