An honest question: the letter the Literary Trust released says that they 'couldn't act to prevent' the movie from happening. Do/can they maintain some sort of rights over depicting Wallace or alluding to his work? Like, what's the legality of that? I'm thinking here of precedent with:

By making a very short movie set in a burn ward.

Green Lantern is a by-the-numbers superhero movie with really nothing to recommend about it. Man of Steel was a work of enthusiastic, nigh-fetishistic heat vision: a vision in which a creature of upstanding good, who traditionally stands for what we all ought to aspire to be, with near limitless powers, chooses to…

It's a weird place, politically: out away from the cities, there's a lot of nice folk, some of whom hold abhorrent views, with most of the more conservative, less sane ones being from the Western half of the state. I recently reviewed the (central Iowan) county's local Republican platform, and its very Tea Party…

I ran into some swans last summer while walking alongside a canal. They took up the entire narrow pathway between the hedge and the water, and squawked like mad no matter how I tried to walk past. So yeah, when I think of 'critters that be assholes', I think swans.

I'll call attention to "The Wager", in which Randy Travis plays the world's most famous actor, on the verge of winning an Oscar until unfounded child abuse charges come up, who thinks - after enduring a string of tribulations as a righteous man - that he can easily draw Biblical parallels to… The Sermon on the Mount.…

To contribute the obvious: reading inherently involves interpretation. As does, for that matter, making a movie, so the disclaimer singling out the film's use of "artistic license" kind of doubly annoys me. It's not just meant to calm/flatter the religious sensibilities of a particularly anti-intellectual strain of…

But the men in Skyfall are disposable, too - it begins straight-out with Bond following through on an order to let a (male) colleague die, Bond is himself left for dead, and the (male) villain was given up by MI6 to be tortured and killed. I thought the movie did an excellent job of establishing that Bond lives in a…

"Yeah, well the jerk store called! It's running out of you…Mr. Bond."

Goldfinger has a lot of iconic elements, and set the template (for better or worse) for the "Bond movie." It's also a tad sluggish as a viewing experience, and suffers if you situate it in the series as a whole. You Only Live Twice took that sentiment to an extreme, and as a result is an interesting document of the…

Yeah, this is one of those things that was hashed out at some council early in the church's history, and I think holds for most denominations. I once referred to Jesus as "half God, half man," to a (Lutheran) seminarian friend and was informed such talk is technically a heresy because he's 100% both ways. The reason…

I'm from the rural Midwest, a fan of Payne's, and looking forward to this. I do think his work reflects a certain Midwestern sensibility in its acceptance-via-acknowledgement of human oddity and frailty while still having a bit of fun with it, so I'd be surprised if he up and decided to ultimately dismiss the region…

I don't think think that's entirely fair: both main plot threads invite comparison in how they foreground legacy, the positive and negative feelings that come in reflecting on your relationship to a particular (person / place) at a point of transitional finality, and having to make hard decisions and move forward…

So how does all this rank in terms of the current administration's practice of going in through technological back-doors and sort-of wiretapping everyone, with hesitant legal justification?

I saw the Univeresal / Legosi / Browning version for the first time a few weeks ago, and I'd have to agree. The best I could is it made me better appreciate Nosferatu, which may be slow in parts but is an honest, usually successful, effort to render the story cinematatically, to create atmosphere and action through…

On the prospects of actually experiencing 50 Shades of Grey, to its advantage: given its repetitive content, it does seem like a reader could select pages at random and get the gist of it, before eventually getting bored enough to lose interest.

Objectivity and the absence of a point of view are fiction, though there are distinctions in style among films that aim for a non-obtrusive narratorial presence on the part of the filmmakers (Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary), those that give a careful hearing to a difficult subject (Capturing the Friedmans), those…

I've at least heard of God, but this "Uganda" sounds suspiciously made-up to me.

I watched "Equilibrium" last night, a Matrix knock-off from 2002. At first, I was excited because I thought Sean Bean was going to get to somewhat-more-atypically play a hero, as his character saves a copy of Yeats' poems he was supposed to destroy, the film being set in a totalitarian society held in check by drugs…

I think it's a stretch to say that the film is "about" Native American genocide (as the guy in Room 237 does), but he persuaded me that there is material in the film that (inadvertently or not) highlights that tragedy, and that can be tied thematically into the film. Like some of Room 237's other nuts and Rob Ager of…