Movies
drorzel | March 20, 2009The nominees for this year's Hugo Awards were announced last night. The most important category is, as always, Best Novel:
Anathem by Neal Stephenson (Morrow; Atlantic UK)
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (HarperCollins; Bloomsbury UK)
Little Brother by Cory Doctorow (Tor Teen; HarperVoyager UK) — Free download
Saturn's Children by Charles Stross (Ace; Orbit UK)
Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi (Tor)
Surprisingly, I've already read four of the five. This is either blind luck, or a sign that I'm better in tune with the tastes of SF fandom than ever before. I'm not sure which I'd prefer.
The as-yet-…
drorzel | March 18, 2009In an effort to wrest something positive from the smoking ruins of the fannish precincts of LiveJournal, a number of people (Kate included) have put together a community to raise money to provide financial assistance to fans of color who want to attend Wiscon or some other convention. They're auctioning off a lot of interesting stuff, from books to artwork to personal services.
The community is Con or Bust, and information about how the thing works is also available. If you're interested in supporting this project, either by bidding or offering items for bid, head on over and check it out.
drorzel | March 5, 2009Two announcements of science-related festivals have turned up in my email in the last week or so:
The second annual World Science Festival will be held in New York June 10-14 this year. They feature an impressive array of speakers again, including Nobel laureates (Physicists David Gross, Frank Wilczek, and William Phillips), well-known authors, distinguished scientists, and actors. Last year's festival was a huge success, by all reports, and let's hope this year's is as good. And, hey, it's not during DAMOP this year, so I might even be able to make the trip down if anything looks…
drorzel | February 21, 2009We are now one week out from the deadline for Hugo Nominations. I'm eligible to nominate this year, and while a couple of past requests for recommendations have failed to generate anything, I thought I'd throw up a preliminary look at my ballot in hopes of bringing in a few recommendations:
Best Novel
Anathem by Neal Stephenson. I don't like his take on Many-Worlds, but it's a terrific book all the same.
Sly Mongoose by Tobias Buckell. A fantastic setting, a great fast-moving plot, and some nice revelations about the universe.
Pirate Sun by Karl Schroeder. Cut-and-paste the comments from the…
drorzel | February 2, 2009In Friday's installment of his ongoing examination of Left Behind: The Movie, Fred Clark points out some gaps in the movie-Antichrist's plan, where it departs from the loopy prophetic cosmology of the Left Behind books. He then notes how they could've done better:
If Team Nicolae had really done their homework, they'd have consulted with groups like the Canaan Land Restoration of Israel, Inc., to make sure they had all their ducks in a row before trying to launch their apocalypse. The frustrating thing for Nicolae at this point has to be that it's already too late for him to get in touch with…
drorzel | January 29, 2009Boskone, the Boston-area SF convention that Kate and I go to every year, is the weekend after next. Once again, I'll be doing a few panels and one talk. For those who might be attending, or who care about this for some reason, here's my preliminary schedule:
Saturday10am Physics: What We Don't Understand
Geoffrey A. Landis
Mark L. Olson
Chad Orzel
Karl Schroeder
Ian Tregillis
In 1999 John Cramer wrote a column in Analog describing seven big
unsolved problems in physics (including the nature of dark matter,
the origin of ultra-high…
drorzel | December 19, 2008Nobody officially "tagged" me for this, but I saw it at Easily Distracted, and it seems like a good post topic for the Friday before Christmas. The idea is to pick one movie title for each letter of the alphabet.
The list below the fold is not an attempt to come up with Great Films for each letter of the alphabet; rather, it's a list of movies that I liked enough to be willing to watch them again. I'm fully aware that not all of them are cinematic triumphs, but I like them, and that's what matters here.
After Hours A quirky and amusing early Scorsese movie. Alternate choice: The Adventures of…
drorzel | November 7, 2008If, like me, you have long thought that the world needs more thrillers based on quantum physics, the students and post-docs of the Ultrafast Group at Oxford have got a short film for you: The DiVincenzo Code, in six parts on YouTube.
It doesn't make any less sense than a Dan Brown novel, and the production is impressively good. Ian Walmsley's turn as the evil Dr. Eve is not to be missed, particularly part V where he does the Mad Scientist Dance.
(Via the Pontiff.)
drorzel | October 16, 2008One of the annoying things about trying to explain quantum mechanics to a general audience is that the weirdness of the theory forces you to use incredibly convoluted examples. Pop-science books about quantum physics are full of schemes that the producers of the Saw movies would reject as implausibly complicated.
I wish I was posting to say that I had found a way around this, but I haven't. So here's another entry in the thriller-movie school of quantum analogies.
Imagine that you and a friend are out hiking, and find yourselves kidnapped by a sinister conspiracy of some sort. You're taken to…
drorzel | July 30, 2008A colleague emailed me yesterday with the following question:
As I have mentioned the other day, [Prof. Firstname Lastname] of Comp. Sci. is putting together an exciting course "Can Computers Think?" (Intro to Comp. Sci.), and she hopes to use Sci Fi short stories (and movies, and TV series) to bring ethics into the course. If you have a minute, please let me know if you have any suggestions on the following topics:
Technology and Privacy
Sustainability
Ownership and intellectual property rights
Threats and possibilities of A.I.
