Smile is the kind of horror movie that works mostly for intangible elements that it brings to the table. The music is creepy. The scares hit at the right times. The acting is pretty credible. There is good creepiness throughout the movie, and it builds pretty well.
What the movie lacks is originality. The plot involves a psychiatrist, Rose, whose patient tells her about being stalked by an unknown entity who is always smiling at her. This eventually drives the woman crazy, and she commits suicide in front of Rose. Now Rose is being haunted and stalked by the same entity that was terrorizing her patient. What she finds is a pattern, where the person who recently committed suicide witnessed a person committing suicide and then goes crazy that goes back to twenty different people. This sort of thing has been done and done again—a curse that keeps being passed from person to person involving an evil entity that must be broken.
So, the movie doesn’t score points for originality, not just in the premise, but within the movie, where it was easy to predict what was going to happen next. Still, it had enough good horror within it to be an enjoyable movie that will make you smile—pun fully intended.
After reading the final book in the Dark Legacy of Shannara trilogy, this series has to rank among the better ones I have read from Terry Brooks. It’s a similar story that he’s told before involving descendants of characters he has written in the past in similar situations with similar stakes and similar talismans. Even though he’s not breaking any new ground, and I wouldn’t give this series or this novel high points for originality, it was well written, entertaining, and compelling. It was also a good bit darker than most of Brooks’s other works. Many characters died in the series, and a heavy price was paid even by the survivors.
As far as this novel goes, the weakest part of the book involved Railing Ohmsford seeking out Grianne Ohmsford in an attempt to rescue his brother. That seemed like the least consequential part of the novel that was designed to give Railing something to do. The better parts of the novel involved the Straken Lord and his army of dark creatures escaping the Forebidding and trying to conquer the Four Lands. The battle scenes were well done. Also, the Ellesindil sisters trying to save the Ellcrys was also well done. The build was strong as was the finale. There is everything that you would want in a Shannara book and series represented here so if you like Terry Brooks, you will enjoy reading this.
I thoroughly enjoyed the first two novels and eagerly anticipated finishing the series, which was probably why I was so disappointed with Only Human. This novel fell flat and instead of ending the trilogy with a bang, it ended it with a whimper. It’s hard to say exactly where the novel went wrong, but so much about it annoyed me. I didn’t care for how the main characters reacted to both their time on the foreign planet and then their return. I wasn’t buying how the people of Earth reacted to the aftermath of the alien robots arriving on the planet and killing so many, with the establishment of concentration camps for those who had a higher concentration of alien DNA. It just didn’t make any sense to me. And whereas I enjoyed the style of storytelling, through journal entries and interviews, in this novel it got ridiculous at times. There would be situations where the characters are being chased and shot at but were still dictating a running commentary of the situation. It felt artificial and trite. Oh, and the use of alien words that I didn’t understand was utterly pointless.
That’s not to say that the entire novel was bad. There was some level of intrigue to it, but mostly it didn’t work. In particular the robot fight at the end was just dumb. If you read and enjoyed the first two novels, you would be better off not reading this and coming up with your own ending.
It’s hard to give a full review for the first season of House of the Dragon. There was so much going on in the season, and it was quite different than any show I’ve ever seen. Some of it was good and some not so good.
The most jarring aspect of the show were the two time-jumps. At first, I didn’t like the switching of the actors and didn’t think it was entirely necessary to do so, especially since I liked some of the younger actors better, particularly young Rhaenyra. Of course, I didn’t realize that there would be a second time jump, necessitating the changing of the actors. However, it made no sense that they kept Ser Criston Cole and Daemon Targaryen, when the actors playing those roles were so much younger than the characters in the latter part of the season. They didn’t even bother trying to age them.
Game of Thrones was one of my all time favorite shows, and I don’t think season one of House of the Dragon quite measures up to it even though there was a lot about the show that I liked. Whereas Game of Thrones was a mix of magic, palace intrigue, and epic fighting scenes mixed in, House of the Dragon is much more about the palace intrigue, with dragons being more of a side show than the main event. The blend of those elements is what made Game of Thrones work so well.
What stood out on the show was the quality of the acting, especially Paddy Considine as King Viserys I Targaryen and Matt Smith as Daemon Targaryen. The birth scenes were kind of like a war unto themselves and were overdone. The CGI with the dragons improved quite a bit over the years. Some of the gaps in logic were a bit much. As an example, it was so obvious that Rhaenyra’s first children were not from her husband, that it was almost preposterous that they would even try to masquerade it. Also, at the end Rhaenys Targaryen could have wiped out all of her Targaryen enemies and it was silly for her not to.
So, it was a bit of a mixed bag, but the good definitely overshadowed the not so good. It’s a worthy successor to Game of Thrones and I think with less jarring time jumps, the second season should be better than the first.
I really enjoyed the first book in this series. With the bar set high, Waking Gods, did not disappoint. The book takes place a number of years after the end of the first book. It starts with the robot giant, Themis, touring around the world, and preparing just in case aliens invade the planet—and they do. This book features robots coming to Earth, and Themis engaging them in fights. It’s readily apparent that Themis can’t possibly fight all of them. As people die by the millions from these robot encounters, the humans need to find an alternate way of dealing with the situation—a way to prove to the aliens that humans are worthy of surviving as a species.
The quality of the writing in this novel is strong. Although most of the time I didn’t mind the nontraditional storytelling method of using mission logs, journal entries, and interviews to tell the story, sometimes it gets a bit wonky. Like when there is a life and death situation, and the person is narrating real time what is happening. That makes absolutely no sense, and it is clearly a vehicle used to tell the story. In a real life situation, that would never happen. But the story telling is good enough to overcome that. Overall, it was a fun read, with some good twists and reveals along the way. The author is also not afraid to kill off big characters, which can be very risky for the author, but it also often pays big dividends. This is a good novel that I would recommend.
Sleeping Giants is a really cool book in a lot of ways. I’m generally not a big fan of novels that are not written in a traditional manner. The whole experimental style is usually not my thing since I think often times it is a gimmick being used because the writing is subpar, but that is clearly not the case here. The book is written as a series of news reports, journal entries, and interviews by a nameless, faceless, yet very powerful governmental agent. It’s done in a clever manner. An easy comparison for this novel is World War Z, but I thought the way this story was told was far superior to the way World War Z was told. With World War Z it wasn’t a continuous narrative that you could follow from beginning to end. It felt more like bits and pieces scattered. In this novel, I could follow the story entirely, despite the non-traditional narrative style.
The novel had an interesting and unique premise. Various parts of a giant robot, far technologically superior than anything we have is scattered around the world. The US puts together a team of scientists and military to find these pieces, put them together, and learn how to use this robot, all in a way that threatens a world war. Despite the lack of a traditional narrative style, the characters are well developed. There are about four or five main characters, and they are all distinctive and have strong personalities. There are also some interesting twists and turns along the way.
All in all, this is a refreshing and creative novel that I would recommend.
