I’m in love with Massachusetts And the neon when it’s cold outside And the highway when it’s late at night Got the radio on I’m like the roadrunner

Quickie review of Forbidden Kingdom: Two of the fight scenes are excellent, and the rest are pretty good. I mean, you’re not seeing it for the plot, which is light. You’re seeing it because it’s the first time Jet Li and Jackie Chan have been in a movie together, and despite the fact that you’re nervous about Rob Minkoff’s directing (I mean, The Lion King?), Woo-ping Yuen is a great action choreographer. ...

“OK, here’s the plan for the rest of the night. We’re gonna play the next song, then we’re gonna play the fake last song. Then I’m gonna introduce the other guys on the stage, with their Christian name, their nickname, possibly their Zodiac sign, their place of birth, and their surname. Then we’re gonna turn our backs to you and act like we’re off stage for a few moments. Then we’re gonna turn around, pretend to be surprised, and play some more music and then the show will end.”

As per this news. The novel is titled Anathem, and the blurb follows: Since childhood, Raz has lived behind the walls of a 3,400-year-old monastery, a sanctuary for scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians – sealed off from the illiterate, irrational, unpredictable “saecular” world that is plagued by recurring cycles of booms and busts, world wars and climate change. Until the day that a higher power, driven by fear, decides that only these cloistered scholars have the abilities to avert an impending catastrophe. And, one by one, Raz and his cohorts are summoned forth without warning into the Unknown. ...

Peter Berg is directing a Dune adaptation (original). Well, that’s a thing. I haven’t seen any of his movies… no, wait, I saw The Rundown, which was mildly amusing. Possibly thanks to the Walken. Maybe they’ll cast Walken as De Vries, and Dwayne Johnson as Duncan Idaho, and Seann William Scott as Feyd-Rautha? Nah, I don’t like where that went either.

Not the sole creator of D&D, not the most important figure in the industry, but sine qua non. The original report is here (original). Troll Lords was his current publisher, so this is very unlikely to be a hoax. There’s also confirmation here. Sad news.

15 movies, 15 quotes, no Googling. The last few answers have been supplied.

This is the coolest graph I’ve seen in a while. It’s a picture of box office grosses per movie over time, from 1986 to the present day. Very clever. You can see the evolution of the summer blockbuster, not to mention the winter blockbuster trend.

It’s harder reviewing the really, really good movies. What more are you going to say about There Will Be Blood? Yeah, Daniel Day-Lewis was awesome, and Paul Dano was too. The soundtrack was terribly cool – I didn’t read it as a horror movie soundtrack so much as I took it to be a parallel narrative of the industrialization of the United States. It groaned and crashed and squealed like machinery. Lovely. ...

And the WGA more or less won. (original) It’s been really interesting to watch; this is the first US strike I’m aware of in which the PR battle was fought on blogs. And when you get right down to it, the writers make a living writing persuasive prose, so it’s not entirely surprising that the PR went well. On the other hand, it’s also the case that this strike didn’t affect the majority of the public in the way that, say, a garbage collection strike does. That helped PR too. ...