Category: Film
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Retro-Review: Cabaret
This weekend the family sat down to watch Bob Fosse's 1972 film Cabaret, adapted from the famous 1966 musical by John Kander and Fred Ebb. It was a first time for all of us: my wife hadn't seen it, nor had my son, and I had only seen a heavily edited-for-television version in my youth…
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Class, Status, and SF
I spent last weekend at the Arisia science fiction convention in the heart of Boston. My chief amusement at conventions is the panels. I don't like "filk" singing much, I can rent my own videos, and I don't wear costumes (other than my "professional SF writer" outfit). I keep intending to spend more time in…
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Appropriating the Past
I got my degree in history, and when I got to historical movies, I'm the one indignantly whispering to my seatmate about errors. Though actually I'm pretty charitable: I understand that movies do have budgets and physical limitations. If you're making a World War II movie and can't scrounge up enough M-1 Garand rifles for…
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Pop Culture: Hold On to Your Hats!
As cultures develop a large and relatively affluent middle class, they develop what we call "pop culture." The upper class have "high culture" more or less by definition, and the lower class don't have the leisure time or spare wealth to create culture at all. Tom Wolfe chronicled this in post-WWII America, as people got…
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Tales of the Time Patrol: The Wild Bunch
We recently re-watched Sam Peckinpah's famous gritty Western The Wild Bunch. This time around I realized something: at least one of the titular Bunch is a secret agent of the Time Patrol. The moment of revelation comes when the gang arrive at the headquarters of the corrupt Mexican warlord General Mapache and see the General's…
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Things I Want Other People to Write
I've never written fan fiction. When I was young, it felt like cheating or plagiarism to write a story set in someone else's fictional setting, or using their characters. (This was before the whole concept of "shared worlds" or "expanded universes" arose, and all works actually had a single identifiable creator.) And when I was…
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What Should Have Been
I think enough time has passed since the movie Avengers: Infinity War came out that I can reveal this thought I had, without getting in trouble for revealing things people haven't seen yet. Spoilers away! You may recall at the very end of the film, after the credits, there's a sequence involving Nick Fury and…
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Those Movies We Love
Who does Star Wars belong to? Well, legally, the answer is "The Walt Disney Company," because they paid George Lucas four billion dollars for his company Lucasfilm, which owned the Star Wars trademarks and copyrights. End of story. Except . . . One of the reasons Lucasfilm was worth four billion dollars to the mighty…
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Dragon Awards!
Congratulations to this year's Dragon Award winners: Best Science Fiction Novel: Artemis by Andy Weir. Best Fantasy Novel: Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson. Best Young Adult/Middle Grade Novel: Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi. Best Military Science Fiction or Fantasy Novel: A Call to Vengeance by David Weber, Timothy Zahn, and Thomas Pope. Best Alternate History Novel: Uncharted by…
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Good Guys, Bad Tactics
If you're interested in military history, you start to notice something: in any discussion of motion pictures, you're the one critiquing the battle scenes. You're the one asking "Why didn't they . . . ?" Or saying "That couldn't happen." Or simply "That's not right!" You're also the one nitpicking the details in historical films.…
The Cambias Digression 