Technorati reveals a bunch of responses to my weekend post on genre fiction, and I wanted to at least note a few of them here. Over at Brad DeLong’s, he highlights my comments about story pacing, which sparked some interesting comments. A number of people object that books and movies are too long these days, […]
Category: Movies
Ask a ScienceBlogger: Science Movies
This week’s Ask a ScienceBlogger is right up my alley: What movie do you think does something admirable (though not necessarily accurate) regarding science? Bonus points for answering whether the chosen movie is any good generally…. A bunch of my co-bloggers have weighed in already, and it’s hard not to duplicate thier choices, so I […]
Fictional Science
The article about physicists in movies cited previously had one other thing worth commenting on: the fictional portrayal of the practice of science: All these films illustrate a fundamental pattern for movie science. Rarely is the central scientific concept utterly incorrect, but filmmakers are obviously more interested in creating entertaining stories that sell tickets than […]
Classic Edition: Move Out of Your Parents’ Basements
Benjamin Cohen at The World’s Fair posts a link to an article about physicists in movies. The author provides a surprisingly detailed breakdown of what must be every character described as a physicist in the history of motion pictures. He also says really nasty things about What the Bleep Do We Know?, which warms my […]
Pirates of the Caribbean 2
On Saturday, Kate and I went to see Johnny Depp swish his way through a second movie as Captain Jack Sparrow, with assistance from Kiera Knightly, Orlando Bloom, and a lot of other wooden props. She’s posted a review with spoilers, and I’ll post some spoilers below the fold, but my one-word, spoiler-free review is […]
The Last Stand, Except for the Sequel
Despite generating a surprising number of comments with last week’s burning question (thanks to Kate for the suggestion), we didn’t actually go see X-Men III until yesterday afternoon. Short verdict: Not quite as bad as I was led to believe. The longer version is either on Kate’s LiveJournal, or below the fold.
Funny-Weird or Funny-Ha-Ha?
While channel-surfing the other night, I caught a few minutes of a program claiming to present the “100 Funniest Movies of All Time,” and was a little baffled at the choices I saw represented. As with most list shows, it was way too heavy on recent stuff (The 40-Year-Old Virgin might be really funny, but […]
Burning Question
Gandalf or Magneto?
Skip to the End
Via a LiveJournal post on the dorkiest thing ever, a link that isn’t new, but new to me: The Lord of the Rings in quotes from The Princess Bride: PETER JACKSON: Frodo and Sam don’t get burned up by the lava. AUDIENCE: What? PETER JACKSON: Frodo and Sam don’t get burned up by the lava. […]
Thank You for Grief-Pimping
Kate and I went to see Thank You for Smoking yesterday (Short review: About as good an adaptation of the original book as you could hope for, and much more my thing than Kate’s). The set of trailers we got was generally excruciating– lots of film-festival material about quirky families being awful to one another. […]