Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 3

BLADE OF FLAMES cover image & book description

I am now far enough along with editing to share the cover image of BLADE OF FLAMES, which you can see below!

The book description follows. If all goes well, I hope to have it out before the end of September.

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In an hour of darkness, a new hero awakens.

Talembur awakens alone in a forgotten catacomb, his memory lost. 

Sinister enemies wielding dark magic pursue him, seeking to claim the sword he bears. 

Yet while Talembur might have forgotten his past, his skills have not left him. 

He will make his enemies beware, for he knows how to wield the deadly sword that he carries…

-JM

Question of the Week: Guns In Fantasy

It’s time for Question of the Week, which is intended for enjoyable discussions of interesting topics!

This week’s question – do you dislike guns showing up in fantasy novels? No wrong answers, obviously.

The inspiration for this question was a blog post I saw where the writer was complaining about the increased number of guns in modern fantasy novels and how it shatters her suspension of disbelief.

For myself, I have no strong feelings about it one way or another. I do think guns are best suited to urban fantasy environments – in CLOAK GAMES and CLOAK MAGE, Nadia goes through a lot of guns. Granted, my favorite type of fantasy is what gets called Basic Fantasy or Generic Fantasy, where a barbarian, a dwarf, an elf, and a wizard go to a dungeon and kill orcs and monsters. Firearms would definitely be out of place in that sort of setting.

That said, I think “guns in fantasy” is like any other story trope, and it just needs to be done well to be enjoyable. I suppose it’s a matter of setting the table for reader expectations. Like, if you have a medieval-style fantasy world like HALF-ELVEN THIEF, it would be weird to have guns suddenly show up. But if you create a setting that’s an analogue for 1880s America but with wizards, then guns wouldn’t be out of place.

-JM

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 267: Summer Movie Review Roundup

In this week’s episode, I take a look back at the movies and streaming shows I watched in Summer 2025.

You can listen to the show with transcript at the official Pulp Writer Show site, and you can also listen to it at Spotify, Apple Podcasts , Amazon Music, and Libsyn.

-JM

Coupon of the Week, 9/8/25

Once again it is time for Coupon of the Week!

This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Ghost in the Serpent, Book #1 in the Ghost Armor series, (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) at my Payhip store:

FALLSERPENT50

The coupon code is valid through September 15, 2025 (please note the shorter expiration date). So if you need a new audiobook this fall, we’ve got you covered!

-JM

Permafree Results For Indie Authors

One of the perennial debates in indie author land is whether or not making the first book in your series free still works or not.

At this point, I have a lot of different series and quite a few different ones with free first books in series. I thought it might be interesting to dig into the sales data and see what percentage of people who downloaded the first book went on to the second book and then the final book in the series.

A few caveats and conditions:

-First, this is only for 2024 and 2025, since I wanted a set time sample for the data. Additionally, this is useful for showing the conversion rate on a finished series that hasn’t had a new book in years.

-Second, it will only apply to series whose first books were free for that entire time period.

-Third, when I talk about “conversion rates”, I mean what percentage of free downloads translated into sales. For example, if Book 1 had a hundred free downloads, and then 12 sales of Book 2 and 9 sales of the final book, that means twelve percent of people went on to the second book, and then nine percent onto the final book. So we had a conversion rate of 12% from the free first book to the paid second book, and a conversion rate of 9% from the free first book to the final book in the series.

So, with all that in mind, let’s take a look at permafree conversion rates for some of my series in 2024 and 2025.

-THE GHOSTS. 13.47% percent went to the 2nd book, and 12.72% went on to the final book.

-FROSTOBRN. 13% went to the 2nd book, and 12.93% to the final book.

-SEVENFOLD SWORD. 22.93% went to the 2nd book, and 22.81% on to the final book.

-CLOAK GAMES. 11.85% went on to the 2nd book, and 11.67% on to the final book.

-SILENT ORDER. 14.64% went to the 2nd book, and 14.54% went to the final book.

-THE TOWER OF ENDLESS WORLDS. 17.46% went to the 2nd book, and 17.46% went on to the final book.

So, I think there are a couple of conclusions we can draw from this.

First, making the first book in a series permafree remains a viable marketing strategy. It doesn’t usually result in dramatic spikes of sales, but is instead good at generating more of a steady trickle.

Second, anything you can do to increase the number of downloads of your free ebooks will likely increase the sales of the paid books later in the series. That said, there are caveats. You want methods to increase the free downloads to people that might conceivably be interested in buying the books. Targeted advertising can be an effective way to do this. What’s not effective is using bot farms or help from a bunch of scammers to generate a big download in free books. At best, you’ll generate a bunch of downloads that won’t convert. At worst, the ebook platforms will detect suspicious activity and either delist your free ebook or suspend your account.

