Category: Film
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Chicon 7: The Final Chapter
On Sunday I ferried Agent X down to the extremely well-run ChiKids program area for Doctor Who Lego building, Jedi costumes, and steampunk Nerf guns. Agent X had a great time at Chicon. I spent the same period watching a panel on screenwriting by Michael Cassutt, Melinda Snodgrass, and the alarmingly overqualified Dr. Harry Kloor.…
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Mr. Diggs Goes to the Movies
I don't normally say "Squee!" about upcoming movies. As an adult my most frequent emotion upon leaving the theater has been disappointment, which means that about the highest pitch of enthusiasm I can work up for something I haven't seen yet is "guardedly optimistic." Well, I'll confess to being as guardedly optimistic as a fourteen-year-old…
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The Power of Pictures
Since I'm a writer, I naturally think that all the writer-stuff is important in a work of fiction: the story, the plot, the setting, and so forth. When I gripe about movies that bother me, my complaints are usually about writer-stuff (and music; I pay attention to music). So it's humbling to realize that one…
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Fantasies of Freedom
I've been thinking about stories lately (actually, I always think about stories), and something has occurred to me. In many stories — especially in genres like science fiction, fantasy, and thrillers — one of the attractions is that the protagonists are more free than the reader. Sure, they may be faced by evil overlords or…
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Lazy Thinking
This past weekend I was a guest at the storm-wracked PiCon convention in Enfield, Connecticut. I had a good time, and I hope others were entertained by my presence. I'll be going back next year if they'll have me. So now I'm going to be exceedingly ungracious. At the various panels I attended, I noticed…
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Thrilling Days of Yesteryear
My wife and I recently watched the movie RED, a Bruce Willis actioner based on the comic series by Warren Ellis. It's about a retired CIA agent suddenly targeted by assassins who has to figure out who's trying to kill him and why. In the process he gathers up his team of now-retired old spooks…
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Genre and Plot
Diane and I went to see Super 8 this past Friday, as one of our mostly-weekly date nights. She was really excited about it — I was less so, but only because I've been cruelly disappointed by movies too many times in the past decade. (Capsule review: The Goonies Meet Cloverfield. Four out of five…
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Soaps Vs. Self-Contained Episodes
I recently joined Brian Rogers and Tom Ladegard to playtest the character creation system for the Smallville roleplaying game. It was an interesting experience. Smallville (the game) is of course based on the TV series Smallville, about the teen years of one Clark Kent and his pals in a small Kansas town, including the angsty…
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Copyrights and Schadenfreude
Apologies for the long hiatus. Among other issues, we took a family vacation and my internet access was limited. Anyway, I'm back. Yesterday I happened to read a posting on the usually interesting io9 blog (the science fiction branch of the Gawker Media empire) — this one, about the tension between expansiveness and self-referentiality in…
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A Modest Comment
It's always a bad idea to complain about movies you haven't even watched. But in the case of the new film version of Gulliver's Travels, starring Jack Black, I'm going to do it anyway. The trailer looked horrid (short version: Jack Black doing his usual boorish stuff but with miniature sets and other actors composited…
The Cambias Digression 