At Ace, the failure of putting Space Swashbucklers in a Military Bureaucracy: Space travel in fiction has two major tropes in its depiction. I’m calling these the Institutional Phase, and the Commercial Phase. The beginning of space travel — and this is the same for any previous mode of difficult transportation — is the Institutional… Read More One of the Many Reasons Prometheus, and Prequels, don’t work.
Duller than a great thaw is Vertigo, hurdling contrivance upon contrivance with such impossible conveyance of thought that one watches it like a man at a mark, praying that the firing squad kills you straight off. And while the preceding bastardization of Much Ado About Nothing is entirely too pretentious to be clever, it’s still… Read More Lileks Speaks the Plain Truth: Vertigo is Lame
I’ve always rather liked The Great Gatsby, because I find Fitzgerald’s prose far better than any of the other Greats of the Roaring Twenties, especially Hemingway, who reads the way sawdust tastes, and Faulkner, who seemed to think that Henry James wasn’t quite loquacious enough. F. Scott never forgot that writing serves the story. However,… Read More Lileks on Gatsby
Love Your Movies, which had the sagacity and good taste to like my post from yesterday, has an exhaustive and mostly truth-telling list of what Hollywood is throwing at us this solstice: Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. I actually think this will do pretty well. It will bring in the Zombieland audience — people who like… Read More The Summer Blockbusters Will Bust the Blocks. In Summer.
I was up until 3:30 in the morning putting together a video for my students. We’re startingThe Screwtape Letters this week, so I thought a little introduction to the Dark One was in order. It might not have taken so long if I were not such a perfectionist about these things. And if iMovie did… Read More What I Really Want is to Direct
Disney’s $250 million epic John Carter earned a measly $30 domestic box office its first weekend. Would anyone like to know why? Because it’s name is John Carter. You can’t give a sci-fi fantasy epic a prosaic name like that. People assume that it’s ironic, that you’re not really doing a real epic, but some… Read More Why Names Matter: John Carter Tanks (Updated)
Ace uncovers it in a (generally positive) review of The Woman in Black: The PG-13 rating is misleading. It doesn’t have the typical red flags of an R-rated movie. And I guess you can’t give someone an R for mood and tone and pervasive morbidity. So they got a PG-13. But it’s really an “R” movie,… Read More The Problem with the Movie Rating System
Watched “Midnight in Paris” yesterday. Is it just me, or do all Woody Allen movies lack a third act?
In 1999, the Vatican issued guidelines for exorcisms. Among them was the requirement that a person claiming demonic possession should first be screened by doctors to rule out illness. In 2012, that fact is used as the premise for a bad movie to trash the Church as “hypocritical,” “bureaucratic,” and uncaring. Because a religious organization… Read More The Big, Bad Catholic Church Strikes Again.
Everyone and their dog has taken a shot at the most recent Indiana Jones movie, and rightfully so. Compared to the original trilogy, it’s a staid, bizarre bore. But what’s really wrong with it, at heart? Well, Red Letter Media has issued its own 2-Part Plinkett Review, which covers the basics: Speilberg Ideas, good; Lucas… Read More Indiana Jones and the Blah of Whatever
Content Blues 