Tag: analysis

Ponty Reviews: Stray (2022)

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2024 is in full swing, and Ponty is already pitching in with his hot takes on video games.

His latest review covers the 2022 video game Stray, in which players take control of a feline protagonist in a post-apocalyptic world.

I remember when Stray hit a couple years ago.  The premise seemed intriguing, and gameplay footage and screenshots looked gorgeous.  The Blade Runner aesthetic and MS-DOS-faced robots added another level of charm.

Cats and the Internet go hand in paw, and pretty soon even the most casual of gamers—but the most ardent of cat lovers—were playing the game.  I even recall rumors that the game would be up for Game of the Year, though that didn’t happen for reasons Ponty eludes to in his review.

It’s also a favorite among couples, as most women even loosely associated or familiar with gaming love cats, some to the point of building their personalities around it.  Naturally, these cat moms flocked to the game.

I have not played the game, unfortunately, but I’d like to try it.  I do have to wonder, though—why didn’t somebody think of this concept sooner?  Given the gaming world’s love of cats, it seems like a slam dunk.  In the case of Stray, it really was!

With that, here’s Ponty’s review of Stray:

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Monday Morning Movie Review: Deadwax (2018)

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I’ve watched some great flicks lately—and some truly terrible ones.  The holidays hit, and I forgot about them!  I guess the “great flicks” weren’t all that great after all.

My plan for 2024 is to move away from just reviewing weird horror movies, and instead getting into some of the timeless classics (some of which, of course, will be weird horror movies).  I’ve been hankering for some high quality viewing.  Just like food, there’s only so much garbage you can absorb before you’re ready to eat a steak.  Just as my body starts craving real food after a week of eating pathetic sandwiches and bachelor chow-tier spaghetti, so does my mind crave excellence after watching the grindhouse trash on Shudder.

But that’s to come.  Although I’ve nearly exhausted Shudder’s extensive library of the good, the bad, and the terrible (pretty much any horror movie made in the last five years, or any horror flick with Canadian actors), I stumbled upon a series—not a movie—called Deadwax (2018).

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SubscribeStar Saturday: The Spirit of 1776, Three Years On

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A very Happy Birthday to our dedicated senior correspondent, Audre Myers.  Have a great day, Audre!

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It’s been three years since the New Epiphany Rising (the original Epiphany Rising was in 1400), when Americans protested the outcome of the 2020 election.  We’re now staring down another presidential election in just ten months.  Where are we now?

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TBT: Napoleonic Christmas

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Somehow, I’d never reblogged this classic TPP post until this summer, when I did a retrospective look back at TPP’s Greatest Hits; “Napoleonic Christmas” came in as “Track III” on that list.  This post got picked up by a conservative news aggregator back in 2019, which caused its views to skyrocket.

I have always possessed a certain fascination with France and the French, and Napoleon is easily the most fascinating Frenchman of all.  That’s somewhat ironic considering he was a Corsican, from an island that belonged to an Italian city-state until said city-state needed to settle some debts with France and handed over the island in lieu of payment.  The Bonaparte family was from a line of minor Italian nobility, and were fiercely in favor of Corsican independence.

Funny how that works:  an Italian from a nationalistic Corsican family became the greatest political and military figure in modern French history.  We can never know what might become of a life.

As I’ve learned more about Napoleon, I disagree more with Andrew Roberts’s assessment of Napoleon in the linked video.  While Napoleon may have been responding to declarations of war by going on the offensive, he also had clear designs to stretch his influence all the way to India.  Indeed, he sought to emulate his hero, Alexander the Great.  The French also mercilessly plundered the cultural and artistic heritage of Italy in the process.

Regardless, Napoleon is a fascinating and complicated figure, and if he doesn’t earn our admiration, he certainly earned our grudging respect.

With that, here is 23 December 2019’s “Napoleonic Christmas“:

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Lazy Sunday CXXXII: Christmas Concert Reviews

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The major professional highlight of the Christmas season for yours portly is the annual Christmas Concert at school, a time-honored tradition that is frequently honored in the breach (leave a comment and I’ll explain what I mean by that).  It’s a huge undertaking for myself and my students, but when everything clicks, it makes for a truly magical experience.

