Now Available: Geek Cutes

My latest book is now available on Amazon and Other E-Retailers. Only 99 cents!

Geek Cutes is a collection of eight light-hearted short stories, spanning a variety of genres, with a focus on lesbians (both cis and trans).

Stories included in this anthology:

Dungeon Therapy: Two women meet over an online tabletop RPG.

Gilded Cage: A young tech expert is locked in her room by her homophobic parents.

Mother's Day: A cop teams up with an occult expert to track down an otherworldly monster.

Fairy Dust: In a war between fairies and dragons, one pixie must embrace her destiny.

Hero Worship: A woman goes on a blind date with a superhero, but is it safer to stay single?

Think Tank: A team of scholars struggle to break a divine code, racing against the most serious of all deadlines.

Strangers in the Void: When the power goes out on a space station, two strangers work together to find the cause.

Vigilante: In a neighborhood riddled with violent crime, a masked hero protects women from the local gangs.

Across the Spider-Verse

Minor Spoiler Warning

Like the first one, this movie is chock full of eye-candy. It's seriously funny, and has lots of cute references for fans of the comics and memes. There's so much to look at, it's honestly exhausting at times. My only real complaint is that it feels a little bloated, and yet it ends with "To Be Continued." It's hard to say until I see the next one, but it feels like they padded it to make it into two movies.

Renfield

Renfield is extremely funny, with great action scenes, and unlike anything I've seen in a long time. It's gory, but the gore effects are so over-the-top cartoonish that it doesn't bother me. Cage really hams it up in the most delightful way. 

See it.

Knives Out and Glass Onion

Knives Out is damn near a perfect movie. Excellent script, perfect cast, great plot. I really can’t think of a single complaint. Okay, there’s a couple of scenes where a character throws up, which makes me nauseous (I’m emetophobic), but that’s my problem. Five star movie, ‘nuff said.

Glass Onion is almost as good. It still has an excellent cast delivering perfect performances. It has a decent plot and a snappy script. But the plot relies on a couple of contrived tropes. Anytime I see either of these particular tropes in a movie, it feels like lazy writing to me. Still, it’s impossible to watch this movie without a smile on your face, and its only real crime is not being as perfect as its predecessor.

By the way, if you want to see more of my movie ratings in one place, follow my Letterboxd account here.

Shazam! Fury of the Gods

Fury of the Gods is fun and enjoyable. It's extremely cheesy, but if you've seen the first one, you should know that going in. There's a few over-the-top parts that you'll either love or hate, like the "Skittles unicorn" scene. And like the first movie, there's a lot of tone whiplash - sometimes it seems a little dark for kids, but other times it's too light for adults.

If you liked the first one, you'll like this one.

Scream VI / Ranking the Scream Movies

We watched Scream VI last weekend. I thought it was pretty good; in fact, I’d say it’s my second favorite Scream movie.

My ranking would be:

1. Scream (1996)

2. Scream 6

3. Scream 2

4. Scream 5 – a.k.a. Scream (2022)

5. Scream 4

6. Scream 3

However, there’s still a huge gap between the original Scream and all the sequels. I like how each one carves out its own specialty – Scream makes fun of horror tropes, 2 makes fun of sequels, 3 makes fun of trilogies, and so on. But nothing beats the originality of the first one. It practically invented a new genre of self-aware horror.

It does drive me crazy how superhuman everyone is in the series, especially in the later installments. Nearly every survivor gets stabbed at some point, often in the stomach or chest area. It gets harder and harder to tell which characters have just suffered mortal wounds, and which ones are going to walk it off in a few minutes. 

Yes, humans in real life often survive injuries they shouldn't, but the reason those stories are so amazing is that they aren't very common. The Scream series would have you believe that one can build up an immunity to stab wounds.

Still, it's a fun series, and the newest one is one of the high points.

M3GAN

M3GAN is a fun movie, though it felt like I’d seen it before. The whole “A.I. takes its job too literally” trope is pretty common, but M3GAN is a standout just for its visuals. The title character is performed so well, that it makes me forget a lot of the other movies with similar plots. Unfortunately, the plot falls apart at the climax, when the movie stops following its own rules.

It seems like the writers just really wanted to show certain scenes, but couldn’t find a valid way to work them into the plot, so they just did it anyway. One line of dialogue could have fixed it. And maybe it did, and I just missed it. But if so, they needed to make it more obvious.

