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Over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to be posting about my 11 night Mediterranean cruise on the Disney Magic, and other Disney-related thoughts. I’m also (slowly) uploading photos to my Flickr.
On a Disney cruise, you never stop hearing about the fantastic time you’re having. Wasn’t last night’s Captain’s dinner just delicious? Didn’t you love [...]

I took the afternoon off today to attend a symposium on Science Fiction as a Literary Genre at Gresham College. However, the main reason I went was because Neal Stephenson (author of Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash, Quicksilver, etc) was the keynote speaker. Aside from being one of my favourite science fiction authors, Neal is also an [...]

I’d heard about Todd McEwen’s famous essay about Cary’s Grant’s suit in North by Northwest (’North By Northwest isn’t a film about what happens to Cary Grant, it’s about what happens to his suit’) but I’d never gotten around to reading it. It turns out it’s online, and it’s a brilliant, hilarious read, getting more [...]

A brief roundup of things I have watched, read and played over the Christmas period:
Ratatouille
Ratatouille is in contention for my ‘most rewatchable movie’ award. This has previously been the sole province of Master and Commander, another movie that doesn’t adhere to normal traditions of pacing and plotting. I’ve watched Ratatouille about four times now (at [...]

If you’re making a movie that’s ‘family-friendly’ with a PG rating, then you can forget about having any real swearing in the dialogue. This is generally not hard to do, but certain dramatic or funny moments (e.g. imminent death, huge tidal wave, just finished beating up bad guys) can call for dialogue that, if it [...]

That’s what this wonderfully incisive Movie Preview Review says, anyway:

I’m going to see the movie – for the robots.

Update: Jen Winter has contacted me and apologised for the email, which I’ve accepted. All sorted now.
Ratatouille is, by all accounts, a magnificent movie. Potentially Pixar’s best, and that’s saying a lot. And of course, it’s a very important film – these movies cost a lot to make and if they fail, that’s tens of [...]

Take a look at this list of release dates for Pixar’s new movie, Rataouille. It astounds me that a major movie like this can be released in the UK over three months later than the US. Where’s the love, Pixar? Why does France get it two months earlier than us? Is it because of our [...]

Philip Pullman, along with a couple of other people from New Line, gave an interesting talk at the Oxford Literary Festival yesterday about the process of adaption The Golden Compass for the cinema. There was a bit of a thrill of seeing some effects shots for the first time, although it turned out to be [...]

Usually I crack around Christmas and actually write a whole series of posts, perhaps due to the complete lack of work. And in fact I have several hundred words of notes lying around in various text files on my desktop, glowering at me whenever I press F11 on my keyboard and watch all of my [...]