Title: Real Steel (2011)
Genre: sci-fi, boxing, ROBOTS
Directed by: Shawn Levy
Written by: John Gatins (screenplay), Dan Gilroy (story)
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Dakota Goyo, Evangeline Lilly

Summary borrowed from IMDB: A future-set story where robot boxing is a popular sport and centered on a struggling promoter (Jackman) who thinks he’s found a champion in a discarded robot. During his hopeful rise to the top, he also discovers he has an 11-year-old son who wants to know his father.

aStore: DVD, Blu-Ray, digital

My rating: 3 out of 5. A great popcorn movie, but as I’m not a 12-year old boy, probably something I’d only watch once.

Review: Charlie Kenton (Hugh Jackman) is a down on his out ex-boxer, current robot boxing contestant. A foolhardy risk taker, he owes money all over the place and is desperate for a single win. But when his ex-girlfriend is killed in an accident, Charlie is left with the custody of the eleven year old son he’s never met.

The boy, Max, has been taken in by his maternal aunt who wants to have custody of him. Charlie agrees to sign the custody papers after talking her much-older husband into ponying up $100,000 to pay for the child–half now and half later.

Charlie takes the boy and uses the money to buy himself a new robot boxer. From there, it becomes an all-out rock ’em, sock ’em  robot experience.

What you have here is Hugh Jackman, a bunch of giant robots, a cute kid, and an underdog story. So if you like all that… this is your movie. And even if you don’t like all that, it’s still a popcorn movie that will leave you thoroughly entertained.

Title: Merchanter’s Luck (Company Wars, #2)
Author: C.J. Cherryh
Genre: sci-fi
Summary: The fateful meeting between the owner of a tramp star-freighter that flies the Union planets under false papers and fake names and a proud but junior member of a powerful starship-owning family leads to a record-breaking race to Downbelow Station — and a terrifying showdown at a deadly destination off the cosmic charts.

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

This is a great book. I liked Cyteen, but I didn’t like a lot of the other Alliance-space novels as much. I just wasn’t that into the ideas behind them.

“Merchanter’s Luck” has a different feel from the Alliance-space novels, at least it does to me. It’s about a man alone on his merchant ship that comes to a station and meets a girl. It just so happens that the girl is from a powerful merchant family that numbers in the hundreds. They’re like a nation all their own. And he’s just one man.

After she bails him out of jail, he gets talked into taking the woman and a couple of her cousins on as crew. They basically take over his ship, which has him freaking out. Then they go to deliver a cargo they manage to get and the story starts.

This is a “classic sea tale,” but on board a spaceship. It features a protagonist coping with severe mental trauma who now has to deal with strangers invading his personal space. It’s not some socio-political treatise on the life and times of people in the future. It’s just a straight up story with interesting, likable characters and entertaining scenes of action. And maybe a little bit of romance.

Title: Exquisite Corpse
Author: Poppy Z. Brite
Genre: horror, serial killer, mm

Summary: After escaping prison, serial killer Andrew Compton heads for New Orleans to pursue the art of what he calls “the art of killing boys.” He joins up with a dissolute playboy who has pushed his art to limits even Compton hadn’t imagined. Together they set their sights on a young Vietnamese-American runaway, whom they cast as the perfect victim.

aStore: print, kindle

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Definitely NOT for children or anyone with a weak constitution or any kind of gag reflex. Seriously, the stuff in this gets pretty heavy-handed and pushes the limits of everything that’s right in the world.

“Exquisite Corpse” is, at its base, a story about someone looking for a soul mate. Someone that is alone in the world and sees the people around him, but has no real connection to them in any emotional capacity. Oh, and he’s like Jeffrey Dahmar.

This is basically Dahmar (or a character startlingly like him!) somehow escaping from prison and going on the lam. He kills a bunch of people on the way, and somehow manages to find his way to the French Quarter in New Orleans (where the vampires and ghouls live, because that’s where I would live if I was a vampire or ghoul. Though honestly, I’d probably move to Alabama, which my nephew firmly believes is overrun by zombies and that’s why we don’t go there. Or Amsterdam.)

He meets a man that shares his morbid interests and they get together to have sex amongst the rotting corpses and plot to kill a somewhat wide-eyed street kid that was probably the most interesting character in the whole book (a male Vietnamese prostitute? Hell yeah.) From there, things get hinky.

All … Read the rest “RE BOOK: Exquisite Corpse, by Poppy Z Brite [horror]”

Title: MPD Psycho
Author: Eiji Otsuka
Genre: manga, horror, serial killers

Summary: In MPD-Psycho Volume 1, police detective Kobayashi Yousuke’s life is changed forever after a serial killer notices something “special” about him. That same killer mutilates Kobayashi’s wife and kick-starts a “multiple personality battle” within Kobayashi that pushes him into a complex tempest of interconnected deviants and evil forces. Earning praise for its consistently shocking plotlines and Tajima’s clean, arresting art style, MPD-Psycho is the manga event of the decade!

aStore: print Book 2 || Movies: DVD, Blu-Ray, digital 2

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is some seriously edgy stuff right here. The drawing style is clean and no-nonsense, so you’re not distracted by a lot of motion lines and garbage. The story itself is pretty twisty and at the end you’re left with this vague feeling that you’ve been run over, but that in all it was a fairly awesome experience. If you’re into serial killer stories, mind control, and group psychosis anyway. Not a whole lot of lovey-lovey here AT ALL, though the female lead is pretty sexy (so go ahead and include her in your fanfic!)

Starts off with a police detective following a serial killer. Then it goes all Se7en when a body is delivered in a cooler. From there you have our protagonist experiencing a complete mental breakdown and being institutionalized for awhile. Then he pops up years later and gets sucked back into the catching serials again.

And that’s when the story really starts. Because at the base of it all is some subversive organization pulling for the resurrection of their cult leader. How? Through the powers of genetics. MPD Psycho–Metro Police, or Multiple Personality Disorder Psycho. And that’s what everyone is in this story. Psycho.

NOTE: This is … Read the rest “RE BOOK: MPD Psycho, by Eiji Otsuka [manga]”

Things I like: bacon. Bob's Burgers. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. cats. cheese. chocolate. crossword puzzles. Dredd. eggrolls. fried chicken. gochujang. Hannigram. HEAs. HFNs. jigsaw puzzles. kimchi. lo mein noodles. mushrooms. nectarines. Nintendo Switch. paperback books. pineapple. pizza. potstickers. raspberry jam. Rick and Morty. sleeping in. snickerdoodles. spaghetti. strawberries. sudoku. tacos. tomatoes. vacations. vaccinations.