Somehow, Palpatine Has Returned

I'm so sick of “Somehow, Palpatine has returned” memes. It’s kind of a berserk button for me. It reminds me of how unpleasable Star Wars fandom has become. Palpatine’s resurrection is perfectly explained in the movie, but everyone quotes that one line from Poe as if that’s the movie’s only explanation. Of course Poe doesn’t know how Palpatine returned, why would he?

There’s a shot where the camera pans across some cloning tanks. With one shot they manage to answer two questions – it reveals that the new Palpatine is a clone, and that Snoke may have been a failed attempt to clone Palpatine. I mean, there's more to it than that – like, Palpatine’s force spirit was so powerful that it was able to possess his own clone – but please don’t tell me there was no explanation whatsoever.

People always tell writers that they should “Show, don’t tell.” Then this movie comes along and does exactly that… and everyone misses it. Stupid, toxic fans. Regardless of how you feel about the rest of RoS's pacing and exposition, the backlash against Palpatine's "unexplained" return is unwarranted.

Guardians of the Galaxy 3

The first two GotG movies are two of my favorite MCU films. GotG 3 is great, but it's not as laugh-a-minute as the first two. The animal cruelty and other seriousness means I probably won't rewatch it very often. I didn't like the soundtrack as much, either. 

I did love the villain, though. I also watched Quantumania this weekend, and I think the High Evolutionary is a much better villain than Kang.

Quantumania

I think the critics were a little hard on Quantumania. It's not a great movie, but then, none of the Ant-Man movies have been "great." It was no better or worse than the previous two films, though it is certainly different. Taking place almost entirely in the Quantum Realm, and therefore abandoning the comic relief characters from the previous movies, it's a bit of a tonal shift. It still has plenty of humor, but it doesn't feel like a flat-out comedy the way the first two did.

The movie is full of plot holes, or at least things that aren't explained as well as they should have been. There's several points where I wanted to ask, "Why don't they just..." and the writers may have even had a valid answer for these questions. One or two lines of dialogue would have saved lots of complaints. But oh well. It's a comic book movie with comic book science and comic book logic. You either buy into it or you don't.

Overall, it's a fun, if average, Marvel movie.

Blood Samples

 I've just published my fourth "book," though this one is just a collection of six short stories. It's called Blood Samples, and it's a prequel to my other books. It's also free on most e-retailers (99 cents on Amazon). You can get it here: Amazon  Other Stores

If you like it, please check out my other books here:

Xine Fury's Books

And if you haven't already, make sure you check out my writing blog:

Bloodhunters Blog

My Third Book Is Out

I've just published the third novel in my Bloodhunters series. If you're interested, you can get them here:

Books by Xine Fury

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

Finally, a good D&D film. I was beginning to think the property was cursed. I mean, how hard is it to make a decent movie about Dungeons and Dragons? Given that D&D is such an open-ended system, technically every medieval fantasy movie is a D&D movie. But it seems like whenever they intentionally try to market the D&D brand, it’s a failure. Okay, to be fair, I actually liked “Wrath of the Dragon God,” but that says more about my taste than the quality of the movie.

Honor Among Thieves is a good time regardless of whether or not you play tabletop RPGs. If you don’t like D&D, then just look at it as a generic fantasy movie. It’s not as grandiose as Lord of the Rings, it’s more of a lighthearted heist movie with a fantasy setting. If you are a D&D player, you’re going to spend a lot of time pointing at the screen and saying, “I understood that reference.” All the locations are taken from Forgotten Realms lore, and every creature is straight out of the monster manual. But you don’t need to know any of that to enjoy the movie.

The actors were carefully chosen so they could pretty much play themselves. Chris Pine is his usual quippy self, Hugh Grant is at his smarmiest, and Michelle Rodriguez is the typical tough gal. The rest of the cast don’t stand out as much, but they play their parts adequately. I really liked Sophia Lillis as the druid, though her performance was kind of subdued.

The movie is not without its plot holes, if you really want to look for them. There’s a dozen places where the druid’s shapeshifting ability could have solved a problem a lot faster than the solutions the characters came up with. They could have fixed some of these with a simple line of dialogue, but the movie takes the “look, something shiny!” approach instead. And that’s a good thing. Over-explaining the limits of each character’s abilities would have bogged the movie down, and I really think the movie’s “this is what we’re going with” approach keeps the story moving at a proper pace.

Bottom line, it’s a fun popcorn-muncher, and I think you’ll like it even if you’ve never touched a d20. But if this movie encourages people to finally give the game a try, so much the better.