A Sundial In A Grave: 1610 is what the Kushiel books wanted to be, but less gilded. Late Renaissance, swordplay, espionage, desperate adventure, and dominance/submission games? Check. It’s possible there’s even a Mary Sue character, depending on how you look at things. And yet A Sundial In A Grave does not over-enthuse about the joys of pain in the bedroom, it does not linger endlessly on the prowess of the hero, and it is not a morass of angst. It swashbuckles, all the while aware of the contradictions that lie at the heart of the protagonist. He is a duellist: he is a man who desires — but that would be telling. ...

This one’s for Jeff. By last count, I had 528 DVDs — this includes TV shows and some wrestling, though. So maybe around 475 if you only count movies. A relatively small number of those are in a sell stack. The last film I bought was The Life Aquatic, in the Criterion 2 disc edition. It looks like another great Criterion production. The last film I watched was Serenity; it’s been an off-month for me. ...

Community Book Solutions (original) is a company which takes book donations and gets them to libraries. They also seem to have a book sales arm, which they don’t talk about much on their web site. That’s a little skeevy, if they’re selling the books people donate to them. On the other hand, I’ve found a few recommendations from librarians. And when you get right down to it, the fact that they’ll come to your house and box and pick up your books? That’s a total win for me. They take just about everything, too.

Sometimes it’s hard to believe that there’s some sort of white supremacist conspiracy that means to stealthily advance its views into the mainstream. We should believe it. They’re targeting the Sierra Club right now. “Latin Americans have shown a positive disregard for environmentalism as evidenced by their tendency toward littering and driving smog-belching old junkers.” (Steve Sailer, “Green Gag.”) The leaders of several anti-immigration organizations funded by Richard Mellon Scaife have put together a slate of six candidates for the Sierra Club Board of Directors. The Sierra Club is a target because, as a liberal group, it provides a path for expressing racist views in a manner that doesn’t set off alarm bells. From John Tanton (original), one of the people behind this effort, in a 1986 memo (original): ...

George Axelrod passed away Saturday. As big Hollywood names go, his wasn’t that big. Still, he wrote Breakfast at Tiffany’s and The Manchurian Candidate and the original play Seven Year Itch. So, yeah, let’s recognize.

I am fantastically excited: Fangoria has the first peek (original) at the FanTasia film festival lineup. As I’d hoped, Night Watch and Kitamura’s Godzilla: Final Wars will be there. Night Watch is the Russian conspiracy modern fantasy epic which has a ton of buzz, and Kitamura is of course the director of the insanely spirited Versus. Those were the movies I’d really wanted to see. Lots of other cool stuff, too. Lion’s Gate has a small slew of J-horror sequels, which I’ll see if it’s convenient, and the horror anthology film Three… Extremes by Miike, Fruit Chan, and Chan-wook Park. I’ll see that for shock value. Lots of zombie movies. Hm, and Paul Spurrier’s “P” — made in Thailand by a British director, looks interesting, gives me some creepy vibes. I love fusion and I want to see that one badly. ...

So I’m not going to talk about the movie at all. You can’t see it for four months; why should I even plague you with an opinion on quality? I think you should see it, where “you” means “yes, you, reading this right now.” Further I will not say. I will talk about the experience of the preview a little. Sean Maher (Simon) and Morena Baccarin (Inara) showed up at the theater to thank us for coming and sign autographs. Joss Whedon had a trailer before the movie in which he talked about how we needed to go out and be browncoats and push the movie. The interesting thing for me was that he speaks with a fannish accent — you may know the one. Not the gamer fannish accent, which is fairly light, but the SF fan accent. He talks the way people who go to a lot of SF cons talk, with those careful pauses and deliberate telegraphing of wryness. ...

Real quick notes, here; I may write more about this later, but then again I may not. However: The new Mac OS X rocks. The Spotlight search functionality is pretty good, but what’s important to me is that it shipped with command line tools so I can do metadata searches in my scripts. Dashboard provides a paradigm for desktop widgets that I can use, namely that they stay out of the way until I go looking for them. The Safari RSS functionality looks pretty slick; I might not use it, but it’s comforting to know it understands Atom.

Huge news: Soderbergh is committing to simultaneous release across TV, DVD, and theaters (original). His next six movies will be released in theaters, on DVD, and on television (via Mark Cuban’s high def HDTV network) at the same time. The movies will be funded by Cuban, shown in Cuban’s Landmark Theaters chain, and the DVDs will be released through Cuban’s DVD label. So it’s all Cuban, all the time. This is something Cuban’s wanted to do for a long time; he is betting heavily on digital distribution and he’s probably right. He built his corporate structure with exactly this kind of deal in mind; he owns a company at each level of the movie distribution chain, from production studio down to every consumer product distribution channel. He must be thrilled that he managed to get someone as prestigious as Soderbergh to buy into the concept. Chances are that Soderbergh will bring one of his star stable (Clooney, Roberts, or Damon) along for at least one of these six movies, which should do wonders for publicity. ...

Ladies and gentlemen, Iraq has a government. Took a while, but they got there. I’m happy about that. I find myself concerned that Chalabi is the acting oil minister, since he’s not exactly a beacon of shining moral integrity. I’m also rather bemused that the Prime Minister is the acting defense minister. Having the head of state also be the head of the armed forces has not traditionally been a sign of democratic process, but at least it’s temporary. ...