It’s not really called that. It’s called “The Wizarding World of Harry Potter.” I don’t know how to feel about it.
Even leaving aside the odious press-release-ese (TWWoHP “brings the stories of Harry Potter to life in a way never before imagined”? Don’t tell me what I have or haven’t imagined you bezoar-eating shill) there’s no way I …
Yesterday at 10 AM I got an e-mail saying that a copy of The Lost Symbol would be arriving momentarily, by messenger. Yesterday at 3:30 PM I finally trudged over to the Random House building, flagged down a publicity assistant, and actually got a copy. (The messenger copy eventually did show up, at 5:00.) At 9:30 last night, I filed my …
From The New York Times, September 8, 2009:
Harper Collins and the heirs to the author J.R.R. Tolkien reached a settlement with Warner Brothers in their suit against the studio over payments from films based on “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, according to statement from Warner, the publisher and the heirs today. The statement did
…
I was going to do a rundown of all the fantasy and science fiction movies I’m looking forward to this fall, cribbed from io9’s admirably thorough fall preview.
Only too late did I spot the flaw in this otherwise near-perfect scheme: there aren’t any.
While I was traveling last week I was lugging around an incredibly fascinating book called The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom. Dirac was one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics. He predicted the existence of anti-matter, mathematically, before there was any experimental basis for it. He won a …
(*Sorry for that NY Post-style hed; I’ve been in NY all week.)
Apple just approved that Rhapsody app that everyone’s been so excited about. Now anyone with an iPhone or WiFI-connected iPod Touch can get virtually any music they want, streamed to them, wherever they are, whenever they want.
It’s the first time Apple has approved a …
The man who’s famous for coming back from the dead has just come back from the dead. And no, he didn’t bring back a tablet with him.
Of course it was more fun to talk about the resurrection of Steve Jobs when you were talking metaphorically, about his coming back in triumph after the firing from Apple and the cratering of NeXT. …
Let’s all kill time before the Apple event …
1. I Am a Dark Elf. Sometimes readers e-mail me random links to things they’ve written. They are sometimes good and sometimes bad. But I don’t often get sent something as interesting as this essay by a Muslim immigrant, born in Pakistan, about how Drizzt Do’Urden, from R.A. …
A few years ago, after a long day spent thinking of new nouns for Homer to say after “Mmm…”, my wife dragged me to the screening of a film directed by a friend. The film was fine. The rough part was the reception.
A room full of strangers is not my favorite social scenario. I prefer a room full of people who already think I’m great. …
AMC is streaming all the old episodes of The Prisoner. (First episode here.) It’s an excellent day for paranoids. They’re doing this to promote their remake of same, which debuts in November.
FINDING NAMOR
HIGH SCHOOL FOR GIFTED YOUNSTERS MUSICAL
THE AMAZING SPIDER-MARY POPPINS
BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (HANK McCOY)
THE AVENGER DUMPLING GANG
SKRULL GOOFY
THE INCREDIBLES (already a FANTASTIC FOUR rip-off)
SLEEPING MUTIE
SNOW WHITE AND THE SINISTER SIX
POWER MAN AND LION …
Just pointers to two things that I wrote, which are not unrelated.
The first is a piece about the Hunger Games books, the first of which came out from Scholastic last fall. There was a lot of buzz about them, and I picked the first one up … and then put it down again. It was all too grim and earnest and dystopic. And frankly it was …