- The New Yorker’s first stab at the Canon of the 21st Century.
- After Man. An appreciation.
- 14 Writers Imprisoned for Their Work.
- Tor has posted its excellent lists of October genre releases:
- 31 Movies Based on Short Stories.
Tag: movies
Links and Notes for the Week of March 11, 2018
A short list this week. I’ve been out enjoying the beautiful weather with my beautiful partner.
* Exactly what it says in the title: (Almost) every Science Fiction and Fantasy and Comic Book Adaptation in the Works.
* I’ve been following the Grand Rapids Whitewater project for several years, and it looks like I might live to see rapids reappear in the middle of Grand Rapids. And I might even be young enough to enjoy them.
* More whacky news from a leader who seems sprung from the same DNA as emasculated president Donald Trump.
Flatland: The Movie
All People Are Critics. Some Are More Critical Than Others
Today I wrote my first movie review.
One of the big, ongoing projects at work is development on Spout.com, a movie discovery and discussion website. Several of my friends are regulars, so I finally bowed to peer pressure and created an account for myself. My user name is “Grasshopper”.
The first thing I did was to rate all of the movies I had seen. Simple enough to do — find the movie, and assign it a number between one and five. Before I knew it, I had rated over five hundred movies, and I am now up over a thousand. And that isn’t even counting all of the TV series and individual television episodes which can be rated; those would probably push me into the 2,000 range.
Normally I try not to shill for the projects I work on, but this time something unexpected happened: I had fun. I went through and found movies I hadn’t thought about in twenty years or more. Some of them were good, many more were mediocre or bad. Some of them made me feel quite nostalgic, accompanied by an odd sense of deja-vu wherein I could remember where I was and what I was doing when I watched the movie. Poltergeist with my brother and step-brother in Louisiana. Robocop with my brother, at home laying on the living room floor. The Crow with friends immediately after I returned from Russia. Star Wars with my Mom and brother in a movie theater in Jackson. The Razor’s Edge, sitting home surrounded by stacks of books.
Martial Arts is the only film genre I watch with a seriously critical eye, and I watch a lot of martial arts films. If I post a review of which I am particularly proud I will announce it here. In the meantime, browse around and see if you rediscover any old favorites.
PHP Goodness
In my perpetual cycle of attention-whoring, I am working on adding reader-submitted comments to the individual post pages. There is a form there right now; it doesn’t go anywhere.
As I was warming up for class I watched the last hour of Aguirre, the Wrath of God , directed by Werner Herzog and starring the deeply spooky Klaus Kinski. There are a lot of strange men in cinema right now… John Malkovich, Willem Dafoe, and the like, but none of them can hold a candle to Kinski for sheer screen presence.