In The American: A Magazine of Ideas, reviewer James Bowman says that Hollywood no longer makes films about heroes.
American movies have forgotten how to portray heroism, while a large part of their disappearing audience still wants to see celluloid heroes. I mean real heroes, unqualified heroes, not those who have dominated American cinema over the [...]

The Spiderwick Chronicles is a superb fantasy movie that towers over its Narnian and Dark Materialed rivals despite, and possibly because of its non-epic, almost domestic scale. Although ostensibly for children, the filmmakers made a laudable decision to allow the threats to be very, very real, to be genuinely scary, and to avoid easy, [...]

For those of you who thought that math classes were a waste of time because you were never going to visit whichever country it is where they speak algebra, Matt Bailey has done a detailed statistical analysis of the notoriously high mortality rate of red-shirted crewmen beaming down to the planet - and he has [...]

Over on No Fear of the Future, Jess Nevis has posted an entertaining historical retrospective of Chinese science fiction that could only be made better if it had actually happened.
Fanqi Mieville’s Mengzi Street Station (4698). Mengzi Street Station may be a controversial choice. Mieville seems to have as many detractors, or at least readers who [...]

A little over a year ago, Claire McKenna, best known as a prolific short story writer, suddenly switched focus and started working on a low-low budget Sci Fi movie based on one of her own short stories, ‘The Liminal’. I’d been getting excited emails from her occasionally with shooting photos attached. A couple of rubber [...]

I have this theory that some objects cause effects in culture similar to the gravitational effect a body such as a planet or comet causes in space-time. You know that demonstration: space as a flat sheet of rubber pulled taut. Billiard balls sit upon it, the indentations they make representing the effect of gravity. [...]

As everyone who knows such things knows, Uwe Boll is a less-than-talented film maker who makes pseudo-blockbuster horror flicks based on computer games. So far he’s produced a trashy zombie gutchewer (House of the Dead) and a trashy scifi-horror opus (Alone in the Dark). Given how bad these films are, I was bemused to discover [...]

Imagine going to see a play and not understanding a single word spoken.
Imagine going to another place and not understanding a single word spoken.
Imagine permanently moving to another country where you don’t understand a single word spoken.
Imagine writing a review about a play about all of the above.
The Arrival
Spare Parts Puppet Theatre
The Arrival is based [...]

Whether we like the idea or not, young people in western culture get most of their cues and their role models for life from television. TV tells them what to look like, what to expect from the world and how to behave. TV tells them what to eat, what to buy and what to wear.

A [...]

Nature’s warning signs are bright red and yellow patches. Hollywood has its own warning signs and Eight Below fair sparkles with them. It’s a post-1970 Disney production; it stars Paul Walker; it is about dogs; it was “inspired by a true story” as opposed to “based on a true story” (the distinction matters); it is [...]