I’m a professor. I have a lot of books. After testing several bibliography apps I chose BookCrawler to catalog my home library (mostly so I could alphabetize it) with my iPod touch. The program is great — using Pic2Shop as a barcode scanner it easily sucked down info about my books. In one case when [...]
When I recently decided to bite the bullet and get to the bottom of sake tasting and nomenclature I purchased a copy of The Sake Handbook by John Gauntner. Even in the Internet Age, I reasoned, a sole-authored guidebook would be more useful than endless googling through Wikipedia pages, right? Sadly, after a month with [...]
High production values and a satisfying blend of game elements make The Dungeon Saga a great deal of fun, despite some game balance issues. The Dungeon Saga has been compared to a lot of other games, but is best conceived as a cross between Puzzle Quest and Dungeon Raid. You character advances across a very [...]
Years ago I stopped writing reviews on sites like amazon.com because their terms of service basically gave them my work. Sure, I wrote reviews for works by friends that I thought deserved some publicity, and for particularly superb things I’d throw a review out there as a way to say thanks for people’s work. But [...]
This 2003 film could have been a perfectly decent romantic comedy with a strong female cast, a fine supporting performance from Shirley Maclaine, and Julia Stiles’s enormous, round head. Instead, the film’s ambition to document the story of an entire family, and its own obvious infatuation with its characters lead to too many scenes too [...]
The “modern sensibility” of this Robin Hood is actually one of the least interesting things about it. Admittedly, thin-hipped Jonas Armstrong looks pretty good in his narrow-legged emo-boy leather trousers, and I’d even go so far as saying that he works the forest green hoodie successfully. But that is about it — the piping on [...]
Gratuitous and derivative. In an age of endless, lucrative, and repetitive franchise-based blockbusters, it takes a lot of work to be called ‘derivative’. And in a post-300 world, the bar for gratuitous sex and violence has been set so low that it would take a scanning electron microscope to find the area beneath it that [...]
Joss probably didn’t intend for the name of the Dollhouse season opener to be some oblique reference to the upcoming kol nidre holiday, but regardless episode one had a strong sense of teshuvah to it as the show returned to where we left the season finale, wrapping up plot points and unleashing new ones for [...]
I’ve always wondered what terrible, secret price Joss Whedon had to pay to Alan Tudyk in order to get him to acquiesce to being killed off on a movie _explicitly designed to keep a franchise going_. And now I know. I imagine that Dollhouse is going to be canceled after the season finale, since it [...]
The price we have to pay for a new Joss Whedon show is, apparently, the gross hypersexualization of Eliza Dushku. I’m willing to live with this — Dollhouse is more than just another big-hearted, snarkily-written show where all the characters talk like Joss. The central technical conceit of the show — that you can wipe [...]
Years ago a friend of mine introduced me to “Action!”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0206467/, a short-lived TV series starring Joy Mohr. He had taped episodes off of the TV and then hoarded the precious, precious cassettes. I watched it, loved it, and then _totally_ forgot about it, only to discover recently that they have now (of course) re-released the [...]
“Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog”:http://drhorrible.com/ is, let’s face it, touch and go. If you love Joss Wheedon then its hard to ignore it, despite its unevenness and lurking doubts about Neil Patrick Harris’s ability to channel Joss’s dialogue. But if you sit through the first minute or so of the opening monologue you are rewarded with [...]
Iron Man is about America’s love affair with guns. It exults in the way that weapons and technology magnify power and amplify the ability to make the world safe, even as it shows how terrifying it can be to be target or victim of violence. Guns don’t kill people, people kill people, and because this [...]
I was re-watching “Withnail and I”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094336/ recently. In the ‘making of’ bonus feature one of the producers remarks that it is “the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid of the 1980s.” That sent a light bulb off in my head — in terms of fans, followers, and plot, it is actually the British Big Lebowski. [...]
I have to admit that I walked into Serenity with a chip on my shoulder. While I am not one of those people who walk around wearing “Joss Whedon Is My Master Now” t-shirts, I do think of Buffy as revolutionary, and thought Firefly was very good too. And… and… Ok. I’ll admit it. I [...]
Dude. The other day I blogged what I thought was a felicitous congruence between Walter Benjamin and Jonathan Osorio. The passage from Osorio that I thought was so cool was this: Ka wa mamua and ka wa mahope are the Hawaiian terms for the past and future, respectively. But note that ka wa mamua (past) [...]
Martial arts flicks are like the Catholic Mass – if you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all. The key to appreciating them comes in understanding the variations in each and the history that lies behind them. Faure’s Requiem is a wonder to listen to, but it’s even more amazing if you understand its extended, sublime [...]
Things did work out, and my review of Tiger Claws III is now up at Gapers Block.
My short review of Shanghai Knights has just been posted over at The Block. I plan to do a lot more serious Action Film Criticism. Check it out – I’m pretty happy with it.
I just watched The Transporter, which I missed in the theaters. There is a lot to say about the film. There are probably about thirty things wrong with it, and about a hundred and fifty things right. France, China, and American have been triangulating the action film for some time, and the creative ferment has [...]