Category: Film
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WorldCon 76 Report: Day 4
Reading back over my WorldCon reports, it occurs to me that I don't seem to be doing much. A couple of panels a day, and mentions of parties, but that's it. The reason is something I had to explain to a friend: "At a con the fans have fun and go to parties. The pros…
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Emotionless Bad Guys
Yesterday I was reading a James Lileks blog post about the legendary 1956 Roger Corman sci-fi movie It Conquered the World. If you haven't seen it, you probably should — because effects, locations, and extras were expensive, Corman reduced an alien invasion of Earth to a character piece, focusing on Lee Van Cleef (of all…
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Thoughts On The Dreaded Backstory
David McGrogan writes interesting roleplaying games, and he had some interesting thoughts about fictional characters in his most recent 'blog post. You can read it here. If you're lazy and want me to just tell you what it says, his main point is that the urge to bolt a backstory onto archetypical characters (like James…
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Aristocracy in Space!
Why are there so many aristocrats in science fiction? They're all over the place. In books you've got David Weber's Honor Harrington (who works for a Royal space navy and eventually becomes a Countess), Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan (a Count who works for an Emperor), Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's Rod Blaine (the son…
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The Inertia of Stereotypes
My family and I are fans of the past decade's amazing string of Marvel superhero movies. In the film Captain America: Civil War, the villain (not really a spoiler, here) is an eastern European military man named Zemo. What's interesting is that in the comic books, Zemo was always Baron Zemo, a Teutonic villain of…
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Euthymus Contra El Zombi-Lobo Achaeanico!
Fans of Mexican B-movies are aware of the long-standing popularity of Luchador movies. These feature masked wrestling stars, but their opponents aren't other wrestlers, as one might expect. In film the Luchadores battle ghosts, spies, Frankenstein's monster, Aztec mummies, gangsters, mad scientists, aliens, monsters, and vampires. Sometimes all at once. According to Wikipedia, the genre…
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R-E-S-P-E-C-T
I saw The Last Jedi the weekend it came out, and I've been thinking about it and discussing it with my family (especially my son) sporadically since then. I'm not going to write a review; suffice to say that I give it a B and leave it at that. Nor am I going to reel…
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Pulp Trek!
I've noticed that discussions of Star Trek — especially as it enters its second half-century — focus on its "cerebral" nature, and how it addressed social problems and moral dilemmas related to real-world politics. That may well be true, but I think there's an even more important component of Star Trek's DNA which goes unrecognized.…
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The Climax of That Movie
What is the climactic moment of the movie Star Wars? Is it the point where the Death Star explodes just as it's about to vaporize the Rebel base? Is it a couple of minutes earlier, when Han Solo swoops in to knock Darth Vader into deep space so that Luke can fire the torpedoes which…
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Obligatory Star Wars Post
There has been a certain amount of muted hoopla this week because it marks the 40th anniversary of the original Star Wars. One thing which I haven't seen anywhere else is a discussion of how different Star Wars was from most science fiction films up to that year. Quite simply, Star Wars turned SF cinema…
The Cambias Digression 