I’m going to quote at length here from one part of this Cracked article about Jews in science fiction movies. Specifically, where it addresses the character of Mr. Universe from the movie Serenity. Mr. Universe is the ultimate tech geek, and he lives alone on a moon. Oh wait, not alone. He’s married to a [...]
The Avengers’ Rebel Spirit
Whatever the final opening weekend take for The Avengers, nearly $25.00 of it will be my four viewings. It wasn’t until my third that I consciously noticed the movie’s narrative theme. But to get there, let’s double back to the now-infamous A. O. Scott review in The New York Times. “I aim to misbehave,” Malcolm [...]
The (Not So) Secret History Of The Cabin In The Woods
It’s one thing that almost every single reporter, critic, and blogger out there misreports the original release date for The Cabin in the Woods as having been February 5, 2010. While that irks me, and shouldn’t happen, it’s not the end of the world. But this week Kelly Gray of WPIX takes it to a [...]
Intimacy And Immediacy In The Hunger Games
Over the last several days, after seeing the film adaptation of The Hunger Games, I wrote over 3,500 words about it. None of that ever will see the light of day, as it mostly amounted to me needing to write belaboringly through a particular narrative issue I had with the film in order then to [...]
The Secret Strength Of Simon Tam
Way back in May and June of 2005, an unfinished version of Serenity screened for fans months in advance of its official release six years ago today. To mark today’s anniversary, this post revisits, revises, and expands upon something I wrote six years ago. The summer of 2005, inevitably, was spent discussing and dissecting the [...]
Death And Firefly
For reasons I won’t go into here, I spent much of the day trying to track down a specific set of Joss Whedon remarks. In the process, I became sidetracked into a different discussion, which led me to an entirely different set of searches, in the course of which I ran into something interesting. To [...]
Of Tells And Totems
With the release of Inception on DVD and Blu-ray, I thought I’d republish the stray, but hopefully coherent, thoughts I previously published elsewhere. Having now seen it a second time, I remain convinced that the film little resembles what so many of its viewers kept trying to make of it. Not once, I need to [...]