It's the day after the Academy Awards ceremony, so that means there's a lot of carping on the Internet about how it was too long and too boring and not good television and all the other things people like to say about the Oscars the day after they're handed out ( Read more... )

One of my co-workers told me this afternoon about a radio call-in segment he'd heard about what 1980s movies should be remade. Apparently, more than one person suggested Back to the Future, which is just ridiculous. Robert Zemeckis himself demonstrated with BttF Part II and Part III that the original couldn't be improved upon. My co-worker's ( Read more... )

I'm not nearly as interested in the Oscars as I used to be, but I still feel compelled to make note of and comment briefly on the Academy Award nominations that were announced this morning. I'm just going to go down the list and see what jumps out at me.

• Hey, I've already seen one of the Best Picture nominees! I think the last time that happened ( Read more... )

I still haven't quite decided what kind of posting schedule I'm going to try to adhere to in 2014. I may go with the Monday / Wednesday / Friday schedule sunbrae suggested. I'm also pondering the ongoing urgings of college pal Lisa B. M. to write more fiction. There's a Harry Potter/Susan Bones story idea I've been kicking around in my head for years now ( Read more... )

I've decided that I'm going to try to start making regular posts to my LJ again. This may have been self-evident to a certain degree, but I'm explicitly mentioning it so as to make clear that this is intended to be a sustained effort, not just a transitory spasm of posting. We'll see how well I do at keeping up with it.So saith me, on January 6 of ( Read more... )

Here's the second half of that questionnaire I started yesterday.

Name a movie you own on DVD/VHS/whatever that no one else on your friends list does.

Last time around I named Happy Accidents, and while none of my LJ friends admitted owning, a friend of a friend commented that he owned a copy. But since he wasn't on my friends list (and still isn ( Read more... )

I finished Wilson, A. Scott Berg's new biography of Woodrow Wilson, this afternoon. I'll have more to say about that tomorrow, but here are two very tangentially related items.

1) I rewatched The Truman Show the other day. It's still a wonderful movie, and it remains in my personal top ten, but here's an unanswered question: was Truman allowed to ( Read more... )

I recently watched a movie called Scents and Sensibility, a contemporary adaptation of the homophonic Jane Austen novel. It wasn't very good, but I was kept amused throughout by the many spelling errors in the closed captions ( Read more... )

UPDATE! As I've gotten deeper into Words of Wonder, I have indeed run across a handful of instances where the level was unsolvable, which you'll recall was a problem for which I had criticized certain bubble saga games. For example, I ran across a level in which I was required to clear two X tiles from the board, but only one X tiles appeared on ( Read more... )

I watched a really funny, really depressing movie last night: In the Loop, a political satire set in the days immediately preceding the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It's funny because, well, it features funny people like David Rasche and Steve Coogan saying and doing funny things. It's depressing because it dramatizes -- comedizes? -- a rather depressing ( Read more... )