I love my fandom, and my fandom drives me insane. By “my fandom,” I mean the people who interact with science fiction and fantasy in a critical capacity with an eye to getting things right. They want the science to not be silly (or at least not any sillier than it has to be for …
Category Archive: Reviews
Nov 18 2010
The Telephone Game
If you get the opportunity to see The Telephone Game, do it. This will be more difficult if you’re not in the Twin Cities, but more worthwhile if you’ve ever done theater, particularly experimental theater, or like your movies slightly odd. I just got back from the premier. I went without great expectations, knowing this …
Aug 24 2009
District 9
Why are you reading this? Go see District 9 instead. Then come back and we can talk. You want a review? Fine. This movie does what more science fiction should do. It educates you in science. Social science. History, politics, sociology, psychology–they’re all in here. They are aggressively, in-your-face in there. This is the best …
Feb 08 2009
Button Eyes
Neil Gaiman has this trick. It isn’t just his trick; plenty of people do it. But Neil makes particularly good use of it. What does he do? He reassures you. Only Neil reassures you about things that weren’t worrying you. He takes great pains, in fact, to reassure you, going on about how little there …
Aug 05 2008
Too Much Editing?
We went to see The Dark Knight this weekend, and it was okay. A few years ago, I might have told you it was wonderful. Even now, it beats any other comic book movie I’ve seen, and I see most of them. Heath Ledger really was as amazing as everyone says. For the first time, …
Jul 28 2008
Why Spook Bugged Me
I’m reading Mary Roach’s Bonk, her new book about sex research, in between, oh, everything else. It’s quite good, and I’m relieved. I read her first two books, Stiff (about the treatment of human cadavers) and Spook (about the search for proof of an afterlife). Stiff was wonderful, but Spook left a bit to be …
Jul 27 2008
Riddick and Reznor
My husband and I have a peculiar metric for some art we just don’t like. It isn’t that it’s bad, exactly. It’s that it’s Chronicles of Riddick bad. Making this extra peculiar is that I haven’t seen Chronicles of Riddick. However, I did hear quite a bit about it after my husband saw it. Seriously, …
Jul 07 2008
Foreign Contamination 100%
Pixar can stop now. They’ve done everything they needed to do. Twenty-two years ago, they released Luxo Jr. and set the standard for animating the inanimate. Luxo Jr. is the desk lamp in Pixar’s logo. It’s a great logo, but in the original animation, he’s even more playful, squirmier and demonstrably young. Sure, he’s beautifully …
Jun 29 2008
Steven Moffat
…is a god among writers. “Nine and a Half Minutes” is the single most brilliant script ever. It’s from Coupling. No, the good one, the British one (same scripts, better acting and directing). It is the exact same sequence of events involving six people seen from three different viewpoints. It’s the only time I’ve seen …
May 31 2008
Really, Mr. Davies?
Who in their right minds invites the writer of “Daleks in Manhattan” back to write another two-part episode of Doctor Who? Who films a cliffhanger that involves The Doctor suddenly being too dense to break glass? Who brings back a favorite action heroine character only to have her spend most of two episodes in a …
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