Sometimes, I have a Spidey sense for a movie without having seen it in the theater. When it comes out on DVD or Blu-ray, I’ll just buy it, knowing that I will probably enjoy having it in my permanent library. Primer was a good example of that. So, when Where the Wild Things Are came…
Anyone with a yen for science fiction has passed through the doors of Isaac Asimov’s original Foundation trilogy. Rich with intrigue, massive in scope, rife with socio-political ideas. It is one of those trilogies, like the more sophisticated Dune series, that gets a young sci-fi reader’s mind racing. One of the beauties of Foundation is…
I’m watching an incredibly irritating movie. One of those movies you can watch while folding laundry — five loads of it. It’s called Gone and the entire plot so far hinges on whether one character reveals to the girlfriend of another character that the boyfriend had a one-night stand before meeting his girlfriend on holiday…
Are you one of those people who can’t stand the sound of silence? If you’re by yourself, do you play a radio or stream audio/video all the time? Or do you love the sound of absolute silence? I’m somewhere in between. I love the sound of absolute silence, but when surrounded by it (can an…
Why do certain movies make us cry? I don’t mean manufactured weepie dramas, but ordinary movies that don’t make anybody else cry…even though you weep every time you see it. Or perhaps it’s just me. I cry when I watch Raiders of the Lost Ark and Marion Ravenwood first unleashes that massive anime grin of…
District 9 is packed with ideas, ignoring countless cliches as it hurls itself into a frenzy of themes and concepts you expect only from the best science fiction.
I think I’ve just about had it with the prettification of the adult male. Decades of Dr. Who have given us a wide variety of doctors, from the old and cranky to the youthful and dorky. Never have we been handed an out-and-out pretty boy. I would love to have been at the meetings where…
Oh, and by the way, as I sit here writing blog posts, my dad is firing up Valkyrie, that movie with Tom Cruise as a Nazi somethingorother. Its opening “trick” to explain away the fact that Tom Cruise is soooo not German is one of the weakest I’ve seen, um, ever. On this topic I…
I loathe Michael Bay movies, his commercial-slick direction and so-called mastery of spectacle are masks for deafening stupidity. But I enjoyed the first Transformers more than I care to admit, and reluctantly resigned myself to seeing the sequel. In this latest, Mr. Bay has achieved new levels of plagiarism, stealing liberally from his own numerous…
“Seems like only yesterday” is, indeed, a cliche. I read Watchmen when they were only available as monthly issues in a 12-issue series, and that doesn’t feel like 23 years ago. Perhaps the reason Watchmen feels so recent is that it remains a rich and entertaining literary epic, its themes so painfully appropriate, its unflinching…