How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Science Fiction Again

It's been years since I've read any straight-up science-fiction. You know, the classic stuff by authors like Arthur C. Clarke or Robert Heinlein or Isaac Asimov. But I got back into it recently through A.E. Van Vogt, having picked-up a used copy of Empire of the Atom.

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Blade Runner: Designing the Future

In its awesomeness, The Curated Object also has pieces from "Blade Runner: Designing the Future," including Syd Mead's conceptual paintings and a promotional, luminescent umbrella.

A Century of Cinematic Horror

Decade by decade, the Movie Morlocks look at 100 years of cinematic horror, starting with the 1910 silent, Frankenstein.

Kathryn Bigelow Retrospective

Kathryn Bigelow won a best directing Oscar for The Hurt Locker. Time for a retrospective. Here's the trailer for Near Dark and some clips. Point Break (i.e. Keeanu Reeves best movie). Jamie Lee Curtis in the cop thriller, Blue Steel. The premillennial tension of Strange Days. The Pirelli ad, Mission Zero. And her sub movie, possible the manliest of genres, K-19: The Widowmaker. She also wrote an episode of The Equalizer.

VARIETY PAK

It’s been just over a year since I became a partner in the Mayfair Theatre, Ottawa’s oldest operating cinema. We’ve shown a lot of films in that time (we average about 40 a month), and I’ve written the synopsis for almost every one.

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The Casefile of Sherlock Holmes and Carl Kolchak, Reporter

Though I prefer reading —and writing about —comics in collections, I do buy comics in single issues.  Sometimes I need to know what happens next or can't wait for the collection anymore. Sometimes it's idle curiosity or the lure of the pretty. But every once in a while, it's the potential for all-out crazy.

I picked up Sherlock Holmes and Kolchak: The Night Stalker: Cry of Thunder #1 for the potential all-out crazy.

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RIP Zelda Rubinstein

Actress Zelda Rubinstein has died after being taken off life support in L.A. last month. Most Gutter readers probably know her best as the psychic in Poltergeist, but she also starred in movies like Anguish, Sixteen Candles and Southland Tales. She was a human rights activist and also a lab tech, so pour 1L for a righteous sister.

HELLO DOCTOR NAME CONTINUE YESTERDAY TOMORROW

I had really hoped that my list of the top 10 films of the decade would be more surprising. Or perhaps I just assumed that I was less predictable. I thought about a lot of other films, some of which you’ll see in my runners-up rundown at the foot of this article, but these are the ones that stuck with me over the past ten years.

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10 Overlooked Movies of 2009

Tired of seeing the same movies on all the top ten of 2009 lists? Grady Hendrix lists his own "highly subjective list of the Top 10 movies (plus two extras) that were overlooked in 2009."

First, Kill All the Lawyers. Or Not. Whatever.

I never thought a courtroom would make a particularly good backdrop for romance. Drama, certainly, in a gavel-pounding, "you can't handle the truth" sort of way. But I thought the procedural nature of the law, with its rules and regulations, and sheer mind-numbing attention to detail precluded any possibility of romance.

Sometimes it's nice to be proved wrong.

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OH, THE MEGA-HUMANITY!

So, Richard Kelly has a new movie coming out. Entitled The Box, it’s based on a Twilight Zone episode written by Richard Matheson, which is in turn based on a short story, also written by Richard Matheson. And I’m pretty sure there’s an entire article in Matheson’s impact on the screen arts, but this isn’t that article.

This is an article about Megazeppelins and the men who crash them. This is an article about Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales.

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Pure, Unadulterated Munday

Originally from the “New York and New Jersey area,” Evan Munday is a Toronto-based comic artist and illustrator with a day job as a book publicist. He's a member of the illustration collective, SketchKrieg!, has written a young adult novel, The Dead Kid Detective Agency and illustrated magazines and books, most recently Jon Paul Fiorentino's novel Stripmalling (ECW, 2009). I first met Evan at a zine fair where he was selling, The Amazing Challengers of Unknown Mystery, his comic about superheroes in Waterloo, Ontario. It's funny, smart and kinda punk. I'd really like to pressure him to make more.  Instead, I ask him questions.

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Guess who Blair Butler ran into?

Blair Butler ran into comics writer, Grant Morrison, at Meltdown Comics in L.A. Wanna look?

Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus

Giant animals square off in Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus. You might think Minoru Kawasaki is behind it. But you'd be wrong--Deborah "Debbie" Gibson's behind it all. (Thanks, Steven!)

Ricardo Montalbán, RIP

Ricardo Montalbán has died. Gutter fans probably remember best his roles in Star Trek, Planet of the Apes, Fantasy Island and Spy Kids, but Montalbán had a long career and also worked hard to combat stereotypical depictions of Latinos. Linda Holmes writes about Montalbán trapped on Fantasy Island in obituaries. In a film geek version of a 21 gun salute, Turner Classic Movies will honor Ricardo Montalbán with a movie marathon.

Patrick McGoohan is a Free Man

Patrick McGoohan has died. He's been in movies from Ice Station Zebra to Scanners to Braveheart.  He turned down a crazy number of roles: The Saint, James Bond, Gandalf and Dumbledore. He directed and starred in some smart tv including Columbo. Most people will remember his dreamy auteur tv show, The Prisoner, a show Glenn Kenny calls in his obituary, "one of the most reliably mind-bending television series ever created." Obituaries here and here.

Money For Nothing

Most writers get into the Romance genre because they read it, and they read it because they love it. Each writer is drawn to the genre for different reasons, of course. Whether the concentration on character; the focus on primary relationships; or the essence of the triumph of hope, the many appeals of the happy ending hook writers the same way they hook readers. Elizabeth Lowell, on the other hand, got into it for the money.

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Cartoon Osteology

Peer deep inside the anatomy of cartoon characters, right to the bone, with Dia de los Muertos Looney Toons at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, Michael Paulus' osteological Hello Kitty and Peanuts drawings and Hyungkoo Lee's rascally, Animatus sculpture. (via Boing Boing)

Happy Bloody Holidays

True crime isn't new. It wasn't invented by Truman Capote for In Cold Blood, although Capote certainly raised the bar for many crime writers. True crime has evolved from 19th century police procedural nonfiction, popularized in weekly journals like the Police Gazette, and later in crime pulps of the 1930s and 1940s which depicted the glamorized lives of contemporary criminals. True crime books, like popular mysteries, combine page-turning depictions of violence, the tribulations of a fictional or real investigator on a case, and obsessive rants on the nature of human evil. What better antidote to excessive family cheer than wondering if the relative you're passing the Christmas turkey to is actually a serial killer?

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Life is Better Underground

Since the first Cro-Magnon man set foot in the limestone caves of Lascaux, we have has a bittersweet relationship with cool, dank places. They provided mankind with much needed shelter from the elements, yet in their dark recesses they also supplied material for our nightmares -- whether they materialised as a flesh-ripping cave bear or a knife-wielding street thug jumping out as you fumble with your keys. Thus the instinctive and primal fear that grips everyone of us anytime we venture into the bowels of our urban sprawl: underground parking lots.

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