Some of these are pretty obvious-- "Technology and Privacy"…
drorzel | July 22, 2008I've been somewhat decoupled from blogdom in general recently, as I've been busy working on the book and getting ready for FutureBaby. It's also been a useful mental health break, though, as I'm a little less worked up about stupid stuff than I was a few months ago.
Every now and then, I catch the edges of some kerfuffle-of-the-moment, though, and it reminds me that continuing the decoupling is probably a Good Thing. The latest is the ongoing squabbling over Sizzle, which is the new "framing" fracas. This has been dragging on for a week, now, with the latest entries to catch my eye coming…
drorzel | July 20, 2008We'll keep this short and spoiler-free:
Kate and I went to see The Dark Knight yesterday afternoon. The verdict: It was an excellent entry in the "gritty comic-book adaptation" genre, and a very solid follow-up to Batman Begins.
Heath Ledger as the Joker was excellent. I see here in my blogger guidelines that I'm supposed to say something about Jack Nicholson, but really, the two movies are too different for that to make any sense.
It ran a bit long, but I'm inclined to forgive the length because it let them take one of the major plot lines in a different direction than I was expecting,…
drorzel | July 15, 2008As you have no doubt noticed, my early-morning review of Randy Olson's Sizzle was part of a concerted effort to get blogs to review the movie all on the same day. It's an experiment of sorts in using blogs to promote the movie.
Unfortunately for Olson, it seems to be an experiment designed to test the old adage that "there's no such thing as bad publicity, as long as they spell your name right." Most of the blog reviews collected at the ScienceBlogs page for the film were, um, less than glowing. My own kind of "Meh." review is one of the better ones on ScienceBlogs.
Having looked at a whole…
drorzel | July 14, 2008The forthcoming Sizzle, Randy Olson's follow-up to the well-received A Flock of Dodos, is a movie that's trying to do three things at the same time: 1) provide some information about global warming, 2) make a point about how scientific information is presented to the public, and 3) experiment with new ways of presenting scientific information to the public. As often happens with movies that are trying to do multiple things, it's not entirely successful at any of them, but it's a worthy attempt.
The film plays as basically a cross between An Inconvenient Truth and a Christopher Guest…
drorzel | July 13, 2008What Kate said, basically. The visuals are spectacular, the plot is pretty silly, the gender politics are kind of irritating.
The director, Guillermo Del Toro, is supposedly going to direct The Hobbit, and given the impressive look and feel of this movie, I'm sure he'll do cool things with Middle-Earth.
Kate remarked on the way home that it would be pretty difficult to screw up the gender politics of The Hobbit, given that there are basically no women in the book at all. I think she's selling Hollywood short.
drorzel | May 24, 2008For the first time since I don't know when, Kate and I have gone to see movies in a theater on two consecutive weekends. I'm pretty sure this hasn't happened in at least two years.
Anyway, before my general (spoiler-free) movie comments, some trailers:
You Don't Mess With the Zohan. Seriously, this is a movie? I thought it was just a fake commercial slapped together for SNL that had somehow come unmoored from the show and started turning up on other channels.
The Love Guru. Mike Myers has outdone himself: I hate this character already.
Australia. For everyone who has been dying to see a movie…
drorzel | May 1, 2008Speaking (as we were) of pro-science film festivals, Sigma Xi (the scientific research honor society-- think Phi Beta Kappa for science nerds) is announcing a student film competition:
In conjunction with a year-long focus on the issue of water, Sigma Xi is sponsoring a competition for three-minute student films on aspects of this precious and dwindling natural resource. The entry deadline is September 1, 2008.
Prizes of $1,000, $800 and $500 will be awarded for the top three films. The competition is open to undergraduate and graduate students, either individually or in teams. There is no…
drorzel | May 1, 2008Having suggested an on-line pro-science film festival a little while ago, I should report that there are discussions underway (or at least in the works) about trying to make something happen. If it goes anywhere, it may look different than the original suggestion, but I'm kind of curious about one aspect of the original idea.
If you recall, my original suggestion was that we could arrange a film festival using YouTube for the submission and distribution of entries, and basically passing the hat to get a prize pool. I still sort of like the idea of funding it via direct contributions rather…
drorzel | April 30, 2008Randy Olson's movie A Flock of Dodos comes up again and again in the course of arguments about public communication of science, but I had never gotten around to seeing it. I finally put it on the Netflix queue, and ended up watching it last night.
For those who have been living in caves and haven't seen this blogged a thousand times, A Flock of Dodos is a documentary about the "intelligent design" fight, primarily in Kansas, where Olson is from. Using the school board debate over science standards as a frame, Olson sets out to learn about "intelligent design," its promoters, and why we're…
drorzel | April 28, 2008Inspired by the suggestion of a pro-science film festival, the Seed editors have launched a poll asking about science movies. They've narrowed it to four, all with both pros and cons:
Contact Pro: Arecibo is way cool. Con: woo-woo ending is even less compelling than in the book.
Gattaca Pro: Believable human interactions between characters. Con: Implausible dystopian setting. Also, it's about biology.
An Inconvenient Truth Pro: An important message for society and a mountain of supporting evidence. Con: It's Al Gore giving a PowerPoint presentation.
Jurassic Park Pro: CGI dinosaurs! Con:…