Raritania
Thursday, June 6, 2019
The End of High Concept Comedy?
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Recently running into a commercial for the Will Ferrell-John C. Reilly vehicle Holmes & Watson on On Demand I was surprised that I didn...
The Action Film's Transitional Years: Recalling the 1990s
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Once upon a time cops and, especially in the '80s, the commando, were the characteristic figures of the action movie, a relatively groun...
Looking Past the Hardcovers: Techno-Thrillers in Other Media
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Writing about the military techno-thriller-- --I generally focused on print works. This was for several reasons--because this is where...
Crazed Fruit
: Some Thoughts
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The screen adaptation of Shintaro Ishihara's second novel, Crazed Fruit , ran on TCM some time ago. I understand the movie has been re...
Tuesday, May 28, 2019
George Orwell's
The Road to Wigan Pier
and Obesity
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Considering the unending debate on obesity my thoughts go back to what George Orwell had to say of the dietary habits of the poor in his jou...
Saturday, April 27, 2019
On John Rhys-Davies' Tantrum
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Recently I chanced upon John Rhys-Davies' nasty behavior toward Green Party MP Caroline Lucas on the BBC's Question Time . In partic...
Why People With High IQs Don't Go Around Bragging About Their High IQs
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I have been struck time and again by the number of trolls who claim to be intellectually superior to anyone they are likely to meet in their...
Sunday, April 14, 2019
Review:
The Chimera Vector
, by Nathan Farrugia
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Nathan Farrugia's The Chimera Vector being the sort of thriller where plot twists and "big reveals" are critical to the enter...
High-Speed Pulp Writing: How Did People Do It?
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Those who delve into the history of the more commercial kinds of fiction--the old pulps and paperbacks and so on--encounter what seem like e...
The '80s Never Ended
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Recently reading David Sirota's Back to Our Future I thought again that the 1980s do define our decade, though the explanation I find s...
Why Was Hollywood So Slow to Capitalize on the Action Film?
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The original, EON-produced James Bond movies of the early 1960s are generally regarded as the starting point for the modern action film--the...
Darko Suvin and H.G. Wells
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Darko Suvin's collection Metamorphoses of Science Fiction includes such classics of his criticism as "Estrangement and Cognition&q...
Of Assholes and Bullshit
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The last time I checked one still could not say the words "asshole" or "bullshit" on network television. Yet, academics ...
Saturday, April 13, 2019
The Politics of Trolling: A Few Reflections
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It seems to me that the label "troll" is much misused. Certain lazy writers will apply it to any criticism. Straightforward politi...
On the Word "Entitlement"
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As James Cairns observes in his recent book The Myth of the Age of Entitlement , the term "entitlement" is defined by the Oxford E...
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