Castle Rock is a horror/fantasy drama series based in one of the common fictional locations and with some of the fictional characters of Stephen King’s novels. Season 1 aired in 2018, and a second season is upcoming later this month. You may recognize the town if you’ve read the books: Cujo, Needful Things, or others.
Dale Lacy (Terry O’Quinn), warden of Shawshank prison in Castle Rock, Maine, commits suicide in an unsual and graphic fashion the day of his retirement. Soon after, a dark secret kept by Lacy is revealed–he has been keeping a young man (Bill Skarsgård) in a steel cage in an alcove of the prison that no one else knew about. The young man won’t give his name, and won’t say anything but “Henry Deaver”.
So they call Henry Deaver (André Holland), who grew up in Castle Rock and is now working in Texas as a lawyer for death row innmates. He has been a sort of local celebrity since he was a kid, when he disappeared with his father when the temperature was below zero. His father (Adam Rothenberg) was found shortly after that, injured in a fall from a cliff onto a frozen lake, but Henry wasn’t found until eleven days later, with no explanation for his whereabouts. Most of the townspeople decided Henry had attempted to kill his father; part of the reason he left the town was to get away from the accusatory glares of the locals.
Henry travels all the way to Castle Rock only to find that the new warden denies the existence of the man who asked for him. The situations just gets weirder and weirder as new details of the case come to light, and in usual Stephen King fashion, it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s not.
The Handmaid’s Tale is a TV show presented on the Hulu streaming service, based on the 1984 Margaret Atwood novel of the same name, which was previously reviewed here, about a near-future dystopia in which the USA has become an extremely oppressive theocracy in which women are second-class citizens, especially the handmaids who are little more than breeding stock. Season three aired on Netflix in 2019 (season 1 was reviewed here, and season 2 here).
Season 2 ended with June (Elisabeth Moss) having her baby after escaping from her servitude and living on the run for some time, with the help of the baby’s probable father Nick (Max Minghella), but only enjoyed her motherhood for minutes before being taken again with her baby. But, after being forced back into her role as handmaid she had the opportunity to smuggle the newborn baby away and she took it, and the season ended with the baby being smuggled out, even with the assistance of Serena (Yvonee Strahovski) who would have legally been the mother of the baby by the laws of Gilead.
In season three, June soon comes to terms with the fact that she won’t be able to smuggle her first daughter Hannah out of Gilead. But she is not going to just lie down and take it. She still serves under Joseph which gives her more opportunity than other handmaids–he is more lenient on many of the rules of how they’re supposed to behave, and June is determined to take advantage of.
This season felt like a marked change in the course of the series, from a scenario where the women are just trying to survive from day to day to a scenario where the women are uniting to fight back in a huge way. I feel like that was made possible in aprt by reducing some of the restrictions on them (which seems less plausible given June’s disappearance and reappearance).
It is an excellent addition to the series, and well worth seeing.
What Do You Meme is a 2017 meme-based competitive punchline card game by Fuckjerry. Each player is dealt a hand of cards, and then for each round an image from a meme is displayed for everyone and they have to pick the best caption for the image from their hand. One player acts as the judge in each round, picking their favorite caption for the image, and then the player who wins is the judge for the next round.
It’s basically an image-based version of Cards Against Humanity, where instead of the question cards there are image cards. Like Cards Against Humanity, it’s aimed at adult audiences, as there’s quite a bit of profanity and sex jokes and other things like that, so it’s not a game you’d want to play with someone who was easily offended or if you’d be embarrassed to read that kind of joke to them.
Audience I wouldn’t play this with or around kids unless you want them to pick up some bad language that they might use at school. I would personally only try it with friends that I know well enough to know what offends them.
Challenge I’s not really challenging, it’s basically competitive multiple-choice punchline choosing. There might be a tiny bit of strategy involved in trying to pick a punchline that would appeal to that particular judge, or trying to save a particularly funny answer card for the perfectly suited question card. There is a high element of chance in how good the cards you get are, sometimes I’ve had to sit on a dud for the whole game because it wasn’t funny and I didn’t want to waste a round playing it.A
Session Time You could play as many or as few rounds as you want, so very customizable. You could play for 5 minutes or for hours if you have a group that’s enjoying it who don’t know the cards.
