“12 Rules For Life: An Antidote To Chaos” by Jordan B. Peterson is one of my few literary forays into non-fiction.  I have been following Dr. Peterson through YouTube for a few months now and cheered most of what has to say.  He has had a long career as a psychologist and professor currently teaching at the University of Toronto where he has bedeviled some of his fellow faculty and many others.

Some of the rules such as “make friends with people who want the best for you” or “pursue what is meaningful-not what is expedient” are pretty straight-forward, however there are still pretty lengthy explanations to follow.  “Do not bother children when they are skateboarding” and “pet a cat when you encounter one in the street” do require a bit more interpretation.  I won’t get into all twelve rules here, but one should peruse he table of contents.  There are quite cleverly stated, even the less ambiguous ones.

Peterson has a lot to say in this one, and he does so eloquently.  There were a few times I had to remind myself as to which rule I was reading.  He’s a psychologist and academics, so he has a propensity for verbosity, on the page anyway.  Fortunately, Peterson is quite gifted in his presentation of both professional and personal encounters.

This book has garnered a lot attention and criticism, however I think Peterson is spot on with his ideas.  The simple takeaway seems to be center around the idea of people being responsible for finding their own sense of peace and order.  Of course, he does acknowledge that help from others can be a key component, but one must be discerning about who they turn to for that help. The book seems to be a refusal to merely accept the circumstances that could be unsettling or threatening one’s well-being and encourages the recognition of every persons’ uniqueness.

A lot of what is said has lined up with some of my own opinions and ideas about people, relationships, and responsibility.  I can also see how people have found this volume quite inspiring.  Peterson is realistic and somewhat blunt in his observations, but he also has a sense of optimism that comes through at the right moments.

I was pleasantly surprised by the plethora of Biblical references here.  As a practicing, and at times struggling Christian, I was impressed about how deftly he worked many Biblical stories and concepts into his expositions.

The Bible should always be the first place we go for inspiration and knowledge of God, however I think most would do well to have Peterson’s book not too far out of reach.

I was glad to have finally purchased this volume and to get through it.  It does solidify my hope that I will one day have the opportunity to meet the good doctor.

After reading what could be a defining piece of literary work from a real-life thinker, time to check in with one of my favorite fictional thinkers.  Sherlock Holmes has to face “The Instrument of Death” in the latest novel by David Stuart Davies.

“The Silence” is a horror film that just premiered on Netflix this week.  Carey and Shane Van Dyke co-wrote this piece which was directed by John R. Leonetti.  The cast includes the Stanley Tucci, Kiernan Shipka, and Miranda Otto.

Some underground colony of prehistoric creatures that resemble pterosaurs are disturbed and emerge out into the open to feast and breed.  These things are blind and rely on sound to locate their prey.  Of course, there’s a family with a deaf girl who is quite adept on dealing with silence.  Stanley Tucci is the patriarch of this clan as they adjust to their new life as refugees trying to head north where it is determined these creatures are vulnerable to the cold.  Also John Corbett is in this playing the more obviously adept best friend at survival situations.

This is a mixture of familiar elements from other films such as the recent “A Quiet Place” and so forth.  It’s not terribly original, but it does manage to be somehow quite compelling regardless.  Tucci almost always has an engaging performance that somehow lifts even the most ill-considered of scripts into something at least tolerable.  There were some moments that gave me the creeps.  It’s not going to be considered any sort of classic, however I wasn’t too out by it.

“Hellboy” has returned to the big screen with a new actor, new writers, new villains.  I miss the days of Guillermo Del Toro and Ron Perlman.  Anyway, this version is brought to us by Neil Marshall directing a script written by Andrew Cosby.  David Harbour dons the red prosthetic pectorals and horn stubs in the lead role.  Hellboy originated from Dark Horse Comics in 1993.  He hit the big screen first in 2004 with Ron Perlman in the part under the superior direction of Guillermo Del Toro.

I will stipulate that the reservations I have about this version have little to do with Harbour’s actual depiction of the character.  I think Harbour did the best he could.  I just think it could have had a better plot.  Milla Jovovich plays a medieval immortal sorceress who is dismembered with her various body parts buried and guarded by various secret societies all over the world for centuries.

I had not read the comics, but I did enjoy the Del Toro films.  I was a little taken aback by the continuous dismemberments and blood splatter.  I have a pretty stout skin when it comes to that, so I got used to it.  There did seem to be more placed on the visual extravaganza than on the actual plot.

There was the usual between the heroic demon and his adopted father, played by the prolific and talented Ian McShane.

