Cover Me

August 10, 2010

If you look at the news to your left, you’ll see that my new novel, The Identity Man, has received some gratifying pre-publication praise in the United Kingdom.  I would like to add my praise for the good folks at Corvus, my UK publisher, who did such an incredible job with the cover for the [...]

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What I Love And Don’t Like About “Mad Men”

August 9, 2010

AMC’s Mad Men is yet one more product of television’s new golden age.  The same combination of mindless leftism, foreign funding and ill-treatment of writers that caused the possibly fatal decline of American movies has chased talent and excellence to the little screen and shows like Mad Men are the delightful result.

If it had nothing [...]

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Movie: Salt

August 6, 2010

Sux.  Okay, maybe that’s a little harsh.  Phillip Noyce is a highly skilled director (he made the excellent little thriller Dead Calm – if you haven’t seen it, stop reading this and go watch it now – and those fun Harrison Ford Tom Clancy films) and the action is well filmed.  Also, the set-up’s intriguing [...]

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Tudors Revisited

August 5, 2010

Back in June, I put up a post on the first season of Showtime’s The Tudors.  I enjoyed it but found it mostly a costume soap opera, heavy on the gratuitous sex scenes, light on the history.
I’ve now finished all four seasons and I’d like to revise that opinion upward – way upward.  By the [...]

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Anne Rice Quits Christianity

August 4, 2010

Spanking porn author Anne Rice has announced on Facebook that she’s quitting Christianity.  According to John Nolte over at Big Hollywood, she made the announcement on Facebook thusly:
I quit being a Christian. I’m out. In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial [...]

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I Spy

August 3, 2010

Two nice reviews of Otto Penzler’s excellent spy story anthology Agents of Treachery single out yours truly for praise.  In the Chicago Tribune, Julia Keller points out that, with Salt in theaters and Covert Affairs on TV, there’s a lot of espionage in the entertainment world this summer–but she says Agents is “the best of [...]

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American Movies, Foreign Minds

August 2, 2010

Two articles in the Wall Street Journal this week confirm a lot of people’s feelings about modern American movies.

The first article, a witty tirade by Joe Queenan, asks whether 2010 is the worst year for movies ever:
Go into a movie theater any day of the week and watch as the audience sits listlessly through a [...]

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Nude Scenes: Prime Cut

July 31, 2010

When I was a little kid, my friends and I used to dig holes in the backyard, imagining, and half believing, that if we went down far enough, we would come out in China.  Well, that’s not right exactly, but it is true that if you go down far enough when you’re making a movie, [...]

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KOC: Out-Takes

July 29, 2010

Hey, Little People!  You know how at the end of movies, they sometimes show what are called “outtakes”–mistakes and accidents that occurred during filming?  These delightful laugh-fests remind you that even your superiors in Hollywood occasionally make an error or two, almost as if their species bore some genetic relationship to that of you troglodytes [...]

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Super Mario Galaxy 2

July 28, 2010

This was lots and lots of fun – then wasn’t.  Super Mario in all his various incarnations is still the closest thing we have to a perfect video game character.  He’s lovable, courageous, courtly, talented–and if your toilet backs up, who ya gonna call?

As with Super Mario Galaxy 1, this game takes you around various [...]

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