Entertainment

What a bunch of a-holes: Guardians of the Galaxy 2 Movie Review

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(Spoiler Free) Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol 2, is in some ways even more of a trippy ride than the first one.

There’s the same manic energy, the same ridiculous, over the top humor.  It’s exciting, and epic, and as crazy as a box of ferrets on crack.

Guardians of the Galaxy was unique, fun, and more than a little unhinged.  The characters were interesting, the stakes were high, and it had surprising depth for a movie with a talking racoon.

Flash forward to Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2.  It turned the crazy to 11,   More characters, more excitement.  It’s an ensemble cast where every character has their moment to shine.

It’s not entirely perfect.  Gamora never quite gets the emotional depth of the other characters, despite several opportunities.  Baby Groot is highly entertaining, but rather limited.  There’s a sort of predictability to the plot, we already know where the characters are going to end up, just from seeing them at the beginning.  This is them finding their groove, seeing how they’ll work together.  It’s a team-building movie.  But it’s just as much fun as the first one and there’s plenty of great jokes.

All in all, it’s a solid movie.  The actors did a fantastic job, the characters were spot on, and the humor and action were both great (if sometimes mind-boggling).  The themes of family run throughout, and the most powerfully emotional scene in the movie was one in which there weren’t any words.

Conventions, Fantasy, Science Fiction

Starfest 2017 Schedule

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Hey everyone.  Just a quick post.  Here’s my Starfest schedule for this year:

Friday, April 21
 8:00pm
Combat in Fantasy and Science Fiction
Saturday, April 22
8:30am
Supporting Casts and Creatures
Sunday, April 23
12:30pm
Villains, Masterminds and Ne’er-do-wells
Starfest is this weekend (April 21-23) in Denver.  They’ve got a lot of neat events and guests, so if you’re in the area, I recommend checking it out!
Writing

Kal’s April 2017 Forecast

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It’s April!  I’m a bit behind in my writing between breaking my foot (yay, the first bone I’ve broken!) and moving to a new house.   However, I’m also writing as much as I can in order to keep up.  The blog posts being sparse is a product of that, I’m afraid.

The good news is that I’m on track to finish the next Shadow Space Chronicles book within the next week.  Ghost Star, Book Six of the Shadow Space Chronicles, should be ready for publishing sometime in May.  I’ve already outlined and started on my next book, the third installment of the Rising Wolf series (Fenris Unchained).  My working title for that is Jormungandr’s Venom and I hope to have it done by the end of April.

All this week I’ve got Echo of the High Kings available for free on Amazon.  Yes, free.  So if you haven’t got a copy, yet or if you want to recommend it to friends, get your copy here!

I’ve got a lot of writing planned for May, too, with the next book of the Eoriel Saga, Heir to the Fallen Duchy to be completed to get it ready to publish in July.

In the near future, you should see Ghost Star (May), Jormungandr’s Venom (June), Valor’s Child (June) and Heir to the Fallen Duchy (July).  Four books published over the next three months.  I’m working hard to make it and I hope everyone is looking forward to these books as much as I am.  Thanks for reading!

 

Writing

Kal’s March 2017 Forecast

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March is here… wow.  It’s kind of a shock to say that.  I’ve been busy.  Really, really busy.  Between work, and moving (did I mention I was moving?  Yeah, I’m moving, surprise!), writing, editing, and raising a very active two-and-a-half-year-old… yeah, 2017 is flying by.

I’m mostly done with Ghost Star, the sixth book of the Shadow Space Chronicles.  However, with the sort-of-unexpected move, it’s going to be delayed, unfortunately.  I hope to publish it in May, which is further out than I’d like, but I don’t think I’ll be able to get it completely done, edited, and sent out to beta readers before the end of the month.

In other news, I’m hoping that the move will increase my writing productivity, with (hopefully) an hour less of my day spent in traffic.  I’ve also done the rough outline for the third book of the Fenris/Rising Wolf series.  I’d planned to write it this month, but I’ll fit it in somewhere.

After that, I’m going to write the second book of my YA series: Valor’s Children.  The first book is going to be a big release in June and I’m planning on doing a release party at Liberty Con.  My goal for the series is to have most of the books written so that I can stage their release over a few months.

I’ve also been bitten by the zombie bug.  No details for readers or an expected publication date just yet, but I’ve got around twenty thousand words of <title redacted> written, which is just over a quarter of the book.  Considering I wrote all of that in just three days, it tells you that I’m excited about it.

In other news, I’ll be doing some revisions to the mailing list.  I hope to have those revisions done after I move.  There’s been a delay in the newsletter as a result, but it should be up in April and going full-steam in May.

Entertainment

Guns, Lots of Guns A John Wick Chapter 2 Movie Review

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john-wick-2-posterjpg-fe1944_1280wGuns, lots of guns… wait, wrong movie… right?