Third, this strategy works even with books that you don’t promote very often. For example, I don’t bash on THE TOWER OF ENDLESS WORLDS because for some people it’s their favorite book of mine, but in all candor I do think it’s one of my weaker books. I was trying to do something with urban fantasy I don’t think I had the skills to do until CLOAK GAMES, which was like twelve years later. So I don’t really promote it, save that I made the first book in the series free a long time ago and kept it that way. Yet still seventeen percent of the people who downloaded the first book continued to the final one.

Fourth, this strategy does require some patience. It can take a while for people to read through a series, and it can also take a while for a free book to get traction.

Fifth, I at times hesitate to recommend this because saying “write five books and make the first one free” is easy to say, but it is a lot of work to do. For many new writers, getting that first book done and out into the world is a monumental challenge. Then telling them to do it three or four more times and then to make the first book free seems like a big ask.

But it does work. Sometimes slowly, but it does work.

With that in mind, here is a link to all my currently free books.

-JM

BLADE OF FLAMES rough draft done!

I am pleased to report that the rough draft of BLADE OF FLAMES, the first book in my new BLADES OF RUIN epic fantasy, is now finished!

Next up is THUNDER HAMMER, a free short story that newsletter subscribers will get in ebook form when BLADE OF FLAMES comes out. THUNDER HAMMER will have the backstory of one of the characters from BLADE OF FLAMES.

Watch this space for a cover image soon, along with some excerpts from the book!

-JM

Advertising Results For August 2025

I haven’t posted an ad results roundup for a couple of months, partly because it’s been a really busy summer, and partly because I’ve been adjusting some things and waiting to see the results. I’ll explain more later in the post, but the short version is that I’m losing confidence in the effectiveness of Facebook ads.

But first, let’s see some advertising results for August 2025!

Let’s start with Facebook ads, where I advertised THE GHOSTS, CLOAK GAMES/MAGE, and the FROSTBORN series.

THE GHOSTS $8,40 back for every $1 spent, with 6% of the profit coming from the audiobooks. This one was likely a bit of an anomaly, because GHOST IN THE SIEGE did a lot of heavy lifting for the series.

CLOAK GAMES/MAGE: $2.70 back for every $1 spent, with 12% of the revenue coming from the audiobooks.

FROSTBORN: $2.83 for every $1 spent, with 30% of the revenue coming from the audiobooks.

Now on to Amazon ads. Remember, for an Amazon ad to be profitable, it needs to generate at least one sale/complete KU readthrough for every 6-8 clicks.

DEMONSOULED OMNIBUS ONE: $5 back for every $1 spent, with a sale for every 0.82 clicks.

HALF-ELVEN THIEF: $1.22 for every $1 spent, with a sale for every 2.47 clicks.

DRAGONSKULL OMNIBUS ONE: $28.75 for every $1 spent, with 65% of the profit coming from the audiobook, with a sale for every 0.11 clicks

Obviously these numbers require some explanation. The profit margin on HALF-ELVEN THIEF is narrow, but the entire series made up for it, so that’s okay, and it will get better when I start writing more books in the series later this year. The numbers for DRAGONSKULL OMNIBUS ONE was so high because the ebook is $0.99, but the audiobook brings in a lot more than the ebook.

Bookbub ads do quite well with Google Play and Barnes & Noble. The numbers are too long to quote here but they did quite well.

All that said, the reason I am losing confidence in Facebook ads is a combination of the loss of granular targeting and over-reliance on AI targeting. One of the paradoxes of online advertising is that the smaller and more granular your audience, the more likely your ad is to convert to sales. Narrow, targeted advertising is a lot better than broad targeting. Unfortunately, Facebook has been slowly removing the more granular targeting options in favor of broader categories that don’t work as well. Like, you used to be able to target dozens of fantasy authors as “interests” for Facebook users, now you can only target “epic fantasy” and maybe JRR Tolkien. You can’t even target Brandon Sanderson as an interest, and he’s probably the most popular epic fantasy author today!

To take its place, Facebook has introduced AI assisted targeting, which they call Advantage+. There’s no beating around the bush – Advantage isn’t very good. It can garner a reasonable number of clicks on an ad, but those clicks don’t convert. Even with ads that don’t use Advantage, Facebook still sneaks it in, so the effectiveness of Facebook ads has been declining.

Like, I turned off Facebook ads for the DEMONSOULED series entirely, and my results actually improved a good bit.

So I’m going to test another series with no Facebook ads for September, and we’ll see how much the results vary. Specifically, I think I will turn off Facebook ads for CLOAK GAMES/MAGE, leave them on for FROSTBORN, and see if it makes any difference.

