Andreeson is at least familiar with culture, as his refernece to “The Sweet Smell of Success” demonstrates.

“The Walk of Life”, to my ears and sensibility, is singularly ill-suited as a closer. And it’s just not possible to improve “Strangelove’s” end.

Tim Allen, dead.solid.perfect in GQ. Would a better actor, acting down, work? Allen played a convincing ham, catch-phrase spouting, has-been, a hack-acting, blowhard star, and a drunk who gets lost in the fans’ adulation and his own megalomania whom is humiliated when he overhears convention fans mocking him. Is it…

On the Ferris wheel looking out on Coney Island

“Ratner’s Star” was my first and still favorite Delillo novel. It was an early work, and if it was pretty much straight though high-concept sf, DeLillo’s voice and talent were plain enough to foresee he might be lured away to purported higher literary grounds. He managed to carry with him the vision and courage to…

Hollywood was a magnificent ruin decades before The Matrix came along. Hollywood rarely knows how to build on its best material and that cuts across all genres. Maybe the period of classic B-Westerns and B-Noir can rightfully be called a Golden Age of Knockoffs, but what else can?

Fleming put words to that effect in the early novels but frequently contrived situations where Bond found righteous exception. There is an avenging angel in Bond as well. If he didn’t take delight, he took untroubled satisfaction in coldly dispatching some villains. Often Bond seems to actively work through his…

Thanks! I hadn't realized just how cool and laugh-riotous alcohol was for young families! It's not as if anyone gets hurt, ever, is it?

I'm not sure why, but this really produced a strong FU google response in me. Enough already.

He deserves remembering for The Andromeda Strain for sure. It was a sophisticated adult thriller about politics, the military industrial complex and foremost, about the scientific process. And hair-raisingly so. There were chilling moments where anything seemed possible. A truly alien encounter where the alien…

Interesting choice, to lead and article on as thoughtful an endeavor as Asimov's "Foundation", with an excerpt from a flipping writer who is hopefully more flipping articulate in print than he is in front of a flipping microphone. It does seem a herculean challenge to translate those old novels of ideas for…

Looking forward to this, particularly given the casting choices! For those who struggled with the book, you might consider an audible version of it. There is a certain density of imagined detail that takes some getting used to, that the spoken word version would carry a listener more easily past.

"it's so goddamned good it makes all other science fiction movies look pitiful in comparison." Well once you put it that way, all other science fiction films are pitiful in comparison. Even the handful of great ones don't approach this film. Nobody has to like it particularly and it won't rattle your eyeballs with…

Any scene, any exchange, from any portion of the Coen Brother's "Miller's Crossing". Sure, its deliberately Chandleresque but more than that, its pure banter for its own sake. Those Coen characters exist to banter and its beautiful to behold. John Michael McDonagh and his brother Martin both banter with the best of…

What are you talking about? There is only one rule. Defend the fuel.

Near Field Communication

I worked for a place that had Dictaphone (of all brands!) early word processors, but my first home "PC" was a Magnovox Videowriter and then I had a black&white early laptop by a company called Altima.

Woody Allen frequently breaks the 4th Wall. It is the entire premise of "The Purple Rose of Cairo", but that might be considered something else, more of a nesting story, as he is actually breaking the characters' fourth wall, and not the audience's. In "Annie Hall", when Alvy brings Marshall McLuhan out from behind…