Ricky Pine's Blog, page 111

Doctor Strange: Marvel's Most Literal Movie Magic

***THIS IS A SPOILER-FREE REVIEW.***

"I've come to bargain..."

Phase Three of the Marvel Cinematic Universe began this year with Captain America: Civil War, an absolutely A-grade thriller. The next in the series, Doctor Strange, has a lot of hype to live up to - not only as Civil War's follow-up, but also from hype of its own making, with the marketing campaigns highlighting what promised to be the movie's greatest strength - its unique visual style, completely new for the MCU.

Welcome to the Ne...

Review: The Midnight Star

The Midnight Star by Marie Lu
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

First and foremost, I have to say, I'm surprised at how short this book is compared to its predecessors. Short it may have been in terms of physical size, but in terms of content? Twists, turns, power failures for all the Young Elites, uneasy alliances aplenty, and impending worldwide environmental disaster? The Midnight Star was every bit as big and five-star as we've all come to expect every time Marie Lu releases a new book. It never...

Review: Nevernight

Nevernight by Jay Kristoff
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Those who are dead are not dead
They're just living in my head."
-Coldplay, "42"

This week, a creative writing classmate of mine presented a story told in the point of view of an awkward young man at the laundromat who picks up a girl, goes home with her, and appears to sleep with her...except he's stabbing her dead, violently, and then he moves on to her sisters as well. Our general consensus - even the professor agreed with it - was that th...

Review: White Night

White Night by Jim Butcher
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

That's two Dresden Files novels in a row for me this Halloween. This one deals a little bit more with the Hitchcockian archetype of the man falsely accused of a grave crime - or, in this case, many grave crimes, as our friendly neighborhood White Court vampire Thomas is the prime suspect in a series of serial killings in which the real killer leaves a reference to a certain Bible verse at each scene: "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."...

Review: Proven Guilty

Proven Guilty by Jim Butcher
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Rereading this one on Halloween was a perfect idea, given how much Harry Dresden (and by extension, Butcher) poke fun at all the most obvious horror-movie tropes. In between all that, Dresden goes on another long, dangerous adventure, in which he has to wrestle with the moral quagmires of sentencing young magic practitioners to death for breaking rules they may not even know about.

But again...those horror-movie tropes. That's where these...

HeartQuake

It seems like I can't go long without finding myself hopelessly crushed out on some girl at school. More often than not, these girls are either already spoken for, not interested in me (aren't they all?), or both.

For once, the girl I like appears not to qualify for any of the above. Of course, I've been wrong before. If you remember the last time a crush inspired a poem, I later discovered she had a boyfriend, to whom she's since become engaged. Well, that made it easy to move on from her.

I s...

Review: Bloodline

Bloodline by Claudia Gray
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

By now, the stories of the original Star Wars trilogy, and also the prequels (love 'em or hate 'em, they're essential to understanding the originals), are the stuff of pop culture legend. So last year, when The Force Awakens began an all-new awesome sequel trilogy as only J.J. Abrams could direct it, there was really only one thing missing...

...how did we get here? The Empire was over - wasn't it? Where and when and how did a new group of ga...

Review: Stealing Snow

Stealing Snow by Danielle Paige
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Like Danielle Paige's other best-known series Dorothy Must Die, this fractured fairytale launched with considerable hype, especially with Paige running a number of snow-themed social-media campaigns. Unfortunately, unlike DMD, Stealing Snow didn't live up to the hype for me.

That's not to say it's a bad book. It is, as Kami Garcia said in her blurb, "lush and addictive." And it presents a pretty unique retelling of The Snow Queen - uniq...

Red Rain: Alex and Fionna's Celebrity Faces

***Spoilers for the most recent seasons of Fear the Walking Dead and Agents of SHIELD appear below. You've been warned.***

One of the cool features of Wattpad is that it lets you pick a cast list for your stories, which I do for all of mine, and in great detail. For the Red Rain series, I've had a couple of different young actors in mind as the face of Alex over the years, but ever since I rewrote him as you see him now on Wattpad and SwoonReads (with olive skin instead of white...

Review: Swarm

Swarm by Scott Westerfeld
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"'Cause people don't understand, understand, understand
People don't understand people like me."
-Alphas Theme

Last year, I liked Zeroes, but I thought it had a few flaws - namely, its tendency to highlight the least interesting characters in the titular group, and at considerable length too. I have to wonder if Westerfeld, Lanagan, and Biancotti got similar complaints from other readers, and worked to make improvements in Swarm.

For sure, this...