The final poster for the new Star Trek is a bit odd. To any Star Trek fan, the image of 1701 is immediately visible. But to the rest of humanity, the image looks like an intriguing blur. Perhaps this was the point. This would make a good teaser-poster, but as the final art, it is lacking. However, there is one cool thing about the poster, and ( Read more... )

It's one thing to produce a series of graphic novels based not on Bladerunner, but on PKD's original "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?". But it's quite another to produce a 24-issue series of graphic novels that include the entire text of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.

BOOM! Studios, in partnership with Electric Shepherd Productions, is ( Read more... )

(Again, here there be spoilers regarding the BSG ep. "No Exit"). Certain elements of the last episode of BSG, "No Exit" was remarkably disappointing. Of course, the series has its ups and downs -- but this was a pivotal episodes, and the writers showed a remarkable lack of creativity when they revealed the relationship between Ellen, the primary ( Read more... )

In Sartre's play, "No Exit", a Valet leads a man named Garcin into an other-worldly room with no windows, no mirrors, and only one door. Eventually Garcin is joined by a woman, Inès, and then another, Estelle. After their entry, the Valet leaves and the door is shut and locked. They, in effect, torture each other, by probing each other's sins, ( Read more... )

Can anyone make out what Alice is saying in this remix consisting of clips from the film 'Alice in Wonderland'? The video is hypnotic, and captures well the surrealism that pervades the film and the book. But my inability to determine what she is saying detracts from the experience.

Click to view

Has anyone read anything by John Updike? He died yesterday. This means I can finally read his fiction. I'm not sure where to start though -- or whether I should at all. I'm considering starting with his well-known, "Rabbit, Run", a story about Harry Angstrom who is in a perpetual state of thanatos -- repeatedly attempting escape from his own ( Read more... )

Last week I saw a musical (yes, a musical -- I am jarred even as I write this) called Sunday in the Park with George. It depicted the story behind George Seurat's painting 'Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Grande Jatte'. Cosmo might remember that George Seurat was a painter whose work we both admired the last time we visited the Getty together. He ( Read more... )

The epic film biography of Che Guevara, starring Benicio Del Toro, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. It runs four hours, 30 minutes, and is almost entirely in Spanish. It apparently dispenses with many clichés associated with biopics of Che, offering virtually no insight into the origin of his brand of humanism, instead presenting ( Read more... )

Between 1940 and 1953, Upton Sinclair wrote the World's End series of 11 novels about Lanny Budd, the "red" son of an American arms manufacturer -- a socialite, an art expert and an acquaintance of Hermann Göring and Adolf Hitler. The books cover in sequence much of the political history of the Western world (particularly Europe and America), in ( Read more... )