The first John Wick movie was a dark, gritty, story about revenge, heavy on gun work and with a surprising level of characterization.  To top things off, when the YouTube video of Keanu Reeves doing gun training for the sequel aired, it was straight out awesome.

Needless to say, I was pretty stoked to see the sequel.  And in some ways, it really doesn’t disappoint.  The gunwork and action scenes are phenomenal.  The choreography is fantastic, the method of John Wick’s murder spree is bloody display of art… but there’s very little of the deep motivations from the first movie.

In the first movie, John Wick is a man driven by revenge and hate.  We not only see how much has been taken from him, but we see the pettiness and brutality of the men that took it away.  We root for his vengeance, as an audience, and excuse the mass-murder rampage that results.  It’s very much like Kill Bill, in that regard.

The second movie has none of these motivations.  He’s had his revenge, he’s killed everyone in his path… and (not to spoil things, but you can guess from the fact that there is a sequel) he gets pulled right back into the life of an assassin.  John Wick kills a lot of people.  Most of them are presumably bad.  He doesn’t have the motivation or drive to do it, he has no revenge, no anger, no justification beyond the preservation of his miserable life.  In that, it feels as if the writer just didn’t really know what to do.

Spoiler (highlight to read): He does it for a sort of murky reason in that he doesn’t want to have the entire criminal underworld come after him.  In fact, he kills more people in this movie than in the last, 128 versus 77 in the first one.  He has his marker to justify, but the end result of him fulfilling the marker is the same as if he hadn’t… so why bother, why did all these other people have to die?)

In the end, John Wick Chapter Two fails to do what the first movie did: rise above being gun-porn.  Don’t get me wrong, it does that gun-porn fantastically… but it’s ultimately a shallow movie that doesn’t have the depth of characterization of its predecessor, nor does it have the interesting plot.  The villains are mono-dimensional and the lack of motivations of John Wick reduces his murderous rampage into a mass shooting event where he guns down droves of nameless mooks.

I came hoping for a story of revenge or vengeance and I walked away at the end feeling as if nothing had been resolved.  The action and acting are fantastic… the story and characterization is flat.  I recommend it for a popcorn movie, but it doesn’t achieve the depth of the original movie.

Guns, lots of guns
Guns, lots of guns…
Fantasy, Reading, Science Fiction

Free Short Stories

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The Freeport Mutineers, by Kal Spriggs
The Freeport Mutineers, by Kal Spriggs

Starting today and running through Monday, February 20th, I’ll be offering The Freeport Mutineers and Look to the Stars for free.  Most of my readers will already have free copies, but in case you’ve missed them before, here you are!

The Freeport Mutineers

Young Midshipman Wachter is about to face the rope.

Troubled by the rumors spread throughout the Southern Fleet, the young officer turned to the Marines and Sailors under his command… yet he and they were betrayed, arrested, and convicted of mutiny, all under the orders of the ambitious Lord Admiral Hennings.

Faced with the prospect of not only his own death, but that of the men under his command, Wachter must somehow find a way to do the right thing. Yet there is little hope with he and his men jailed, weaponless, and condemned, while the town of Freeport lies under martial law and the threat of dark sorcery.

Only one course lays open to him, to break his oaths and to swear allegiance to the cause of another, to become exactly what his enemies have accused him of being: a mutineer.

Look to the Stars
Look to the Stars, a short story by Kal Spriggs
Look to the Stars, a short story by Kal Spriggs

Mason McGann is a smuggler, a liar, and a cheat. With his ship impounded by customs, he figures he has no choice left but to auction off information about the lost Dreyfus Fleet.

But things are never what they seem when you hold information that can change the course of history.

 

Entertainment

Movie Review: The Space Between Us

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the_space_between_us_posterThe Space Between Us is a near-future science fiction romance.  In my opinion, it’s a perfect Valentine’s Day movie to drag your significant other along for a night out.  It’s optimistic, it’s sappy, and it’s fun.  Honestly, I’d put it in the same category of movies as Tomorrowland and Stardust.

The plot isn’t overly complicated.   It’s a story about a young man and woman finding themselves.

That can be pretty difficult when they both live on different planets.  The interactions between the two main characters is fantastic, with great chemistry and they portray their roles very well.

It’s a movie that takes our going to Mars as a matter of course, and for that I could forgive any number of mistakes in the movie.  Fortunately, there’s relatively few, with the most egregious being science stuff (asymmetric-designed ship… groan).   There’s a few minor plot decisions that had me shaking my head, but even those are relatively tiny things.  The movie as a whole is fun, fast-paced, and with some genuinely sweet scenes.

It’s a movie that makes you feel good about being alive in this era of wonders… and that’s a really good thing in my opinion.  They take the time to marvel at human accomplishments and the movie uses Gardener to give an outside perspective on so many things that we take for granted.

I highly recommend seeing this movie.  As I said, it’s fun, it’s romantic, and you walk out of the theater feeling good.

The news and opinions of Kal Spriggs