UPDATE, July 2025: There’s a couple tweaks to include new movies & an additional viewing guide (details at the bottom). With the announcement of a B5 animated feature, I have been reminded that many people have not seen the original Babylon 5, that ambitious and inventive science fiction series from the 1990s. As of May 2023, you can currently watch the entire series for free on Tubi as well as renting or buying it streaming…
I am still following accounts of the Writers’ Strike, which looks like it’ll be a long one, but while you can continue to check out information, like the Strike Diaries from the Hollywood Reporter, for today, I wanted to just post about film, specifically a great example where writing, performance, and fight choreography comes together beautifully. I’m talking about the climactic duel in the 1956 comedy The Court Jester. I love the duel because, as…
Come on, between a key demand of the Writer’s Strike being the regulation of AI in screenwriting and some of my other posts about AI this year, did you really think I wouldn’t share this half-hour comedy screed from Adam Conover? It may be foul-mouthed, but it is funny. However, if you’re looking for a TL;DR one might sum it up as such: And did I mention it’s foul-mouthed? Beware around kindern and co-workers who…
So the not-quite-a-week-old writers’ strike is still on my mind, in part because much of the online forums I visit are full of, well, writers. So here’s a few more resources that I feel give you a bit more context about what’s being demanded, how the studios usually respond and what is officially on the table. First up, an 8 1/2 minute video from Nerdist that sums up the strike: If you’ve been following other…
Some of you may recall an article I linked to back in February which documented how there’s now a business model, most evident in the technology sphere, that has been optimized without the customer in mind (well, assuming the customer doesn’t want a crap experience). Well, turns out the Cory Doctorow article is part of an overall book called Chokepoint Capitalism, and he talks about some of the findings in the book with fellow disenchanted…
I am interested in technological progress (not just fun with machine learning bumbling into the creative sphere). And it’s usually about progress and how we might want to examine our societal decisions about how fast we’re going. So imagine my surprise when I read this article in Wired by Charles Platt about how analog computing is making a comeback. Oh, this is giving me story ideas…
Finding time to read, or catch up with films, seems all the more difficult these days, so I pored over this list from various critics at The Guardian, who apparently are annoyed at the increasing length of films and heft of novels and have a slew of suggestions of how to get all the artsy goodness you want in a smaller package. I haven’t seen all the films nor read all the novels listed. In…
I was all ready with another post for today when this popped into my inbox yesterday afternoon: You can learn more about the decision in these articles in The Hollywood Reporter, Gizmodo, and Reuters among others. Even though this decision makes perfect sense –I guess there have to be less than 2 million of us red envelope cinemaniacs left– it’s quite the bummer. For almost all of those 25 years, I have been the recipient…
So, I’m clearly not in tune with all fandom news because then I would have realized that the trailer I shared for the latest volume of Star Wars: Visions on Wednesday was but one output of a massive Star Wars marketing shindig last week (aka Star Wars Celebration 2023). There’s numerous articles about the various announcements made at the event, but I found myself interested in one 19-minute interview with showrunners Dave Filoni and John…
I know. For a blog that has quite a lot of posts about Star Trek, what am I doing talking about magical space wizards? Because magical space wizards are fun. As with plenty of other Gen Xers, Star Wars was a big part of my childhood. I also grew up with a lot of samurai films and anime (something else shared by plenty of Gen Xers I’ve met.). So when Disney announced they were releasing…