On the plus side, I didn’t lose any money on any of my ads this month, and they all turned a profit.

As always, thanks for reading and listening, everyone!

-JM

 

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 266: Is Writing Fiction Like A Theme Park?

In this week’s episode, I look at what goes into a successful theme park, and compare it to the process of creating a compelling story.

You can listen to the show with transcript at the official Pulp Writer Show site, and you can also listen to it at Spotify, Apple Podcasts , Amazon Music, and Libsyn.

-JM

Coupon of the Week, 9/1/25

Once again it is time for Coupon of the Week!

This coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Dragontiarna series at my Payhip store:

FALLDRAGON25

The coupon code is valid through September 8, 2025 (please note the shorter expiration date). So if you need a new ebook this fall, we’ve got you covered!

-JM

Movie Review Roundup Summer 2025: Westerns, Space Westerns, and Adam Sandler!

The end of summer is upon us, which means it’s time for my Summer Movie Roundup!

As is usual for the summer, I saw a LOT of movies, so this will be one of the longer posts. For some reason I ended up watching a bunch of westerns.

As always, the movies are ranked from least favorite to most favorite. The grades, of course, are totally subjective and based on nothing more than my own opinions and impressions.

Now to the movies!

THE AUSTIN POWERS TRILOGY (1997, 1999, 2002)

The AUSTIN POWERS movies came out just as the Internet really got going in terms of mass adoption, which is likely why so many Austin Powers/Dr. Evil memes are embedded in online culture. Despite that, I had never actually seen any of them all the way through. They’ve been one in the background on TBS or whatever quite a bit when I’ve visited people, but I’ve never seen them all. But I happened upon a DVD of the trilogy for $0.25, I decided to give it a go.

They were funny, but not particularly good.

Obviously they are a parody of the JAMES BOND movies. The movies kind of watch like an extended series of Saturday Night Live skits – like what if Dr. Evil has a son named Scott? What if a British agent from the 60s arrives in the 90s? What if Dr. Evil didn’t understand the concept of inflation and demanded only a million dollars from the United Nations? What if Dr. Evil was actually Austin’s brother, and they went to school together at Spy Academy?

Michael Caine was pretty great as Austin’s father.

Overall, funny, but fairly incoherent.

Overall grade: C-

HORRIBLE BOSSES (2011)

A very dark and raunchy comedy from fourteen years ago.

Interestingly, this reflects what I think is one of the crises of the contemporary era – frequent failures of leadership at all levels of society.

Nick, Dale, and Kurt are lifelong friends living in LA, and all three of them have truly horrible bosses in their places of employment, ranging from a sociopathic finance director, the company founder’s cokehead son, and a boorish dentist with a tendency to sexual harassment. At the bar, they fantasize about killing their horrible bosses, and then mutually decide to do something about it. Obviously, they would all be prime suspects in the murder of their own bosses, but if they killed each other’s bosses, that would allow them to establish airtight alibis.

However, since Nick, Dale, and Kurt are not as bright as they think that they are, it all goes hilariously wrong.

Bob Hope has a hilarious cameo.

If the best “crude comedies” I’ve seen are ANCHORMAN, ZOOLANDER, and TROPIC THUNDER, and the worst is MACGRUBER, I’d say this is about in the middle.

Overall grade: C

COWBOYS & ALIENS (2011)

I almost saw this in 2011 when it came out, but I was too busy to go the theater in July of 2011, so I finally saw it here in 2025.

This was almost a great movie. Like, the performances were great, the concept was great, the scenery was great, the special effects were great, and it was packed full of really interesting ideas, but somehow it just didn’t gel. I’m not entirely sure why.

That said, I think the trouble was that it was just too overcrowded with too many characters and too many subplots.

Anyway, Daniel Craig portrays a man who wakes up with no memory in the Old West, with a mysterious bracelet locked around his wrist. He makes his way to the town of Atonement, and promptly gets arrested because he is apparently a notorious outlaw. While he is locked in jail, space aliens attack the town. The aliens, for unknown reasons, abduct many of the townspeople, and Daniel Craig’s character, who is named Jake even if he doesn’t remember it, must lead the town’s effort to recover their abducted citizens.

Harrison’s Ford character as excellent, this awful cattle baron who nonetheless has virtues of courage and fortitude that you can’t help but admire. An excellent performance.

That said, the movie was just too packed, and I thought it would work better as a novel. After I watched the movie, it turned out that it was indeed based off a graphic novel. Novels allow for a far more complex story than a movie, and I don’t think this movie quite managed to handle having such a complex plot with so many characters.

