Since August, I’ve written over a dozen news articles about Dune, the big-budget Warner Bros. film adaption of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi literary masterwork. Yesterday (or today, depending on how you look at it with the time difference), I had one more article go up, while the movie itself became available as a premium purchase or VOD rental in the U.S. iTunes Store.

This post contains links to my complete news coverage of Dune, directed by Denis Villeneuve. But first, I want to discuss Arrival, the 2016 film that marked Villeneuve’s transition from thrillers into science fiction (picking up eight Academy Award nominations in the process).

In which a grown man grouses for 600 words about a computer-animated comedy that left him cold. More like The Gaijin Grump, amirite?

This was originally a capsule review that made up one section of the next post, “Closing the Book on Star Wars in Japan.” Solo: A Star Wars Story opened in Japanese theaters on June 29, 2018. Three and a half years later, on December 29, 2021, The Book of Boba Fett streamed its series premiere on Disney+. That week, I rewatched Solo and added in some more thoughts and screenshots to this review, expanding it into its own breakout post.

The original idea behind The Gaijin Ghost was to have a travel blog that would de-emphasize the blogger and make the reader the main character, rather like a Choose Your Own Adventure book where the reader is invited in with the words, “You’re the star of the story!” For a while, I even tried to adhere to a mandate of never using first-person pronouns here on the site. It can actually be tricky to write like that when you’re trying to synthesize subjective experiences into travel blog posts.