I will read every single comic that Chip Zdarsky writes. His run on Howard the Duck was amazing, his run on Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man was amazing, and I presume that his run on Daredevil will be amazing. Also: Sex Criminals.

I don’t even think they rank very high in terms of self-awareness, because “parody” generally implies that the filmmakers have actually seen the thing they’re making fun of. Atlantic Rim seems to have been rushed together on the basis of a teaser trailer the Asylum guys watched eight months before the release date.…

I’m not even sure Atlantic Rim was made to be mocked. The story is that Asylum’s movies are totally self-aware parodies of the blockbusters they’re supposed to be imitating, but the impression I always got is that they’re aimed at low-end consumers who are so ill-informed that they automatically assume that Transmo…

I feel the same way about Killer Fish. It is without question the Cry Wilderness of this season, a bad movie eccentric enough that I would probably watch it straight up — but I won’t turn down some help from the bots.

CGI makes it easy to create sequences like this Aquaman fight, where the camera and actors make some moves and choreography that would be nearly impossible to carry out for real — with longer shots that definitely help to maintain a sense of space/geography throughout the sequence.

“personal poetry”

What does this even mean?

Paging Dr. Cronenberg

We’ve already established that Luca Guadagnino’s remake of Suspiria is quite good.

I’ve totally given up on the Predator and Alien franchises.

The lines here seem too close for comfort, but this does raise questions about where contemporary poets draw the line between allusion and simple plagiarism. The history of poetry is full of near-verbatim quotations and riffs that often have legitimate expressive purposes.

This is why you build a nice Blu-ray/DVD collection. I love streaming, but I also love watching a movie I’m in the mood for, when I’m in the mood to see it.

Why aren’t we talking about the real crime. The lack of new movies being added by all these streaming services.

For me, the show becomes more enjoyable after it has taken the fantasy of self-fulfillment through mecha combat.and demolished it beyond all hope. Shinji will never earn his father’s respect or Asuka’s affection or even a sense of distance from the forces bearing down on him. Worse yet, the desire for him to get into…

I loved Star Wars. Right up until the prequels. The intense focus on the Jedi/Sith/Skywalker stuff bored the snot out of me. It made me realize I didn’t actually care about any of that in the original trilogy, either. I liked the smugglers/gamblers/mobsters/bounty hunters. I gave zero shits about anyone with a…

I think it already reached that point at the moment of its inception, when you really think about it. Cyberpunk evolved from things like Neuromancer - Neuromancer was *already* a pastiche of things past. It was noire. It was noire, with some 80s sci-fi layered on top of it. That was also the case with Blade Runner…

If, like Malzberg, you think of SF as a genre that is about actual possibility, then steampunk is just a wet fart of a joke. If you grew up in the middle of the 20th Century, then you read SF because you wanted to get a sense of what the future was going to be like. Steampunk, OTOH, is just nostalgia — nostalgia…

My takeaway was that because the themes aren’t dated, you can’t really call the genre dated. And that a slavish adherence to the aesthetic, which is dated, leaves a work shallow and nostalgic.

...what next, an exposé on how gothic horror doesn’t jel with our reality in 2018? Of course it doesn’t.

Elves have no place in cyberpunk. On this position I will forever stand fast.

So it’s kind of disingenuous to blame a literary movement from the ‘80s for not keeping up with current trends.