Overall grade: C

HEADS OF STATE (2025)

This was a deeply stupid movie. However! The fundamental question of any movie, shouted to the audience by Russell Crowe in GLADIATOR, is “are you not entertained?!?”

I was thoroughly entertained watching this. Not everything has to be Shakespeare or a profound meditation on the unresolvable conflicts inherent within human nature.

John Cena plays Will Derringer, newly elected President of the United States. Idris Elba plays Sam Clarke, who has now been the UK prime minister for the last six years. Derringer was an action star who parleyed his celebrity into elected office, while Clarke is an army veteran who worked his way up through the UK’s political system. Needless to say, the cheerful Derringer and the grim Clarke take an immediate dislike to each other. However, they’ll have to team up when Air Force One is shot down, stranding them in eastern Europe. They’ll have to make their way home while evading their enemies to unravel the conspiracy.

So half action thriller, half buddy road trip comedy. The premise really doesn’t work if you think about it too much, but it was funny and I enjoyed it. Jack Quaid really stole his scenes as a crazy but hyper-competent CIA officer.

Overall grade: C+

CAPTAIN AMERICA: BRAVE NEW WORLD (2025)

I think this ended up on the good side of middling.

You can definitely tell it went through a lot of reshoots and retooling, and I suspect the various industry strikes hit it like a freight train. But we ended up with a reasonably solid superhero thriller.

Sam Wilson is now Captain America. He’s not superhuman the way Steve Rogers was and doesn’t have magic powers or anything, so he kind of fights like the Mandalorian – a very capable fighter who relies on excellent armor. Meanwhile, in the grand American political tradition of failing upward, Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross, who spent years persecuting the Hulk and whose meddling caused the Avengers to disband right before Thanos attacked, has been elected President. To Wilson’s surprise, Ross reaches out and wants him to restart the Avengers.

But Ross did a lot of shady black ops stuff for years, and one of his projects is coming back to haunt him. Wilson finds himself in the middle of a shadowy conspiracy, and it’s up to him to figure out what’s going on before it’s too late.

I was amused that lifelong government apparatchik Ross wanted to restart the Avengers, because when the Avengers had their biggest victory in ENDGAME, they were essentially unsanctioned vigilantes bankrolled by a rogue tech billionaire.

Overall grade: B-

IRONHEART (2025)

I’d say this was about forty percent very weird and sixty percent quite good.

It’s sort of like a modern version of Dr. Faustus.

The show got some flak on the Internet from the crossfire between the usual culture war people, but the key to understanding it is to realize that Riri Williams AKA Ironheart is in fact an antihero who’s tottering on the edge of becoming a full-blown supervillain. Like Tony Stark, she’s a once-in-a-generation scientific talent, but while she doesn’t have Stark’s alcohol problem, she’s emotionally unstable, immature, ruthless, indifferent to collateral damage and consequences, and suffering from severe PTSD after her best friend and stepfather were killed in a drive-by shooting.

This volatile mix gets her thrown out of MIT after her experiments cause too much destruction, and she has to go home to Chicago. To get the funds to keep working on her Iron Man armor, she turns to crime, and falls in with a gang of high-end thieves led by a mysterious figure named Hood. It turns out that Hood has actual magic powers, which both disturbs and fascinates Riri.

However, Hood got his magic in a pact with a mysterious dark force. When a job goes bad, Riri gains the enmity of Hood and has to go on the run. It also turns out Hood’s dark master has become very interested in Riri, which might be a lot more dangerous in the long run.

Overall, I’d say this is about in the same vein as AGATHA ALL ALONG, an interesting show constructed around a morally questionable protagonist.

Overall grade: B

A MINECRAFT MOVIE (2024)

I have to admit I’ve never played Minecraft, so I know very little about the game and its ecosystem, only what I’ve generally absorbed by glancing at the news.

That said, I think the movie held together quite well, and wasn’t deserving of the general disdain it got in the press. (No doubt the $950 million box office compensated for any hurt feelings.) One of the many downsides of rapid technological change in the last fifty years is that the Boomers and Gen X and the Millennials and Gen Z and Gen Alpha have had such radically different formative experiences that they can’t really relate to each other. Growing up in the 1980s was a wildly different experience than growing up in the 2010s, and growing up in the 2010s was an even more wildly different experience than growing up in the 1960s. Smartphones & social media were dominant in 2020, barely starting in 2010, and implausible science fiction in 2000 and earlier, and so it was like the different generations grew up on different planets, because in some sense they actually did. (A five-year-old relative just started school, and the descriptions of his school compared to what I remember sound like different planets entirely.) The Minecraft game and A MINECRAFT MOVIE might be one of those generation-locked experiences.

