I'm on steroids for the sciatica, plus a soupcon of opioids for flavor, and this morning I had an anxiety dream about work ( Read more... )

Saw Ben Wheatley's film Free Fire, as produced by Martin Scorsese, filmed in Toronto. Enjoyed the 70's feel, the pressure-cooker premise, the classical unity of place and time. Most of the filming takes places inside an old warehouse, standing in for an abandoned umbrella factory, whose motto on the wall reads, "We have you covered." haha. A ( Read more... )

I took in Jordan Peele's horror/satire "Get Out" the other weekend, in part because it got a 99% critics fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and since Citizen Kane garnered 100%, I figured it should be within a percentile of that movie in quality ( Read more... )

Someone here at LiveJournal suggested that something I said reminded them of The Story of Your Life, by Ted Chiang, so I read it and really enjoyed it. In fact, it has been a secret nerd handshake until now, an indicator that the speaker was one of us, people who still read sci fi, not just watch movies and television with spaceships, et cetera. ( Read more... )

Within all of us there is the capacity to be anyone, or anything, and that’s the place where compassion comes from, that understanding that I could be like that, if circumstances had been different. There is an Iago and a Romeo within all of us - there is that lover, and there is that sociopath ( Read more... )

Remember how my sister fell down our front steps and hurt her foot? Turns out the problem, that horrible noise she heard, was not a bone, but a tendon on the top of her foot snapping. When she went in for xrays recently, the little bones at the base of her toes had moved around without that connective tissue to make them behave. Tuesday, she is ( Read more... )

Saw Abe Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and enjoyed it. Not nearly as awful as it ought to have been.

My brother got asked to intro the sci fi/horror movie night at the college where he teaches, and because he's a man of ham, he agreed:

Click to view

The camerawoman is his wife, and the thing with the tentacle is his kid.

For some reason, this silliness makes me inordinately and unreasonably proud. I wish our Mom were alive; she would really dig this.

I just got snagged by this 1/2 hour indie film directed by Vincent D'Onofrio. It's stagy and play-like, but a very sweet homage to Orson Welles, with D'Onofrio playing the lead ( Read more... )

Ah, the AARP Harrison Ford looks good as ever, hanging off trucks, cracking the whip, involved in improbable chase scenes in exotic locales. I'd hit that ( Read more... )