SwiftBlog

When Jurassic World finally roars to life on June 12, it’ll mark the latest emergence of the dinos-run-amok scenario created by Michael Crichton in his 1990 novel Jurassic Park. While that book is probably the author’s most famous work, it’s also just the tip of his high-tech, high-concept, popular-thriller iceberg. Related Stories The Complete Works: Ranking All 64 Stephen King Books Like his fellow superstar novelists Tom Clancy (military technology) and John Grisham (lawyers), Crichton had his own distinctive and incredibly page-turning shtick: meticulously researched settings that involve a crack team of experts combating a wild social or scientific breakthrough of some kind or another, be it a hungry T. [Read More]

With news that Homestar Runner would be seeing more frequent updates later this year, we went back and rewatched every single Strong Bad Email, the series that really put the weirdo Flash animation site on the map. Some good news: All of the emails you remember — the ones that you can still quote — mostly hold up. Some less good news: The ones that you don’t remember, or maybe have never even seen? [Read More]

Keith Kupferer and Tara Mallen in Ghostlight. I wandered into Ghostlight early one afternoon this past January at the Sundance Film Festival. I didn’t know anything about the picture; it was simply playing at the right time and was just the right length to keep me off the street for a couple of hours. I didn’t even know what genre it belonged to. (For some reason, I had a vague thought that it might be a nature documentary. [Read More]

Kevin Alves as Travis on Yellowjackets and Nathan Chen at the 2022 Winter Olympics. You may know Kevin Alves as moody teen Travis on Showtime’s breakout-hit maybe-cannibalism series Yellowjackets, but what you may not know him for comes in handy this week: being a former singles figure skater. After getting his mind blown watching a particularly incredible skater as a child (more on that soon), the Canada native represented Brazil on the ice as a teenager in the aughts and competed at multiple championships, eventually earning the distinction of being Brazil’s first men’s skater to compete internationally at the senior level in 2009. [Read More]

Red Band Society What I Did for Love Season 1 Episode 10 Editor’s Rating 4 stars **** «Previous Next» « PreviousEpisode NextEpisode » Red Band Society What I Did for Love Season 1 Episode 10 Editor’s Rating 4 stars **** «Previous Next» « PreviousEpisode NextEpisode » The quality of a given episode of Red Band Society inevitably rests with the amount of Dash we get onscreen. [Read More]

Tagline: “From the studio that brought you Fahrenheit 9/11 and the director of Borat…” Translation: Attention flag-burning sodomites! The Verdict: In Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen made ordinary red-state Americans look silly by blundering through driving lessons and bringing poo to dinner parties. In Religulous, his upcoming documentary about organized religion, Bill Maher will apparently try for similar results by mocking people directly to their faces. As occasional watchers of his HBO show Real Time, we’ll admit he can be funny — just not typically in his man-on-the-street interviews, in which he usually looks completely uncomfortable; sadly, these appear to make up the bulk of Religulous. [Read More]

In 1972, the American artist Lee Bontecou, who died this week at age 91, showed a series of plastic flowers and vacuum-formed fish and sea creatures in New York. She felt she got bad reviews and left the city, settling in rural Pennsylvania, where, with her artist husband, she raised a child (“Having a baby was the most wonderful piece of sculpture I ever made,” she later said). For 20 years she commuted to Brooklyn College to teach, but her low-to-no profile turned her into a kind of ghost artist. [Read More]

Reservation Dogs Uncle Brownie Season 1 Episode 3 Editor’s Rating 5 stars ***** «Previous Next» « PreviousEpisode NextEpisode » Reservation Dogs Uncle Brownie Season 1 Episode 3 Editor’s Rating 5 stars ***** «Previous Next» « PreviousEpisode NextEpisode » After two consecutive whoopings by their rivals, the Reservation Dogs desperately seek a mentor who can teach them how to defend themselves — a kind of Native American Obi-Wan Kenobi. [Read More]

Rick and Morty Morty’s Mind Blowers Season 3 Episode 8 Editor’s Rating 3 stars *** «Previous Next» « PreviousEpisode NextEpisode » Rick and Morty Morty’s Mind Blowers Season 3 Episode 8 Editor’s Rating 3 stars *** «Previous Next» « PreviousEpisode NextEpisode » Rick and Morty has absolutely no interest in making my job easy, does it? [Read More]

A very talented, promising young musician just earned his first No. 1 on the Billboard charts, and he goes by the name of [checks notes] Bob Dylan? Yes, Nobel Prize in Literature holder, Oscar winner, and ten-time Grammy award-winning folk legend Bob Dylan has climbed to the top of the charts for the first time in his career at the tender age of 78. Pitchfork reports that Dylan’s 17-minute song “Murder Most Foul” about the assassination of JFK, which he surprise released last month, now sits atop the Rock Digital Song Sales chart after selling 10,000 downloads within its first week of release. [Read More]