Anyway, this has gotten very deep for what was essentially a portal-based LitRPG movie. A group of people experiencing various life difficulties in a rural Idaho town get sucked into the Minecraft world through a magical portal. There they must combine forces and learn to master the Minecraft world to save it from an evil sorceress and return to their own world.

As always, the fundamental question of any movie is the one that Russell Crowe’s character shouted to the audience in GLADIATOR back in 2000. “Are you not entertained?” I admit I was entertained when watching A MINECRAFT MOVIE since it was funny and I recognized a lot of the video game mechanics, even though I’ve never actually played Minecraft. Like, CASTLEVANIA II had a night/day cycle the way Minecraft does, and CASTLEVANIA II was forty years ago.

But that was another digression! I did enjoy A MINECRAFT MOVIE. It was kind of crazy, but it committed to the craziness and maintained a consistent creative vision, and I was entertained.

Though it was impressive how Jack Black’s agent managed to insist that he sing several different times.

Overall grade: B

BACK TO SCHOOL (1986)

This is one of the better 80s comedies I’ve seen.

Thornton Melon, who never went to college, is the wealthy owner of a chain of plus-sized clothing stores. His son Jason is attending Great Lakes University, and after Thornton’s unfaithful gold-digging wife leaves him (Thornton is mostly relieved by this development), he decides to go visit his son. He quickly discovers that Jason is flailing at college, and decides to enroll to help out his son. Wacky adventures ensue!

I quite enjoyed this. “Great Lakes University” was largely shot at UW-Madison, which I found amusing because I spent a lot of time at UW-Madison several decades ago as a temporary IT employee. So it was amusing to see places I remembered quite well in the movie.

Also, I’m very familiar with how the sausage gets made in higher ed. There’s a scene where the dean is asking why Thornton is qualified to enter college, and then it cuts to the dean cheerfully overseeing the groundbreaking of the new Thornton Melon hall which Thornton just donated, and I laughed so hard I almost hurt myself, because that is exactly how higher ed works.

Some pointless nudity, but it was only a few seconds and no doubt gets cut in network broadcasts.

Overall grade: B

WHISKEY GALORE (1949)

A comedy set in Scotland during World War 2. The villagers living on an isolated island have no whiskey due to wartime rationing. However, when a government ship carrying 50,000 cases of whiskey runs aground near the island, wacky hijinks ensue.

I have to admit the first half of the movie was very slow and deliberate, slowly setting up all the pieces for later. Then, once the shipwreck happens, things pick up and the movie gets much funnier.

Definitely worth watching both as a good comedy movie and an artifact of its time. A modicum of historical knowledge is required – if you don’t know what the Home Guard is, you might have to do some Googling to understand some of the scenes.

Regrettably, the version I watched did not have captioning, so I had to pay real close attention to understand what the characters were saying. Some of the accents were very strong.

Overall grade: B

HAPPY GILMORE 2 (2025)

Dumb and overstuffed with celebrity cameos, but thoroughly hilarious.

And I say this even though it uses one of my least-favorite story tropes, namely Hero Of Previous Movie Is Now A Middle-Aged Loser. However, the movie leans into it for comedy. When Happy Gilmore accidentally kills his wife with a line drive, he spirals into alcoholism and despair. But his five children still love him, and when his talented daughter needs tuition for school, Happy attempts to shake off his despair and go back to golf to win the money.

But Happy soon stumbles onto a sinister conspiracy by an evil CEO to transform the game of golf into his own personal profit center. Happy must team up with his old nemesis Shooter McGavin to save golf itself from the evil CEO.

Amusingly, as I’ve said before, the best Adam Sandler movies are almost medieval. In medieval fables, it was common for a clever peasant to outwit pompous lords, corrupt priests, and greedy merchant. The best Adam Sandler protagonist remains an everyman who outwits the modern equivalent of pompous lords and corrupt priests, in this case a scheming CEO.

Overall grade: B+

SUPERMAN (2025)

This was pretty good. Very funny at times.

I think it caught the essential nature of Superman. Like, Superman should be a Lawful Good character. If he was a Dungeons and Dragons character, he would be a paladin. People on the Internet tend to take the characterization of superheroes seriously to perhaps an unhealthy degree, but it seems the best characterization of Superman is as an earnest, slightly dorky Boy Scout who goes around doing good deeds. The contrast of that good-hearted earnestness with his godlike abilities that would allow him to easily conquer and rule the world is what makes for an interesting character.

I also appreciated how the movie dispensed with the overused trope of the Origin Story and just got down to business.

In this movie. Lex Luthor is obsessed with destroying Superman, and is willing to use both super-advanced technology and engineer geopolitical conflict to do it. Superman, because he’s essentially a decent person, doesn’t comprehend just how depraved Luthor is, and how far Luthor is willing to go out of petty spite. (Ironically, a billionaire willing to destroy the world out of petty spite is alas quite realistic).