Replayability Certainly some replayability, but if you play it too often the repetition of the cards, and the loss of the surprise-humor would make it less enjoyable. Which was true of Cards Against Humanity, but I think it’s even more true here, because the images will probably lose their humor more quickly, especially ones having to do with current politics.
Originality Since it is basically Cards Against Humanity which in itself is basically “Apples To Apples for adults” the premise isn’t particularly original, though the individual writing for the cards (which is the highlight of the game anyway) is very original.
Overall I’ve enjoyed playing this game a couple times with friends who I know well enough to not feel that I have to worry too much about them being offended. After a couple of rounds of it, the images are already getting kind of old, so I don’t feel like this game has a great deal of staying power. Overall it’s a fun game though, and can be a riot with the right group. You can find it at various retailers, the original and expansion packs for varying prices depending on the size of the pack and how new it is. There are also specific topic packs like a Game of Thrones meme pack.
Sushi Go is a competitive point-scoring strategy game, published in 2013 by Gamewright. The game is based around grabbing sushi as it whirls by and making yourself an excellent three-course meal.
Everyone starts with a hand of cards. You all pick one card, lay it face down on the table. When you’re all ready, you flip the card face up so everyone can see it and pass your entire hand of remaining cards to the left, and this repeats until all of the cards are depleted. That constitutes one round. A full game is three rounds, at the end of which whoever has the most points win the game.
Nigiri are the easiest cards to score; they’re each worth 1, 2, or 3 points flat. If you get three sashimi you get 10 points for the group, but if you have only one or two, they’re worth nothing. Wasabi is worth nothing by itself, but if you play one, your next nigiri is worth triple its face value. Pudding, the dessert, aren’t scored at the end of the round like all of the other cards, but is all saved for the end, at which point the player with the most pudding gets 6 points and the one with the least (including 0) loses 6 points. Chopsticks, once played, can be used for a future round to pick two cards out of the hand instead of one.
It’s a fast-paced game, and can be very quiet as each of you silently picks a card and passes for the round. At the beginning, when you have the most cards to pick from, you have a very incomplete view of the cards in play, so you don’t know if there are enough sashimi to actually get a full set. As you play, you can see how everyone else’s strategies are forming and you can pick the method to score the most yourself or block someone else’s strategy.
The game says that it’s for ages 8+, but my 5-year-old loves the game and wants to play it every night. They’ve got all of the scoring systems memorized and understands the strategies to playing each of them (even if they don’t always make the shrewdest decisions. The game can be played by 2-5 players, and is a great way to pass the time.
Audience All ages who are old enough to be ready for this type of strategy. Like I said, my 5 year old plays it very well and loves every minute.
Challenge Can be quite challenging, depending on how competitive your fellow players are. The most ambitious strategies are also designed to be a gamble, so you might play sashimis only to find that there are only 2 in the set of hands being passed around. If you play a wasabi early in the hopes of seeing a 3-point squid nigiri, you might only find 1-point egg nigiri. So there’s a strategic gambling to the whole game setup.
Session Time You can play a full game in maybe 10-15 minutes, so reasonably quick, if not as quick as some other games.
Replayability Lots of replayability, your strategies might or might not be rigid, but the variations of the card combinations and the other player’s strategies serve to keep it fresh.
Originality I haven’t played a game similar to this, fun and original.
Overall A very fun and fast-paced strategy scoring game where chance plays a big enough factor that the best strategist isn’t going to just walk away with a win easily. Suitable for people of all ages, and is a lot of fun, (and inspired us to try eating sushi for the first time).
The Lightning Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical is a 2017 fantasy musical about the modern day children of the ancient Greek gods, based on The Lightning Thief of 2005, the first book in the Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordon.
