Last night ended Day 3 of San Diego Comic Con. Despite some disappointments earlier in the day, the night ended on a high note for me. It also reinforced a long-held belief of mine when it comes to conventions; have backup plans when your primary goals fall apart, and most importantly, allow room for…
San Diego Comic Con 2018, Day 2 Megapost…
San Diego Comic Con, Day 2 (technically Day 3, if you include Wednesday’s Preview Night) is almost at a close. My plate wasn’t too full today. Comic Con is made a little easier when you stop spending the entire day trying to get into Hall H and Ballroom 20 events, as I’ve done long ago. No…
San Diego Comic Con 2018: Day One Megapost…
Last night was Preview Night; the champagne bottle breaking on the four-day geek mecca known as San Diego Comic Con. Today was Day One. Let the revelry begin! Earlier this year, I wrote a 50th anniversary salute to one of my favorite movies of all-time; “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Today I attended an anniversary panel for the film….
San Diego Comic Con 2018: Preview Night megapost…
Today, Wednesday, July 18th (or tonight, as I type this) was San Diego Comic Con “Preview Night.” Not many major events were scheduled, so I had a chance to get a quick lay of the land and see some of the new attractions and exhibits. Tomorrow is the official first day of San Diego Comic Con, but since I…
The days before San Diego Comic Con…
No matter how prepared my wife and I are for San Diego Comic Con (we’ve been attending the event together for nearly 15 years now), it seems like the last week before the event is always a bit of a mad dash to finish things. I spent the better part of yesterday putting together revised/new…
Marvel’s “Iron Man” ten years later…
The Marvel shared cinematic universe first came online with 2008’s “Iron Man.” There’d been many other Marvel Comics properties adapted as films (“X-Men”, “SpiderMan”, “Hulk”) but “Iron Man” was the first that was deliberately designed to be part of a greater whole. It’s a universe that (10 years and 19 or so movies later) shows no…
“JAWS: The Art of Fear in Filmmaking” exhibit at Catalina Island…
To paraphrase the tagline from JAWS 2: Just when you thought it was safe to go into the museum… I’d like to preface by saying JAWS is one of my top five favorite movies of all time. If I were marooned on a desert island with a portable DVD player that ran on coconut juice? I…
“Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom”: an apt title?
“Jurassic Park: Fallen Kingdom,” the fifth movie in the “Jurassic” franchise to date, is an utterly unnecessary sequel that has little-to-no reason to exist. While it’s not nearly as bald-faced or useless as, say, “Independence Day: Resurgence,” it only becomes truly interesting right at the finish line. Director Juan Antonio Bayona (“The Orphanage”) does a decent enough…
“Deep Impact”: an unfairly overlooked end-of-the-world epic…
Twenty years ago, my then-fiancee (now current wife) and I took in a new Steven Spielberg produced, Mimi Leder directed (barely) science fiction movie about a comet on a collision course with Earth called “Deep Impact.” A large cosmic mass in danger of colliding with Earth isn’t exactly the most original idea. There was 1951’s…
Revisiting “Raiders of the Lost Ark” in cinema…
Whip it good. This week, my wife and I took in a screening of the 1981 Steven Spielberg/George Lucas classic “Raiders of the Lost Ark” at our local cinema. I hadn’t seen “Raiders” theatrically since the summer of 1981, when I was all of 14. This time, nearly four decades later, I was a…
My personal Martian chronicles…
Discovery. A few days ago, I turned on the news to finally hear something other than scandals, angry tweets, and a world increasingly going to hell in a hand basket. There was a headline story about the planet Mars. The Curiosity rover, which landed on Mars almost 6 years ago, had discovered organic material on…
HUMANS: TV’s no-frills cybernetic revolution…
It’s unfortunate that “HUMANS,” a terrific British cyber-revolt series (based on a Swedish series) has to share an era with HBO’s “Westworld.” Don’t get me wrong, my wife and I enjoy Westworld very much; it’s a beautiful piece of science-fiction television, and arguably the best mindf–k TV series since 1967’s “The Prisoner.” It’s that HUMANS…