Guy Gardener (“jerkish Green Lantern”) and the extremely competent and the extremely exasperated Mr. Terrific definitely stole all their scenes.

The director of the movie, James Gunn, was quite famously fired from Disney in 2018 for offensive jokes he had made on Twitter back when he was an edgy young filmmaker. I suppose Mr. Gunn can rest content knowing that SUPERMAN made more money than any Marvel movie released this year.

Overall grade: A-

WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT? (1988)

A very strange movie, but nonetheless one with an ambitious premise and strong performances.

It’s post WWII Los Angeles, and “toons” (basically cartoon characters) live and work alongside humans. Private eye Eddie Valiant hates toons since one of them killed his brother five years ago. However, he’s hired by the head of a studio who’s having trouble with one of his toon actors, Roger Rabbit. Roger’s worried his wife Jessica is having an affair, and Valiant obtains pictures of Jessica playing patty cake (not a euphemism, they actually were playing patty cake) with another man.

Roger has an emotional breakdown, and soon the other man winds up dead, and Roger insists he didn’t do it. Valiant and Roger find themselves sucked into a dangerous conspiracy overseen by a ruthless mastermind.

This movie was such an interesting cultural artifact. It perfectly follows the structure of a 40s film noir movie, but with cartoons, and the dissonance between film noir and the cheerfulness of the toons was embraced and used as a frequently source of comedy. In fact, when the grim and dour Valiant uses the toons’ comedy techniques as a tactical improvisation in a moment of mortal peril, it’s both hilarious and awesome.

Christopher Lloyd’s performance as the villainous Judge Doom was amazing. (I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that he’s villainous, because his character is named Judge Doom and he’s literally wearing a black hat.) Like, his performance perfectly captures something monstrous that is trying very hard to pretend to be human and not quite getting it right.

And the amount of work it must have taken to make this movie staggers the mind. Nowadays, having live actors interact with cartoon characters is expensive, but not unduly so. You see it all the time in commercials when a housewife is smiling at an animated roll of paper towels or something, and Marvel’s essentially been doing it for years. But this was 1988! Computer animation was still a ways off. They had to shoot the movie on analog film, and then hand-draw all the animation and successfully match it to the live film. It wouldn’t have worked without the performance of Bob Hoskins as Eddie Valiant, who plays everything perfectly straight in the same way Michael Caine did in A MUPPET CHRISTMAS CAROL.

So kind of a strange movie, but definitely worth watching. And it has both Disney and Warner Brothers animated characters in the same movie, which is something we will never, ever see again.

Overall grade: A

K-POP DEMON HUNTERS (2025)

Like WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT, a very strange movie but nonetheless one with a clear and focused artistic vision. It is a cultural artifact that provides a fascinating look into a world of which I have no knowledge or interest, namely K-Pop bands and their dueling fandoms.

Anyway, the plot is that for millennia, female Korean musicians have used the magic of their voices to keep the demons locked away in their world. The current incarnation is a three-woman K-Pop group called Huntrix, and they are on the verge of sealing away the demons forever. Naturally, the Demon King doesn’t like this, so one of his cleverer minions comes up with a good plan. They’ll start a Demon K-Pop Boy Band! Disguised as humans, the demon K-Pop group will win away Huntrix’s fans, allowing them to breach the barrier and devour the world.

However, one of the Huntrix musicians is half-demon, and she starts falling for the lead demon in the boy band, who is handsome and of course has a dark and troubled past.

Essentially a musical K-drama follows.

I have to admit I know practically nothing about K-Pop groups and their dueling fandoms, other than the fact that they exist. However, this was an interesting movie to watch. The animation was excellent, and there were some funny bits.

Overall grade: A

CLARKSON’S FARM SEASON 4 (2025)

A long time ago in the 90s, I watched an episode of FRASIER where Frasier and Niles attempt to open a restaurant and it all goes horribly wrong. At the time, I had no money, but I promised myself that I would never invest in a restaurant. Nothing I have seen or learned in the subsequent thirty years has ever changed that decision.

Season 4 of CLARKSON’S FARM is basically Jeremy Clarkson, like Frasier and Niles, attempting to open a restaurant, specifically a British pub. On paper it’s a good idea, since Clarkson can provide the pub with food produced from his own farm and other local farmers. However, it’s an enormous logistical nightmare, and Clarkson must deal with miles of red tape, contractors, and a ballooning budget, all while trying to keep his farm from going under.

An excellent and entertaining documentary into the difficulties of both the farming life and food service. I still don’t want to own a restaurant!