Percy Jackson is a troubled kid who lives with his mom and his abusive stepfather, and has been kicked out of five schools in six years for behavior problems. He tries, but between ADHD and dyslexia, it often seems like the world is out to get him, though he has a good relationship with his mother.
But one day, on a field trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, his life takes a sharp turn for the weird when his substitute teacher Mrs. Dodds draws him away from the rest of the group and turns into a monster. With the help of his mentor and teacher Mr. Brunner who hands him a pen that turns into a sword, he slays the monster and survives, but then Mr. Brunner claims that nothing happened and that there is no such teacher, and he gets expelled from yet another school.
Left reeling again, and feeling betrayed by everyone who doesn’t believe, Percy doesn’t know what to do, when he and his mother are attacked by yet another monster, and soon he finds out that he there are reasons why he seems so different from everyone else–he is the son of a Greek god, and he will soon go to a summer camp called Camp Half Blood where the children of Greek gods to learn how to fight and about all of the godly politics that actually decide much of the natural world. His best friend Grover reveals he has been keeping secrets about who he is since he met him, and he meets other demigods like Annabeth, daughter of Athena, who is about the same age.
Percy doesn’t know yet which god is his parent, and he is thrown into this strange new world with very little to go on. And soon he is sent on his first hero’s quest!
I hadn’t read the book yet when I saw the play, so I came in completely fresh. It was a good introduction to it overall, though you could tell where major parts of the book were stripped out, leaving weird gaps and logical holes, and places where lyrics were added that didn’t really make sense or have no context. It is a really catchy soundtrack, in particular, “Drive” which is an action-packed road trip song as the three heroes try to take buses and hitchhike across the country is a great song, as well as “DOA”, about the modern manifestation of the Underworld which takes the guise of a record company. It’s a lot of fun, and I would recommend it, though if you have questions about plot holes or out-of-context lyrics, check out the book as well.
Exploding Kittens is a card game designed by Elan Lee and Shane Small, published by The Oatmeal, that describes itself as a “highly strategic kitten-powered version of Russian Roulette”, published in 2015.
When you play the game, the deck will have one less exploding kitten in the deck then there are people playing. Each turn you can play one or more cards from your hand, and your turn ends when you draw the next card from the deck. If the next card is an exploding kitten, then you lose! Unless you have a Defuse card (everyone starts with one and there are more in the deck). Defuse card lets you put the exploding kitten somewhere back into the deck.
Many of the cards, even if they’re part of a common type, have different artwork and explanations that are fun to read. So the Defuse might be a laser pointer that is used to distract the kitten from exploding, but it might be something else.
So, the exploding kitten and the defuse are definitely the two most important types of card in the game. But there are a variety of other cards to help strategize with. A See The Future card lets you pick at the top few cards on the deck without drawing them, so that you can decide whether to draw or to avert a crisis by playing a Shuffle card to reshuffle the deck, or play an Attack card that skips your draw and forces the next person to draw two cards instead of one.
My personal favorite card is the “Nope!” card. All other cards you can only play when it’s your turn, but you can play a “Nope!” card at any time to cancel out whatever card was played previously. Just slap down that Nope and say “Nope!”. They think they’re going to see the future to peek into the deck? Nope! They think they’re going to defuse that exploding kitten? Nope! They think they’re going to “Nope!” your card? Nope!
It’s a pretty quick game to play once you get the strategy, and can be played with two or more, a fun game to strategize and kill some time.
Audience Suitable for all ages, though it would help if they’re old enough to read they could learn to recognize the colors of the different cards if they’re a little bit too young. Don’t need kids for it to be fun.
Challenge Can be reasonably challenging if you try to be as prepared for the exploding kittens as you can be, but there is a huge element of chance in that whether you draw the kitten and whether you draw extra defuses and other important factors decide a lot of it. If you’re a good strategist you’ll do better, but you still can’t always win.
Session Time Each round is generally done in around 5 minutes, you can play as many rounds as you want.
Replayability Plenty replayable, I’ve played it for hours and it didn’t get old, with the variety of cards in the deck.
Originality Fun silly original premise and the play isn’t like any other card game I’ve played.