I guess I should summarize the background finally.  Hellboy is a half-demon who was prophesied to take over the world with unimaginable fear and suffering, however he somehow was convinced by the tender care of an adoptive father to reject his more evil tendencies and work to protect us mere mortals from the supernatural as an agent for the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense.

It’s an absurd concept as expected from a comic book series, so there is a lot of forgiveness that needs to be afforded on the outset.  Th problem here is that the movie feels like it goes on forever.  It falls short on coherence even for a comic book film.   It just felt like a bit of a mess at times.

There were a few amusing one-liners but not enough to cover up the cracks in the writing.  It has a talented cast which does keep it from being a complete disaster.  It’s a film that doesn’t really sink to the bottom of the cinematic trash can, but it bounces around the rim a bit.  Maybe the overall affection for the character of Hellboy by the fans will help it do well enough to justify another shot.  Just because I was a little disappointed in this effort doesn’t quite mean that I will give up hope that a potential next installment will be an improvement.

“An Ideal World” is a Doctor Who audio play from Big Finish Productions and is one of The Early Adventures featuring Peter Purves presenting another rendition of the First Doctor, since William Hartnell is no longer with us.  Ian Potter is the writer of this installment which also features Maureen O’Brien reprising her role as Vicki as well as helping out Purves with narration.

The Doctor, Steven, and Vicki find another beautiful world with lethal lifeforms lurking.  They also meet a group of human colonists who have traveled a very long way to seek out a new planet.

The guest cast includes Carolyn Pickles, Angela McHale, and Tom Stourton.  As usual they do a fine job of keeping up with the regulars.

I had a little trouble staying interested about midway through the story.  It was a competent entry into the range but not much really grabbed my attention and kept it locked in.

Purves still does quite well capturing the essence of Hartnell’s version of the Doctor.  In spite of my lack of enthusiasm for this particular adventure, my interest in this range overall has not waned at all.

“Pet Semetary” is one of Stephen King’s most lauded horror novels published in 1983. There was a film adaptation released in 1989. And then there is this second adaptation released in 2019.  This thing apparently needed two directors in the form of Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer.  Jeff Buhler wrote the screenplay, which was from a story by Matt Greenburg.  One would think with so many people involved, it would have made a more impressive impact on me.  Jason Clarke, Amy Seimitz, and John Lithgow are some of the more significant cast members in this one.

Anyway, a big city doctor moves his family to a small town in Maine.  He learns of this pet cemetery in the woods behind his new house.  Even further beyond that is where those that are buried there don’t stay back and come back with a more demonic and murderous agenda.  It’s one thing when a pet returns with a more aggressive attitude, however the grief over a dead child can cause even further compelling temptations leading to blood-soaked outcome.

The girl at the center of this actually does put forth a fairly creepy performance. Yes, this time it’s the daughter. If this Jete Laurence carries her acting career into adulthood, I am sure she could have solid career provided that she can pick her projects with some wise counsel.  The performances are not necessarily bad.  Clarke has been around a while, and he does fine.  Lithgow is great as always. The actual acting from everyone is pretty good.

There were plenty of familiar elements that I can recall from the novel and previous onscreen iteration that made it into this one.  I thought the relationship between Clarke’s and Lithgow’s characters was somewhat rushed.  In the book, they developed a pretty solid if new friendship before Jud Crandall introduced the good doctor to the more profound secrets of the cemetery.  In this version, I had some trouble buying into their bond developing so quickly.

I was left with a sense that this latest adaptation was pointless.  Maybe the horror genre as a whole is pointless, but there are some gems in the pile of nightmarish coal as far as quality of writing and fun scares.

What it comes down to is that this is not exactly a terrible film, but it does drive home the thought that the book is still better by a long shot.

“The Highwaymen” is a Netflix film written by John Fusco and directed by John Lee Hancock.  Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson star as two former Texas Rangers tasked with bringing in the infamous and murderous Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow in 1934.  Kathy Bates plays Governor Miriam Ferguson who reluctantly signs off on the involvement of the two Rangers.  She was apparently responsible for dissolving that agency for a time.  I first learned that Texas had a female governor in 1934.  That was an interesting historical discovery for me.

It’s an interesting film but it could be a little slow.  Costner and Harrelson seem to work well together.  There is some amazing scenery as they depict the chase.  Costner plays legendary Ranger, Frank Hamer.  Harrelson plays the seemingly unreliable partner, Maney Gault.

I liked it for the most part, but it had some moments that dragged a bit.  It takes a while for the full revelation of Bonnie and Clyde.  We see some of their misdeeds from a distance.  I was also struck by how many of the public idolized them at that time.  Their funerals had attendees well over 10,000.

