Movies & TV

  • Watch and Read: Stranger Things

    While I can honestly watch Stranger Things over and over and over again we have so much material that adds on to the Stranger Things universe to quench your nerdy hearts. As well as a few reads to give you the same feeling the show did – for all ages! The Stranger Things Field Guild… Continue reading

  • New Year Resolutions: Exercise in the Time of Covid

    Coming to you from the cyberpunk dystopia that will not end, a series of New Year’s Resolution-themed posts, because the only way out is through. My fellow apocalypse-sters, you and I both know the importance of exercise. It keeps your meat sack in working condition, helps you sleep better, gives you energy, and can even… Continue reading

  • Romantic Christmas Movies

    Nothing says Christmas season to me more than cuddling up under a warm blanket with a mug of hot chocolate and watching a holiday romantic movie.  Unfortunately, I don’t have cable so I can’t binge-watch the Hallmark Channel.  But luckily for me, the library owns a lot of the movies.  To find the whole list… Continue reading

  • Christmas Horror!

    Ah, Christmas! A magical time filled with colored lights, falling snow, and visits from old St Nick. Yet colored lights can’t hide the fact that each day it gets darker earlier and stays dark longer. Falling snow is awfully good at making footprints look strangely shaped or just covering them up all together. And isn’t… Continue reading

  • What to Watch to Feel Hygge

    Hygge (pronounced hue-gah) is a Danish word that describes “coziness and contentment.” With winter beginning and the stress of COVID-19, this is the perfect time to try to foster some hygge. Here are a few films to help you attain your own coziness and contentment: Continue reading

  • Thirty Names of Night

    Come December’s shortest days, there are, amongst us, those who relish Burning the Midnight Oil, who revel in every blue-black hour’s saturating presence.  These Night Bloomers, Know the Night, The Long Night, Faithful and Virtuous Night understand that as each day’s darkness lengthens its translucent filaments entwine with time’s endless line.  This is the story,… Continue reading

  • A Lovecraft Country Syllabus

    Matt Ruff might have a new book out this year – 88 Names – but the reason he is one of my favorite people of 2020 is due to the HBO series Lovecraft Country.  It is based on his book of the same name, but Misha Green the creator took it to a whole new… Continue reading

  • The Inimitable P.G. Wodehouse

    P G Wodehouse was a prolific writer, with nearly all of his stories set among British aristocracy and/or in the proverbial ‘polite society’ of 1920s and 30s Britain. Knowingly or not, he somewhat reflected the naïve obliviousness of a few of his characters in his real life. After moving to France and being captured by… Continue reading

  • Watch and Read: The Queen’s Gambit

    Just like with books, shows will also leave me wanting more. While The Queen’s Gambit is based on a book by Walter S. Tevis it’s also pretty darn popular right now, as anyone who has seen the show can probably imagine. So here are a few other diamonds in the rough to get you through…and… Continue reading

  • Three Classic British Sketch Comedy Shows

    During the same period they were bringing Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster to the small screen, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie were sprinkling the British airwaves with their own sketch comedy show A Bit of Fry and Laurie. If you ever thought to yourself, as I have, “Is there any such thing as ‘highbrow absurdist humor’?”… Continue reading

  • Leading Ladies of British Comedy

    The Vicar of Dibley – Reverend Geraldine Granger is assigned to the small Oxfordshire village of Dibley, its first female vicar following the Church of England’s quite tardy change of heart regarding the ordination of women. Offering spiritual guidance to the tiny town’s cast of oddballs, the vicar negotiates her way around and through entrenched… Continue reading

  • One Season Wonders (kind of…)

    At Last the 1948 Show (1967)  Prior to 1967 it was a dark time. Comedy hadn’t yet been invented and the population was just starting to accept the world becoming colorized after thousands of years being a nice, calm, black and white. Enter two scholars from Cambridge, John Cleese and Graham Chapman. Well, them and… Continue reading

  • The Story of Film Part 15: Cinema Today an Tomorrow

    The Story of Film Part 15: Cinema Today an Tomorrow

    We’ve now come to the end of our journey through Mark Cousins’ The Story of Film, following cinema’s early beginnings to the advent of the digital age. But before we ring down the curtain, we have a few more stops on our tour of cinema history.                As digital effects began to strip the “realness” from mainstream… Continue reading

  • One Season Wonders – Mystery Edition

    Just because a show only lasts a single season is no reason to think it is a bad show. Yes, yes, I know, most WERE bad and were thankfully put out of our misery quickly, but some were tossed by the wayside merely due to the way the TV industry machine works. Here are a… Continue reading

  • Fifteen Years since Hurricane Katrina – Nonfiction

    As Hurricane Sally made landfall, I remembered on August 30, fifteen years ago, when I realized I needed to actually put together an emergency kit for my family and me. What made me finally do this is seeing New Orleans underwater after Hurricane Katrina and the levees breaking.  What a devastating part of our history… Continue reading

  • The Story of Film Part 14: New American Independents & The Digital Revolution

    Throughout The Story of Film, we’ve seen how the advent of new technology has changed the face of cinema. Sound, color, and widescreen technology altered filmmaking significantly, and in the 1990s CGI (computer generated imagery) changed cinema again. Suddenly, it seemed anything a filmmaker wanted to show, could be. A vast Roman city, one costing… Continue reading

  • Three on a Theme: Films About Elections

    With the 2020 elections on the horizon and dominating the news cycle, it is a great time to engage with media that focus on various aspects of electoral politics. Here are three documentary films, available for free with your library card to stream on Kanopy, that tell specific lesser-known election stories from the United States… Continue reading

  • Three on a Theme: Disability Justice

    2020 is an important year for disability rights in America, as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) turned 30 years old this July. This landmark piece of legislation was the result of the hard work of activists in the disability justice movement, which is still in progress today. Here are some SPL resources from disabled… Continue reading