Overall grade: A

TOMBSTONE (1993)

The Western genre of fiction is interesting because it’s limited to such a very specific period of time and geographical region. Like the “Wild West” period that characterizes the Western genre really only lasted as a historical period from about 1865 to roughly 1890. The Western genre was at its most popular in movies from the 1940s and the 1960s, and I wonder if it declined because cultural and demographic changes made it unpopular to romanticize the Old West the way someone like Walt Disney did at Disneyland with “Frontierland.” Of course, the genre lives on in different forms in grittier Western movies, neo-Westerns like YELLOWSTONE and LONGMIRE, and a lot of the genre’s conventions apply really well to science fiction. Everyone talks about FIREFLY being the first Space Western, but THE MANDALORIAN was much more successful and was basically a Western in space (albeit with occasional visits from Space Wizards).

Anyway! After that long-winded introduction, let’s talk about TOMBSTONE. When Val Kilmer died earlier this year, the news articles mentioned TOMBSTONE as among his best work, so I decided to give it a watch.

The plot centers around Wyatt Earp, played by Kurt Russell, who has decided to give up his career in law enforcement and move to Tombstone, Arizona, a silver mining boomtown, in hopes of making his fortune. However, Tombstone is mostly controlled by the Cowboys outlaw gang, and Earp is inevitably drawn into conflict with them. With the help of his brothers and Doc Holliday (Val Kilmer’s character), Earp sets out to bring some law and order to Tombstone, whether the Cowboys like it or not. Holliday is in the process of dying from tuberculosis, which makes him a formidable fighter since he knows getting shot will be a less painful and protracted death than the one his illness will bring him. Kilmer plays him as a dissolute, scheming warrior-poet who nonetheless is a very loyal friend.

Definitely a classic of the Western genre, and so worth watching.

Overall grade: A

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: FINAL RECKONING

The eighth MISSION IMPOSSIBLE movie. Of the eight movies, I think the sixth one was the best one, but this one comes in at a close second.

It continues on from DEAD RECKONING. Ethan Hunt now possesses the key that will unlock the source code of the Entity, the malicious AI (think ChatGPT, but even more evil) that is actively maneuvering the world’s nuclear powers into destroying each other so the Entity can rule the remnants of humanity. Unfortunately, the Entity’s source code is sitting in a wrecked Russian nuclear sub at the bottom of the Bering Sea. Even more unfortunately, the Entity knows that Hunt has the key and is trying to stop him, even as the Entity’s former minion and Hunt’s bitter enemy Gabriel seeks to seize control of the Entity for himself.

A sense of apocalyptic doom hangs over the movie, which works well to build tension. Once again, the world is doomed, unless Ethan Hunt and his allies can save the day. The tension works extremely well during the movie’s underwater sequence, and the final airborne duel between Hunt and Gabriel.

I don’t know if they’re going to make any more MISSION IMPOSSIBLE movies after this (they are insanely expensive), but if this is the end, it is a satisfying conclusion for the character of Ethan Hunt and the Impossible Mission Force.

Overall grade: A

DEEP COVER (2025)

This is described as an comedy thriller, and I didn’t know what to expect when I watched it, but I really enjoyed it.

Bryce Dallas Howard plays Kat, a struggling comedy improv teacher living in London. Her best students are Marlon (Orlando Bloom), a dedicated character actor who wants to portray gritty realism but keeps getting cast in tacky commercials, and Hugh (Nick Mohammed), an awkward IT worker with no social skills whatsoever. One day, the three of them are recruited by Detective Sergeant Billings (Sean Bean) of the Metropolitan Police. The Met wants to use improv comedians to do undercover work for minor busts with drug dealers. Since it plays 200 pounds a pop, the trio agrees.

Of course, things rapidly spiral out of control, because Kat, Marlon, and Hugh are actually a lot better at improv than they think, and soon they find themselves negotiating with the chief criminals of the London underworld.

What follows is a movie that is both very tense and very funny. Kat, Marlon, and Hugh are in way over their heads, and will have to do the best improv of their lives to escape a very grisly fate.

Overall grade: A

PUSS IN BOOTS: THE FINAL WISH (2022)

I don’t know much about the history of Disney as a corporation, and I don’t much care, but I do have several relatives who are very interested in the history of the Disney corporation, and therefore I have picked up some by osmosis. Apparently Disney CEO Michael Eisner forcing out Jeffrey Katzenberg in the 1990s was a very serious mistake, because Katzenberg went on to co-found Dreamworks, which has been Disney’s consistent rival for animation for the last thirty years. That’s like “CIA Regime Change Blowback” levels of creating your own enemy.

