Old movie night again at the Stanford Theater! This time it was North by Northwest, one of the best. I have a hard time picking a favorite Hitchcock film but this one’s in the running for sure. It also contains the scariest scene from any…
I always assumed that I would have two jobs when I grew up. One would be a job with a salary and benefits. The other would be fiction writing. Since college, I’ve had jobs with salaries and benefits. I haven’t done a lot of fiction…
The other day, my sister, in her Livejournal, linked to a rant about how Livejournal in specific and blogging in general interferes with the art, craft, hobby, and profession of fiction writing. This is the rant. I hate the word “rant,” at once falsely modest…
Utterly. Brilliant. Made up 200% for that Dalek trash. This is easily the best episode they’ve done to date and probably one of the best in the entire series, going back to 1963. Why they waited till the third season to mine this vein is…
Funny how all it takes is one dog of a two-parter like this to puncture my swelling enthusiasm for this show. You’d think they could knock those out of the park, since they have the equivalent of four of the old-school episodes to develop the…
I’ll probably end up posting more commentary on encyclops.com soon, but okay, okay, I finally have warmed to the new Dr. Who. I still think the plotting has a tendency toward great setups with incredibly stupid endings, but I’ve really begun to enjoy it. I’ve…
My girlfriend is a big George Romero fan, so of course we went to see his new low-budget zombie film this weekend. At first I wasn’t sure I was going to like it. Apart from a fantastic scene involving a news team on the scene…
It’s funny. You grow up pre-internet in the suburbs and in small towns where a trip to the library or the mall is your only chance to make contact with a larger culture. You go to college in a modest city with not one but…
Maybe I’m just feeling better, but just to prove I’m not a film snob: Blood and Iron is MUCH better than Sword of Storms. The script’s both funnier and eerier, the compositions are far more interesting, the fights are less tedious, and the whole thing…
I have the flu. Yesterday was the worst; I felt so messed up that I couldn’t enjoy anything — reading, playing video games, watching movies, nothing helped. I just wanted to sleep, but even that didn’t help much because my mind kept going. It was…