Raritania

It is an old stereotype that Americans, especially if they are not immigrants, are less likely to have second language skills than people in...

As even a glance at the box office data from China indicates the Chinese film industry is a powerful competitor for its vast domestic audie...

As the latest Bond movie finally has its day at the box office, and the data about the viewers is piling up, one thing that has attracted a ...

Recent decades have seen film production budgets explode--and with them promotional budgets as well, which have, if anything, grown faster. ...

As those who have followed the scene are well aware the boom in superhero films is about two decades old, certainly if one goes by the then-...

The idea of the hero is, I suppose, found in just about every culture in one form or another, and with it superheroes in the broad sense of ...

I have previously had occasion to mention on this blog my reading Graham Greene's brief but valuable essay about "our literary frie...

I doubt anyone would say that the twenty-first century has been Hollywood's most glorious era artistically. It did not and arguably coul...

It seems to have become something of a commonplace over the years to draw an analogy between life and a poorly designed video game. The list...

One of my (many) causes for annoyance with the results Google's search engine spews out these days is that whenever I type in a name-- a...

Looking back at the 1990s from a generation on I find myself thinking that it may have been the last time when Americans had a sense of how ...

I remember how back when writing for The Fix I penned a piece titled "Science Fiction and the Two Cultures." As the title implies...

Some time ago I revisited the kind of writing I used to do for IROSF , in particular the big summary-type pieces toward which I tended--lik...

Looking back on the history of paramilitary action-adventure it seemed to me that one of the reasons why the genre declined in the 1990s as ...

Those who discuss the idea of the middlebrow commonly trace it back to a letter Virginia Woolf wrote to the New Statesman deriding it, post...