I liked the film for the most part,  but it didn’t quite grip me as much as I hoped.

“Shazam!” is the latest of DC Extended Universe films and is directed by David F. Sandberg.  Henry Gayden produced the screenplay in which he co-developed the story with Darren Lemke.  Zachary Levi and Asher Angel share the role of Billy Batson who is bestowed with the power of Shazam.  Mark Strong is cast as the villain of Dr. Thaddeus Sivana, who almost had the power when he was a child but let himself fall into the temptations of imprisoned beings known as the Seven Deadly Sins. Jack Dylan Grazer plays Billy’s foster brother and fledgling guide as Billy tries to understand his new powers.

Shazam! was not a series I followed as a kid, so I missed out on a lot of understanding of the characters and background here.  I am not sure the script did a great job to service such newbies as myself in this one.

There are a lot of really funny moments in this film, but the coherence in the story wasn’t all that consistent.  Levi did hit the mark as a child trying to get used to an adult body much as was seen with Tom Hanks in “Big”.  However, he also has to contend with rather erratic and diverse superpowers.  There was a lot of Asher Angel, who I thought was rather engaging himself as the teen-aged Billy Asher.  Actually, the kids in the foster home were rather charming.  The most charming being that of Faithe Herman as Darla Dudley.

Just as a side note, it was nice to see foster parents portrayed as people who actually cared deeply for their young charges.  Cooper Andrews and Marta Milans play the couple who take on the admirable task of fostering children who are either orphaned or come from other troubling circumstances.

Shazam! may not have a very coherent backstory in the comic books for I know , so this may have been the best the writer could do.

The visual effects were fine.  After a while, that can be reasonably expected to be the case in this genre of film.

Anyway, it’s a pretty fun movie with solid casting, but I wouldn’t expect it to make a whole lot of sense.

“Black Thursday/Power Game” is a Doctor Who audio drama double bill release from Big Finish Productions with a pair of two-part adventures with Peter Davison’s Fifth Doctor. He is once again accompanied by Janet Fielding and Mark Strickson, playing Tegan and Turlough, respectively.  Jon Culshaw is voicing the shape-shifting android known as Kamelion.

“Black Thursday” is the first story and is written by Jamie Anderson.  The Doctor and his companions arrive in a Welsh village in the very early twentieth century where mining accident has occurred.  Kamelion has the rather unique problem of being overly empathetic when strong emotions are stirred up.  He bonds with a woman who has lost her husband and her son in this disaster and is consumed by the grief which causes all manner of disturbing reactions.  It’s not a terrible story but I think I liked the follow-up a little better.  I had some problems liking Tegan in this one because I sometimes found her a little more shrill than usual.  She has this way to bristle at every perceived slight to women at this time where attitudes of that nature were common.  One of the characters makes some assumption that she couldn’t be a doctor or something, and of course, Tegan has to make some retort without any consideration of the time period she is currently in for this story.  Tegan has always been one of the more impulsively brash companions in Doctor Who history, but I sometimes wish she could be written to not always fly off the handle when she is in these settings.  Perhaps there could be a more subtle or amusing way for her to note the chauvinism which seemed more prevalent in an earlier time period.  It isn’t like we all don’t know that women didn’t get a fair shake particularly back then.  I don’t think she is necessarily wrong, but I would have thought that she has seen enough through her travels with the Doctor to at least not quite sound so shocked or righteous when she encounters these moments which would have been much more common in that particular setting.  I am also thinking that I am glad Kamelion wasn’t used so much in the television series.  The whole show would have been in danger of just being about having to find him and deal with his inability to resist mind control or being swamped by intense emotion.  I may be one of the few Big Finish listeners not overly enthused by Kamelion being explored as a character more.

“Power Game” by Eddie Robson is a much more engaging idea to me.  It centers around a scavenger hunt type game show where the participants are not quite there voluntarily.  Tegan finds herself competing in this thing with no clear memory she got there.  The Doctor and Turlough, meanwhile are having to search for her and, you guessed it, Kamelion, who have mysteriously disappeared.  Tegan is back to be much more tolerable in this one.  This is where her stubbornness and indomitability become much more relevant and enjoyable to me.  Robson also seems to bring out her resourcefulness in the character which is something I can appreciate about having Tegan around.  I actually rather like Tegan for the most part, but I just had a hard time connecting with her in the first story of this release.  Once again, it starts to appear that Kamelion is at the root of these problems in this story.

