...is the absolute lack of boilerplate justification. You are told what you need to know to advance the plot and bring the drama, and nothing more. Why do they all use colt peacemakers, and why do those peacemakers make funny high-pitched noises? Who cares? In a star-faring setting, is ground transport technology really not cheap and transportable ( Read more... )

who the hell actually watches the PoTC films? Todd Alcott, it turns out:
Elizabeth ...still has the medallion she took off Will.  Why did she take it?  She took it... to keep her dream alive of one day being stolen away.  As the movie proper begins, she takes the medallion out of its hiding place and puts it on.  Why?  As a little lust token, ( Read more... )

I shouldn't post these without having listened to them, but I see they won't be up for much longer, so I'm letting you know before they go: new Blake's 7 radio drama. To whit:

Origin story reimagined
"early years" episodes.

I'm told Blake's 7 has quite a fan base in the US, which surprises me, although perhaps not more than Doctor Who's. For those not ( Read more... )

Further to yesterday's post, it seems James Cameron is being lured from his batcave to tackle the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster. I'm guessing this is because of what he's learned about filming using robot submersibles (although I suspect the vast team of technicians he worked with understand all that rather better than The Mighty Director) and not ( Read more... )

I can't possibly say anything really novel about Avatar, perhaps the most over-discussed movie of the past decade, so I'll keep this short.

First, I liked it, in its way. Yes. It is very, very pretty, although I'm not so sure about its Midnight Barbie palette. And more involving than and no more stupid than other examples of its genre, about which ( Read more... )

Since there's no moment of doubt about which One to Let In, I'm going to just trust teh Wikipedia that it's a reference to a Morrissey song. Curious.
Also curious: the not-present day, not-period setting; the references to Brezhnev as a Swedish official; the elisions in the movie from the book plot (which render almost all the relationships in the ( Read more... )

This is a little premature, I'm still halfway through it, but I don't think I'd compare it to Borges. It is tiresome to speak of labyrinths here, so I'll just say that my favourite Borges stories open up vistas, sometimes long after I've read them. He had a knack for containing a whole world in a few pages and for unfolding that world just far ( Read more... )

So even though this is short, it's spoilery. If you've been living under a rock.

Best things about the film: the weather and Lang's house, ostensibly on Martha's Harbor but actually in Usedom, on the German-Polish border.* This piece of mid-century brutalism throws us straight back to North By Northwest and continues the (at very least) 50 year old ( Read more... )

Jim Broadbent is a raving bloody genius. I have no idea how he does that with his face.

And the rest of the film is actually, really quite good, so if you had any doubts about seeing it just for Broadbent (and I can't imagine why you would), let me reassure you that it's still worth watching even when he's not on screen. Gambon in particular is ( Read more... )

I wasn't going to, but then I did. I agree with everyone else about it ( Read more... )