Category: Film
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My Canon
In modern geek culture we've begun to use the term "Universe" to refer to a background setting, particularly one which is shared by multiple creative works. The most famous, right now, is probably the "Marvel Cinematic Universe," which encompasses all the Marvel/Disney superhero films and TV series since Iron Man in 2008. There are some…
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Retro-Review: Treasure Planet
I recently watched the 2002 Disney animated movie Treasure Planet. I am told by my children that we rented it multiple times when they were younger, but I am sure I never actually watched the whole thing. Perhaps I was in the room while they watched it, but my attention was elsewhere. My judgement is…
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Godel Operation Minus Two
Counting down now to launch. One early promotional effort: my guest article at the 'blog My Book, The Movie — in which I discuss who would be best to play the characters in The Godel Operation if it ever makes it to the screen. You can read it here. Writing that piece was surprisingly difficult.…
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Inception Et Cetera
I recently saw the film Inception for the first time — I'm not sure why I didn't watch it when it came out, but I didn't. It's a great movie, and it helped me to understand a key difference between science fiction films and novels. A perennial gripe about SF in movies is that films…
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Thoughts on That Christmas Movie
A lot of people think they've watched the movie It's A Wonderful Life but either haven't actually seen it, or have forgotten most of it. This leads to a lot of misunderstanding. When my family watched it this past Christmas my son was astonished to discover that a good two-thirds of the film's run time…
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Safety Last
I was recently reading about the legendary silent comedy star Harold Lloyd, and learned the interesting fact that he did his famous comedy stunts despite having lost the index finger and thumb of his right hand (he used a glove with prosthetic digits to hide the injury). Here is Wikipedia's account of how Lloyd lost…
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Movie Review: The King
On Thanksgiving, after a huge midday dinner, we all sat down on the couch to watch a movie. We eventually decided to watch David Michod's 2019 movie The King, featuring Timothée Chalamet* as Henry V of England. The three of us gave it a solid B+ — good acting, good filming, nice locations and costumes,…
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Notes on the Invisible Man
On Friday evenings my wife and I have a regular Movie Night. We've been doing it ever since it became impossible to go out to a real movie theater, and I expect we'll continue after (if) they re-open. To avoid conflicts over what to watch — or, worse yet, an "Abilene Paradox" situation where in…
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Time For Tea!
There's an excellent series of online readings organized by Sarah Smith, Brookline's Grande Dame of Fantasy and Science Fiction, called Teatime Readings. I did one last week, and now everyone can enjoy it here. The first half of the video is me reading a chapter from The Initiate, and the second half is a question-and-answer session…
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Hamiltonian Musings
A couple of weeks ago the Crack Team launched an expedition to the distant isle of Manhattan. We toured the museum ship Intrepid, saw an exhibit of clockwork automata at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ate some fancy food, and saw a matinee of Lin-Manuel Miranda's famous hip-hop musical Hamilton. Quick summary: it's good. Just…
The Cambias Digression 