Kamelion keeps having to apologize in these recent stories, and I have to say that the Doctor’s reluctance to tackle this problem a bit more directly is a little annoying to me.

Once again, the casting and performances do still make this a reasonably enjoyable listen.  The sound effects are still well executed.  Davison still performs quite well.  It’s hard to believe that he isn’t all that far from being seventy.  He doesn’t sound quite the same as he did in the television series, but he seems to be holding up well enough to make his participation in these episodes enjoyable.  Strickson is always a welcome return to the role of Turlough.  I would like to hear more with just him and Fielding without a third companion.  Their era on the television series was one of my favorite dynamics with the Fifth Doctor.

Anyway, I had a few gripes about this particular release, but it still was a long way from being bad.  The basic settings were quite different from each other which was nice, but the same problem of Kamelion erratic reactions to emotional stimulus made me rather glad that technical issues kept him from being realized fully onscreen.

“The Best of Enemies” is a film written and directed by Robin Bissell.  The always compelling Taraji P. Henson takes on the role of fireball civil rights activist Ann Atwater while Sam Rockwell has the rather unenviable task of playing Ku Klux Klan leader C.P. Ellis.  This movie dramatizes the conflict between these two as they are convinced to co-chair some two week committee meeting set up to finally deal with the issue of segregation which was apparently still going on in Durham, North Carolina around 1970.  It is not quite a spoiler to say the two of them ended up developing a solid friendship when it was all said and done.  The elementary school for the black children has a fire which then forces the question as to whether or not to integrate with the other schools.

I didn’t know anything about this story until I saw the advertisements for the movie.  Henson, in particular, is someone who I sort of keep an eye on because she usually has some interesting projects.  I was a little irritated about her predictable yet misguided support for her “Empire” support, Jussie Smollett, but that may be for another blog.  She’s still a consistently solid performer and is a powerful presence in this film.  Of course, the few interviews I have seen with the late Ann Atwater shows that her moniker of Roughhouse Ann was quite deserved.  Atwater was certainly in the right, but she sometimes struggled with the art of subtlety at times.  I think I would have liked her anyway if Henson’s portrayal was accurate.

Rockwell certainly is talented enough to hold his own as well.  Although his racism was indefensible, the movie shows some pretty complicated and heart-wrenching challenges that C.P. Ellis was apparently facing at the time.  Ellis was not really likeable for much of the movie obviously, but the presentation manages to avoid making him seem like a caricature. I thought the transformation of his views was pretty well depicted although there was a lot to try to cram in a two hour movie.

It was great to see Bruce McGill even if he was playing a rather despicable character in this one.  I also enjoyed the performance by an actor named Babou Ceesay.  Ceesay plays the black activist named Bill Riddick who does get the art of subtlety.  He was also the moderator for this community event called a charrette.  I got to expand my vocabulary a bit, so that was pretty cool.

I was a little surprised to see that reviews by the professional critics are rather mixed.  I am not sure why it didn’t get more of a positive reaction, but I liked it. Maybe the issues were a little over-simplified as expected, but not terribly so.  I learned a new piece of history of the civil rights fight.  It had a talented cast.  I am not sure what was embellished in the typical Hollywood fashion, but I didn’t catch anything that seemed too outlandish or distracting.

This seems like a piece of the Civil Rights Movement that is more overlooked than not, and I am glad that this story was told in an effective, concise manner with what appeared to be the right cast.

“Hotel Mumbai” is a film about the terrorist attacks that occurred in 2008 when several coordinated sieges plagued Mumbai, India for about four days.  This particular film centers on those trapped in the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel.  Anthony Maras is the director who co-wrote this piece with John  Collee. Armie Hammer, Dev Patel, Jason Isaacs, and Tilda Cobham-Hervey are included in the cast.

This is a pretty gripping cinematic experience.  It’s pretty intense.  Although it is hard to say if I enjoyed this movie considering the tragedy and bloodshed depicted, I will judge it as being pretty well put together.

There are several moments of courage and nobility by many of the people trapped in this thing.  The actors playing the extremists who initiate this attack are quite convincing in their brutal and loathsome behaviors.  The performances of those portraying the guests and staff of the Taj gave a genuine impression of how that fear and faint hope of survival must have looked during the real event.

I thought the choreography came off as pretty authentic.  The depiction of the utter brutality of those perpetrators was quite shocking as well.

Although I am sure much of the individual actions and characters in this film were fictional, I do believe there were genuine moments of bravery and nobility in the real attack.

Anyway, this seems to be a pretty important film in many ways.  I would recommend that it be seen but be prepared to be a bit rattled.