SIFF 2010 is almost upon us, and I still need to post my "shortlist" of movies I plan to see. People have started asking me about my annual recommendations - I'm apprehensive about calling them that, because they're really just what's grabbed my slightly-warped attention before things have even really started.

That being said, though, there are a ( Read more... )

Packed house tonight at the Cinerama for the Fifth annual Science Fiction & Fantasy Short Film Festival, courtesy of EMP|SFM and SIFF. The Internet being what it is, a sizable number of the shorts are already available online for those who couldn't be there but are curious. I've tried to list all the ones I could find below - please let me know ( Read more... )

Jan. 1, 2000: Computers everywhere continued working mostly as expected, so no need to go in on the weekend. Our British corporate masters (who had bought us a year or two earlier) were still trying to figure out what to make of our Pittsburgh office, which was mostly doing DoD/DARPA work and therefore had to have an arms-distance relationship ( Read more... )

A rapidly growing number of correspondents have started linking to a Telegraph.co.uk article about Creation, a movie about Charles Darwin that opened the Toronto Film Festival several days ago, and the filmmaker's contention that it's not getting US distribution "because his theory of evolution is too controversial for American audiences." I would ( Read more... )

( Also very good and worth recommending )

SIFF has wrapped up for another year, which means I'm likely to be more visible with something other than updates on what movie I'm seeing today. Over the course of the last three-and-a-half weeks, I saw a total of 40 feature-length movies and ten packages of shorts (plus one feature and one shorts package outside the festival proper).
I had ( Read more... )

Less than 24 hours to go! I've been asked by several folks what's on my "shortlist" so the following are the films I've already planned to see. I make no suggestion that these are the films I think will be the "best" - much less that I can recommend them, as I haven't seen any of them yet. Some of the themes in here are films I see for someone ( Read more... )

Thirteen bits of good fortune in my life this Friday the 13th:

1. Making the midnight opening of Watchmen at the Cinerama last Thursday night
2. Seeing the original cast of MST3K doing, well, MST3K but without the parts they don't own the trademarks for at the King Cat this upcoming evening
3. Donations are starting to come in sponsoring me in the ( Read more... )

I was among the throngs who saw Watchmen in its Seattle opening, midnight Thursday night at the Cinerama. There were at least two people in full Rorschach outfits, one very good. Nobody I saw came as Dr. Manhattan, for which I'm probably grateful - although it was chilly enough out that if you went for the costume honestly, you might not have ( Read more... )

Thirteen bits of good fortune in my life this Friday the 13th:

1. Let's start with the big one: I'm working for a Fortune 500 that had a good earnings report coming out of 2008. These days, that's enough good fortune for an entire Friday the 13th.
2. As of Monday, down just under 10 pounds on the year so far.
3. The 2009 Science Fiction + Fantasy Short ( Read more... )