I’m catching up on wordcount at the moment, so I’m not blogging as much as I’d like. When I’ve recovered from WisCon, expect some more of the Catherine Cookson Experience, a pile of Questionable Taste Theatres, and a response to Darin Bradley’s challenge.
In the meantime, mad respect to these dancers, who have better spacial memory than I ever will.
Even more respect to the dancers of the period, who did this dance in crowded, smoky rooms, basically in the dark (candles never give off more light than absolutely necessary, the bastards), forty pounds of embroidered clothing, shoes with no demarcated left and right, and the stench of unwashed humanity constantly crawling up their noses. Ah, romance!
This year at WisCon I participated on the Netbook Show and Tell panel as the plug-and-play representative. For those who know their programming, it was an informative panel. For those who are a little more, uh, Luddite, it was a hilarious panel; I’m pretty sure that at some point in the melee, someone recalibrated their warp drive for endothermic propulsion.
People were very generous about showing off their netbooks and going through the pros and cons. I’ve done a layperson’s roundup over at Tor.com..
Hopefully this is just the beginning of my WisCon recapping, but I went back to the day job this morning after letting work build up in my absence, and oh, that’s always fun! (More later, is what I’m saying. Because this place is wild today.)
So, the problem with a character like Sherlock Holmes is that you can, in theory, take any element of him and run with it until you have a two-hour movie. It’s just – it’s a plan. As evidenced above, it’s not a GOOD plan, but it’s a plan.
(Related: I didn’t remember that Sherlock Holmes dodged quite so many explosions. Learn something every day!)
Also, Rachel McAdams should be famous enough by now to be allowed to wear clothes in the preview, right?
It’s not even that I’m a purist – I thorougly enjoyed the remake with Rupert Everett and Ian Hart and Michael Fassbender and Perdita Weeks and Rachel Hurd-Wood in it. It was well-made, and it’s really useful for Awesome British Actor Camp bingo. But for real, even with all the liberties they took, there was not a lot of useless slow motion and running-from-explosions.
I know Guy Ritchie has a pretty small bag of tricks, but damn.
I round up those who are still standing and mourn those who have fallen over at Tor.com. Sometimes the decisions that get made in the big offices are truly baffling.
I wrote up a short list of speculative movies with a conspiracy edge for Fantasy Magazine.
Two things:
1) It is amazing how many ye olde fantasy movies are powered by a single corrupt dude in a position of power. He usually has an army at his command and everything, but still, it’s seriously impressive what a little gumption and a command of the Dark Arts will get you in Fantasyland. I don’t think this is the case with books so much, but most of the fantasies that make it to the big screen are sort of Eragon-licious, you know?
2) I really love Stigmata. Like, to a degree where I think it’s a great movie, not just that I like it. I mean, it manages to make a villain of corrupt organized religion while giving actual spirituality a pass. Also, Gabriel Byrne.
