Summer of ’28

When I first started writing with aspirations of professional publication, Ray Bradbury was one of the quiet giants who always captured my imagination. If I learned anything from him, it is that the poetry of an idea is more important than all the words used to execute it. He happened to be both an idea…

Kick less ass

The difference between an entertaining story and a great one is the difference between predictability and inevitability. A predictable conclusion is one where you guess with a fair amount of accuracy what’s going to happen at each milestone leading to the conclusion. An inevitable story is one where you know the outcome will be positive…

Returning to the well

I have mixed feelings about Prometheus. Great direction. Expected. Beautiful to look at. Expected. We get to figure out one of the great mysteries of Alien. Thumbs up. But hiring Damen Lindeloff, one of the heinous masterminds behind the heinous Lost TV show to co-write the script, was not a wise idea. Lindeloff is no Ronald…

Ye Gods

The ways in which Tarsem’s Immortals is superior to the Clash of the Titans remake and, in some ways, 300 are almost innumerable. Certainly, 300 paved the way for Immortals. You see that in almost every fight scene in which a combination of bullet-time/normal-time/bullet-time is used. 300‘s indisputably homoerotic obsession with perfect male physiques is…

Make Batman stop

I have several problems with Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies and I’m just going to clear my head of them. 1) Nolan’s work is 100% cerebral testosterone. He and Guy Ritchie are cast from the same cloth, with the key exception that Nolan is actually a visionary, a superior director, and doesn’t irritate. More on this…

Skyline vs. Battle: Los Angeles

Two big budget alien-invasion movies came out earlier this year. Skyline came out first and did poorly at the box office, being roundly panned by critics. Battle: Los Angeles came out later and did gangbuster business at the box office, although it too was roundly panned. Both movies focus on Los Angeles (what a surprise…

Lovecraft was wrong

All of my books are packed in boxes stacked in a container sitting on a cargo ship enroute to New Zealand. I’ve been pining for a good read and can’t stand the idea of staring at my iPad screen reading reformatted Kindle pages. I stopped today at Borderlands, the sci-fi and fantasy book store in…

Drama monsters

I watched the most unusual movie the other day.  It’s called Monsters, and it involves, well, enormous monsters from outer space.  But it’s not a single-minded monster movie, not in the way that, say, Cloverfield is.  Instead, it lives in a rather underpopulated genre of its own: the dramance, guest starring monsters.  It’s also an…