Overall Nice compact fast-paced game, easy to learn and fun to play, can be played with groups of different sizes and the face pace would keep it entertaining for kids. The different illustration and explanation for each individual card even if they’re identical in functionality are a fun and nice touch. Lots of fun!
Cards Against Humanity advertises itself as a “party game for horrible people” that was created by 8 Highland Park students in Illinois and is now published by Cards Against Humanity, LLC. The game is very similar to the children’s game Apples to Apples, but generally aimed at a mature audience (or at least, an adult audience, if not necessarily mature).
To play, each player is dealt seven white “answer” cards. Then a single black “question” card is played that everyone can see and each person apart from one person who is the judge for the round has to pick what they think would be the best answer card in their hand to combine with it to inspire some kind of reaction (whether it be laughter, disgust, confusion, whatever). The cards are all played facedown and then the judge decides which one they like best, and the one who played that card is the winner of the round and is the judge for the next round.
An example of a black card is “I drink to forget _____”. Which you could choose a white card like “Alcoholism” or “A PowerPoint Presentation”, to name a couple of the cleaner ones, to keep this review on the cleaner side. But many of the cards in the deck are not ones that you’d want to say in front of your mom, or at your average workplace (google for “cards against humanity examples” to find some favorites.
The game aims to be offensive in a funny way, which can admittedly be a hit-and-miss kind of prospect. Sex is probably the most common topic, but many of them also touch politics, adoption, pregnancy, race, a lot of other topics. The judge for the round reads all of the entries aloud to the group before deciding, so part of the fun is picking cards that would be funny for that person to say.
If you play you’re going to want to consider who you’re playing with, I’d probably only want to play with people I know pretty well so that they would know very well so I didn’t have to worry too much about what might bother them. Much of the humor is based around not expecting the cards that get read, so the game can wear out if you play it too many times, it’s not one you’re going to want to break out every weekend.
Audience I wouldn’t play this with or around kids unless you want them to pick up some bad language that they might use at school. I would personally only try it with friends that I know well enough to know what offends them.
Challenge Not really challenging, it’s basically competitive multiple-choice punchline choosing. There might be a tiny bit of strategy involved in trying to pick a punchline that would appeal to that particular judge, or trying to save a particularly funny answer card for the perfectly suited question card. There is a high element of chance in how good the cards you get are, sometimes I’ve had to sit on a dud for the whole game because it wasn’t funny and I didn’t want to waste a round playing it.A
Session Time You could play as many or as few rounds as you want, so very customizable. You could play for 5 minutes or for hours if you have a group that’s enjoying it who don’t know the cards.
Replayability Certainly some replayability, but if you play it too often the repetition of the cards, and the loss of the surprise-humor would make it less enjoyable.
Originality Since it is basically “Apples To Apples for adults” the premise isn’t particularly original, though the individual writing for the cards (which is the highlight of the game anyway) is very original.
Overall I’ve enjoyed playing this game now and then with friends whom I know well enough, but because of some of the content it is more limited in where and when I can play it (I don’t play it when kids are around, and I’m not going to bring it to work to play at lunch)–if you want one you can play anywhere and anywhen and with anyone you can grab Apples To Apples instead. I have played it enough times with people in a short stretch of time that the cards lost some of their humor from repetition. Overall it’s a fun game though, and can be a riot with the right group. You can find it at various retailers, the original and expansion packs for varying prices depending on the size of the pack and how new it is. There are also specific topic packs like a science fiction pack.
The Boxtrolls is a 2014 claymation film by Focus Features. Everyone knows Boxtrolls are dangerous monsters. Everyone knows they capture and eat children. This is only confirmed when a boy is taken by them, and the exterminator Archibald Snatcher (Ben Kingsley) establishes a deal with the cheese-loving aristocratic council The White Hats that if he exterminates all of the boxtrolls they will let him join their council.