Here are past posts about Christmas concerts from 2021-2023:

Happy Sunday—and Merry Christmas!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

Memorable Monday Morning Movie Review: A Very Portly Christmas: It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)

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With Christmas Break looms large, I’m taking it a bit easier with the old blog.  I’ve seen some great—and not-so-great—movies lately, but they can wait a few weeks for 2024.

Instead, I thought I’d take a look back at a timeless Christmas classic of yesteryear, a film I reviewed along with Audre Myers and Ponty during the 2022 Christmas season.

That film, of course, is 1946’s It’s a Wonderful Life.  It’s a film that is somehow more than a mere movie.  It’s a flick that can be judged and appreciated as a movie, of course, but it’s also one that transcends the medium, and is part of the whole Zeitgeist of Christmas.  It’s hard to separate it from the very notion of “Christmas.”

With that, here’s my review from last year:

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Christmas Concert 2023 Review

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Eight days ago (Friday, 8 December 2023), my students had their annual Christmas Concert.  The Christmas Concert is one of the two marquee concert events of the school year, the other being the more amorphous Spring Concert, which can fall pretty much anywhere between March and April (and even early May).  Of the two, the Christmas Concert is my favorite, and while it’s also one of the most stressful days of the year, it’s also one of my favorites.

Our Christmas Concert follows a predictable format, consisting of performances from our choir, our World Language classes, and finally from my Middle School and High School Music Ensembles.  Historically, dance classes have performed pieces prior to the musical portion of the concert, but this year marked the first that dances were not included, as the dance class performed before the Christmas Musical, which was on Friday, 1 December 2023.

Honestly, excluding dances was a major improvement.  I have nothing (well, not much) against dance as an art form, but it was never a comfortable fit in an already-overstuffed Christmas concert format.  It also adds some minor additional headaches for yours portly, who in the past has had to move pianos in the middle of the concert to accommodate the dancers.  At the risk of editorializing (but isn’t that the whole point of a blog?), I find most of these “dance” routines to be rather distasteful and a tad lurid, although I am to report that this year’s dance performance was really exceptional, tasteful, and beautiful.

But I digress.  What of the music itself?  Let’s dig in, like a Wisconsin dad shoveling snow.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Boring Politics

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Has anyone else noticed how boring politics has become?  I don’t mean to imply that nothing is happening—I mean, we had a Speaker of the House fired for the first time in American history a couple of months ago—but it all seems so… dull.

If everything was hunky-dory, it would be fine for politics to be boring.  Indeed, it would be great—we want to live in a world where the issues that face us are so miniscule, we can elect boring people to administer boring, predictable law and order.

But the opposite is the case.  Everything sucks.  Our government is wildly oppressive.  Our institutions can’t pave the roads adequately, much less govern the country.  People aren’t allowed to say anything reasonable in public without losing their jobs.  Inflation is through the roof.  Wages are stagnant.  China owns everything.  Our leaders want to drag us into wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East that involve ancient clans battling over ancient grievances.  Peaceful protestors—actual ones, not progressives robbing their local Wendy’s—are in federal prison without trial because they were invited to walk through the Capitol Building.

In spite of all of that, politics is boring.  I think I know why.

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Monday Morning Movie Review: Napoleon (2023)

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Hollywood is in a weird place right now.  All of the major franchises and studios are bombing at the theaters.  The Marvel Cinematic Universe used to be a money-printing machine; now, it’s dropping like Iron Man in Avengers: Endgame (2019).  Disney is sinking faster than The Little Mermaid‘s hometown.  Star Wars is exploding as if a couple of proton torpedoes hit its reactor core.

At the same time, there have been some major prestige films that have done well with critics and audiences alike.  Oppenheimer (2023) became a cultural phenomenon due to its release alongside Barbie (2023).  Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) is earning accolades.

Now there’s another nearly-three-hour-long flick charging cinemas, and it’s quite good:  Ridley Scott’s Napoleon (2023).

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Acceptance

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Readers are likely familiar with the Kübler-Ross model of the five stages of grief.  It’s one of those psychological models that has percolated into the popular culture.  As is often the case, The Simpsons illustrates it better than I can:

When it comes to the future of our nation, I’ve reached the “Acceptance” phase after many, many years in the other phases.

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