Roger Corman, the producer of close to 500 feature films and the director of over 50, has died at the age of 98. You can read obituaries and appreciations about his career from: A common theme amongst the pieces is not only how prodigious his filmography is, but how various films within it represent “the break” for a nontrivial amount of filmmakers from directors like Francis Ford Coppola to Martin Scorsese to James Cameron as…
(Note: this capsule review is part of my farewell to the Netflix DVD service. #GetThroughMyQueue) Yet another DVD I’ve been meaning to check out for ages. This black comedy is an absolute favorite of several indie filmmaker friends I know. Now, I get why. Being into smaller indie films will definitely aid your enjoyment of the film, as well as wanting humor that’s dry as a bone and peppered with profanity as punctuation in that…
Having done villains last week, let’s take a look at heroes. Okay, James Bond is something of an anti-hero as established from the get-go in that “you’ve had your six” moment in Dr. No. But still, he is working for Queen and Country as well as saving the world (sometimes as a sad clown). This is a fun overview of how James Bond has changed with the times that Fandom released just before No Time…
I’m going to save some of my posts for Banned Books Week for, well, the week itself, but I mention it here in order to spur you on to make a reading selection, possibly from the website, possibly from visiting your friendly local library. Instead, we have Patton Oswalt rating his top 5 and bottom 5 films with the zeal and wit you have likely come to expect. Now, knowing that Oswalt is a total…
Note: This post and the related links abound in spoilers for Ted Lasso, season 2. This past weekend, my wife and I finally finished the second season of Ted Lasso, the comfort-food comedy-drama that is nominally about soccer, but really seems to be a backdoor effort to assemble a Gen X mixtape playlist whilst making equal numbers of jokes and pop culture references every single minute. The gentle yet foul-mouthed comedy of season one remains,…
As I’ve mentioned various times, my dad made sure we saw many of the classic and not so classic films from bygone ages. I mean, I’ve seen pre-Russian Revolution films using stop-action animation of insects for crying out loud! Now, besides such curiosities and rattling good stories, these films provided de facto period pieces: they were recording the here and now of an era long past –in human terms– with details quite unknown to me.…
One of my kids has, wisely, picked up on the fact that Disney tends to kill off characters’ parents. We talked about it (they weren’t disturbed, they just found it odd) and I mentioned that it was one way to “raise the stakes.” I’m not sure if that expression means much to a child who doesn’t know how to play poker, but I’m sure we’ll also get to that in time. Another aspect of stories…
Main PageTOS | TAS | TNG | DS9 | VOY | ENT | DSC | ST | PIC | LDWhole Enchilada VOY Ranking by Titles Only On one level, Star Trek: Voyager feels forced. It’s like that D&D campaign where people decided to make characters they hadn’t played before, like the Orcish Ranger, the Tiefling Paladin, and the Dwarven Bard. I really didn’t take to it at first. However, in going back to watch the entire series, it definitely rose in my estimation. For one thing, they did two-parter episodes really well…
Main PageTOS | TAS | TNG | DS9 | VOY | ENT | DSC | ST | PIC | LD | PRO | SNWWhole Enchilada Whole Enchilada Ranking by Titles Only Peldor Joi, Star Trek fans! There’s plenty to be grateful for in terms of Star Trek stories and below you’ll find every single one ranked (list current as of June 14th, 2020). Well, at least for television. However, we are faced with a fannish…
I’ve really enjoyed Chris Hadfield letting us know about the realities of space exploration, from his space-based cover of Bowie to his book to his counsel on dealing with the pandemic. So, I was happy to check out what his thoughts were on some of my favorite “hard sci-fi” films were and– oh, it’s like comparing notes with my dad, the physicist and history buff…