What everyone knows is wrong. Boxtrolls are peaceful creatures who hide from humanity and whose only interaction with them has been to scavenge human garbage for tools and other things of interest. They’re called boxtrolls because each one wears a box as a sort of permanent garment, like a hermit crab’s shell, and will retreat into their box as a refuge to hide. A boy lives among them, called Eggs (Isaac Hempstead Wright) (because he wears a box with a picture of eggs on it), who thinks he’s a boxtroll like any other. He is the boy who had disappeared years ago, his very existence acting as the proof of the fraud of Snatcher’s arrangement with the White Hats. As Eggs witnesses the continual disappearance of boxtrolls, he decides to venture up to the surface where he finds out about Snatcher’s quest to exterminate them all.
The setting and character design are particularly good because the characters each have their own characteristic style, from the sinister and greasy character of Snatcher, to the polished and aloof White Hats, to the grubby but well-grounded Eggs.
The Boxtrolls is a fun, funny, and well-paced movie that’s well worth watching, that does enough unexpected to keep things interesting. The boxtrolls themselves are easy to root for and loveable, while both Snatcher and the White Hats are easy to root against.
Pokémon Detective Pikachu is a live-and-CG children’s mystery/action movie based on the Pokémon franchise.
Through most of the world they are mostly used as the fighting creatures we know them as from the game/card franchises, who are trained by humans and pitted against each other in arena-style battles against other Pokémon. Ryme City is the exception, where humans and Pokémon live together as fellow citizens, each human citizen paired with a Pokémon citizen.
Tim Goodman (Justic Smith) is a 21-year-old insurance salesman in a world where are real. He used to love Pokémon but lost interest when his mother died, and his dad took a detective job in Ryme City and has had very little contact since. But when Tim is informed that his father has disappeared, he travels to Ryme City to take care of his father’s affairs. While he’s there he meets a strange Pikachu (Ryan Reynolds), the only Pokémon he’s ever heard of who can talk with a human. Pikachu wants to be a detective, and seems to have been Tim’s father’s Pokémon partner, but he has no memories.
He also meets junior reporter Lucy Stevens (Kathryn Newton) and her Psyduck companion, who claim that they have information about Tim’s father’s disappearance. They work together to investigate clues about what actually happened.
This was fun and funny, and had plenty of action to keep the kids interested, dialog and story, it’s all around quite a lot of fun. You don’t have to know much about Pokémon to follow the movie, though there are jokes and references that Pokémon followers will get that others want (I knew just enough to get a few of them, but I’m sure I missed many). Recommended, and fun for the kids.
MIB International is a science fiction action/comedy movie, the 4th and most recent movie in the Men In Black series about a secret government agency that keeps the world safe from intergalactic security threats as well as ensuring that extraterrestrial residents of Earth can live in peace and secrecy among us. When someone joins the Men In Black, they give up all remnants of their former life to devote their lives to the cause.
As with previous movies, this one follows a pair of MIB agents working together against some new threat against the world. This time the agents are Agent M (Tessa Thompson) and Agent C (Chris Hemsworth), working under the leadership of High T (Liam Neeson) in the London office of the MIB.
Agent M had been Molly Wright, who witnessed her parents meeting with the MIB after an alien snuck into their house. Molly’s parents thought that she was asleep, so her memory of the event did not get wiped like her parents’ did. She committed her life and extraordinary academic career into seeking out the Men In Black and finally earned a position in them.
Agent C is a living legend, having fought off an invasion of The Hive with High T using only their wits and Series 7 De-Atomizers. His ways are unorthodox, to say the least, much looser than the usual stiff MIB protocol, and probably only tolerated because High T is the leader.
There’s a new threat to the world, a new excursion of the all-subsuming Hive and it’s up to Agent M and Agent C to stop it.
I love the series, and this one had a lot of potential. I love both Tessa Thompson and Chris Hemsworth to bits, and I thought that they did an exemplary job with the parts given to them, but I felt like the parts given to them were a little 2-dimensional. The movie was all right but I wanted more from it, especially since this is #4 in the series, the novelty can’t carry it at this point and nothing spectacularly new was done with the premise. So, not bad, it was fine, I loved seeing the two lead actors in particular, but I felt like it didn’t reach its potential.
