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. ...
I’m thinking about a long essay on Johnny Depp’s trilogy of food movies: Chocolat, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and of course Sweeney Todd. No? What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?
Stop hurting America! (original) Michael Bay’s production company is working on remakes of: Nightmare on Elm Street Friday the 13th Near Dark The Birds Near Dark was just fine the way it was. Grrr. Who the hell is Samuel Bayer? I suppose I’m upset about Hitchcock remakes too. I’m not really upset about Friday the 13th, though.
I’ve seen a few critics recommending minimal knowledge of Cloverfield going into the movie, and I think that’s right. It’s also a sign that it’s a gimmick movie. That’s not a pejorative, since there’s nothing wrong with gimmick movies, but you always have to ask: does the gimmick contribute to the story? In this case, since the story’s more about how people react to the giant monster eating New York City than it is about the monster, I think the answer’s yes. To the degree that Cloverfield doesn’t succeed, it’s not any fault of the found footage conceit. Rather, it’s that the characters aren’t all that interesting, excepting our primary cameraman Hud. They aren’t boring, per se. I cheered for them. I just wouldn’t have been cheering if it hadn’t been a monster movie. ...
Interesting geeky project of the nonce: Shadow Unit, from Elizabeth Bear, Emma Bull, Sarah Monette, and Will Shetterly. It’ll be updated weeklyish with more stuff; starting in February there’ll be fiction every two weeks, including a full novel. Right now it’s the front page plus two character dossiers, but if you go here you’ll find the rest of the dossiers. And a message board. Keen. Edit: And LiveJournals. Start maybe here. I haven’t figured who’s who yet, although that one is obviously Chaz, because I need to get to work. ...
I saw No Country for Old Men weeks ago, and it’s taken me this long to come to grips with it; or to at least find an entrance point for discussion that made sense to me. I spent a while musing on the nihilistic nature of the movie. My first draft of this noted “family counts for nothing except danger, and the monsters are not destined for jail time.” But that’s not true. I’ve seen nihilistic movies. A truly nihilistic movie ignores consequences; the crop of Tarantino/Besson-influenced movies come far closer to nihilism than No Country for Old Men. Consider Snatch, in which the protagonists are pretty completely immoral but walk free at the end. I liked Snatch but there’s about zero morality in the whole thing. ...