only 2 months after everyone else, I finally saw The Hobbit part 1 with my eldest on Sunday. He has not yet read any Tolkien ( Read more... )

watching The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, it's remarkable how Jude Law looks like Rik Mayall ( Read more... )

...I can't remember a single thing about the plot. But I do remember that it brings back Sam Neill and makes fun of the "preachiness" of the earlier movies by blaming Jeff Goldblum. This is really ingenious - the kind of move I've previously only seen pulled off by religions and nation states.

And remember those dinosaurs that were surprisingly ( Read more... )

and the sequel, too. Sometimes I do ludicrously out-of-touch reviews here, but this time I just have one thing to note:

that film really, really wants to mean something, but I don't have the faintest idea what it is. And I don't think it knows, either: it's like a rambling conversation with a drunk undergrad - it clearly feels passionately about a ( Read more... )

Can you help me figure out how to run a Barsoom game?

Here's the problem: people get all fired up watching adventure movies or reading books and then they want to play out those adventures in an RPG. Only the book/movie stories are carefully constructed to play out toward a conclusion and the heroes act the way they have to in order to make those ( Read more... )

Did you all write about Cowboys and Aliens and I just missed it? I may have, I was awfully busy last August, but the only trace I can find in the archives is a casual mention on Roll for Initiative - and I find that strange, because for anyone who groks that DnD is really a western game, it’s just about the most DnD movie ever. More obviously it’s ( Read more... )

So I just got done with a binge of HBO's Rome and Showtime's Borgias series - that is, of sex salted with murder or possibly murder salted with sex, in Rome, in 50BC or 1500AD, you choose which. And the experience has left me feeling rather... used. And wary of ever getting involved in any kind of popular history TV project.

Here's the thing: I can ( Read more... )

Teahupoo, Tahiti is widely known throughout the world of surfing as having the most powerful break on the planet... The French Navy labeled this day a double code red prohibiting and threatening to arrest anyone that entered the water.

So of course Chris Bryan went surfing. Watching it, I can honestly say I still don't get the attraction. Even ( Read more... )

Others have covered the costumes, the Tharks, the white apes and the tech with an obsessive level of detail that only fanboys can bring.* I have just three things to say about the John Carter trailer.**

1. When I first heard the director of Finding Nemo was making a Barsoom movie, I thought it was possible that something new could come into this ( Read more... )

In case you missed it, Geoffrey McKinney somehow got hold of John Boorman's 1970 treatment for a 3 hour LoTR film.* His summary is here, and it's a trip - giant snakes, kabuki performances, leather-clad beekeepers and blood sugar sex magic galore - you can smell the 70s coming off it in waves. It's also raggedly uneven, dripping with original ideas ( Read more... )