Anyway, historical ironies aside, PUSS IN BOOTS: THE FINAL WISH was a funny and surprisingly thoughtful animated movie. Puss in Boots is a legendary outlaw and folk hero, but he has used up eight of his nine lives. An ominous bounty hunter who looks like a humanoid wolf begins pursuing him, and the Wolf is able to shrug off the best of Puss In Boots’ attacks. Panicked, Puss hides in a retirement home for elderly cats, but then hears rumors of the magical Last Wish. Hoping to use it to get his lives back, Puss In Boots sets off on the quest.

It was amusing how Little Jack Horner and Goldilocks and the Three Bears were rival criminal gangs seeking the Last Wish.

Overall grade: A

CHICKEN PEOPLE (2016)

A good documentary film gives you a glimpse into an alien world that you would otherwise never visit.

In this example, I have absolutely no interest in competitive chicken breeding and will only raise chickens in my backyard if society collapses to the level that it becomes necessary for survival. That said, this was a very interesting look into the work of competitive chicken breeding. Apparently, there is an official “American Standard Of Perfection” for individual chicken breeds, and the winner of the yearly chicken competition gets the title “Super Grand Champion.” Super Grand Champion! That looks impressive on a resume.

It is interesting how chicken breeding is in some sense an elaborate Skinner box – like you can deliberately set out to breed chickens with the desirable traits on the American Standard of Perfection, but until the chickens are hatched and grow up, you don’t know how they’re going to turn out, so you need to try again and again and again…

Overall grade: A

THE MASK OF ZORRO (1998)

I saw this in the theatre when it came out 27 years ago, but that was 27 freaking years ago, and I don’t have much of a memory of it, save that I liked it. So when I had the chance to watch it again, I did!

Anthony Hopkins plays Diego de la Vega, who has the secret identity of Zorro in the final days before Mexico breaks away from the Spanish Empire. With Mexico on the verge of getting its independence, Diego decides to hang up his sword and mask and focus on his beloved wife and daughter. Unfortunately, the military governor Don Montero realizes Diego is Zorro, so has him arrested, kills his wife, and steals his baby daughter to raise as his own.

Twenty years later, a bandit named Alejandro loses his brother and best friends to a brutal cavalry commander. It turns out that Montero is returning to California from Spain, and plans to seize control of California as an independent republic (which, of course, will be ruled by him). In the chaos, Diego escapes from prison and encounters a drunken Alejandro, and stops him from a futile attack upon the cavalry commander. He then proposes a pact – Diego will train Alejandro as the next Zorro, and together they can take vengeance upon the men who wronged them.

This was a good movie. It was good to see that my taste 27 years ago wasn’t terrible. It manages to cram an entire epic plot into only 2 hours and 20 minutes. In some ways it was like a throwback to a 40s movie but with modern (for the 90s) production values, and some very good swordfights.

Overall grade: A

WICK IS PAIN (2025)

I’ve seen all four JOHN WICK movies and enjoyed them thoroughly, though I’ve never gotten around to any of the spinoffs.

WICK IS PAIN is documentary about how JOHN WICK went from a doomed indie movie with a $6.5 million hole in its budget to one of the most popular action series of the last few decades. Apparently Keanu Reeves made an offhand joke about how “Wick is pain” and that became the mantra of the cast and crew, because making an action movie this intense really was a painful experience.

Definitely worth watching if you enjoyed the JOHN WICK movies or moviemaking in general.

Overall grade: A

GAME NIGHT (2016)

A hilarious if occasionally dark comedy-action thriller.

Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams play Max and Annie Davis, a married couple who are very competitive and enjoy playing games. Jason has an unresolved conflict with his brother Brooks, and one night Brooks invites them over for game night, which Max resents. Halfway through the evening, Brooks is kidnapping, with Max and Annie assume is part of the game. However, Brooks really is involved in something shady.

Hilarity ensues, and it’s up to Max and Annie to rescue Brooks and stay alive in the process.

This was really funny, though a bit dark in places. That said, Max and Annie have a loving and supportive marriage, so it was nice to see something like that on the screen. Though this also leads to some hilarity, like when Annie accidentally shoots Max in the arm. No spoilers, but the punchline to that particular sequence was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.

Overall grade: A

CONCLUSION

So, no A+ movie this time around, but I saw a bunch of solid movies I enjoyed.

One more note – I have to admit I’ve really come to respect Adam Sandler as an entertainer, even if his movies and comedy are not always to my taste. Like, he makes what he wants, makes a lot of money, ensures that his friends get paid, and then occasionally takes on a serious role in someone else’s movie when he wants to flex some acting muscles. It’s not surprising that nearly everyone who was in the original HAPPY GILMORE and was still alive wanted to come back for HAPPY GILMORE 2.

-JM