I am in the Christian Louboutin store with my wife. She is behaving like I would if I was in a shop filled with working lightsabers.
— Simon Pegg on Twitter.
Dan O’Bannon, 1946–2009.
A fantastic series of photos: Legos on Hoth. The photographer gives a full description of how they took the photos, which involve submerging the figs in water, then sprinkling plaster of paris for the snow. Brilliant!
It’s hard to imagine even the most jaded and cynical having any issues with the last forty minutes, in which Cameron uncorks the action and shows all the young pretenders — the Bays and the Emmerichs and the Von Triers — how it’s done.
— From Chris Hewitt’s five-star review of Avatar for Empire.
Three favourites of mine — Shane Carruth’s Primer (above), Duncan Jones’s Moon and Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris remake — made Wired readers’ list of the decade’s top science fiction films. Most surprising omission: Children Of Men.
Update: Hard-boiled notes, as I did earlier, that Children of Men is the only film from this decade to make the Wired editors’ official list, at the expense of Primer in particular. The two lists aren’t comparable though, as the official list is for the last three decades (hence the inclusion of Gattaca from 1997).
Well, that wasn’t even the best PowerPoint presentation I’ve sat through lately.
— Charlie Jane Anders quoting a friend right after watching The Matrix Reloaded, one of the Top 10 Science Fiction Disappointments of the Past Decade.
Barbarella poster. Jane Fondova? (via Peter Nidzgorski)
After he finished making True Lies, Cameron called Kubrick, by then a recluse, and invited himself over. They spent a day, in the basement of Kubrick’s house in the English countryside, watching True Lies at Kubrick’s flatbed editing station. Cameron went over the shots … so that Kubrick could learn how the effects were done.
— One of many anecdotes from The New Yorker’s lengthy feature on James Cameron ahead of his sci-fi opus Avatar, opening in December. (via José Barbosa)
Artificial Paradise, Inc is an experimental film by Jean-Paul Frenay, Sandro Paoli et al anticipating a future where a major corporation has developed unique software, based on organic virtual reality, which holds all the lost memories of humankind.
Children of Men features in part two of Wired’s Favourite Sci-Fi Flicks of All Time. Not a bad list — quite happy to see The Hidden in there — but where the hell is Primer? (Spaceballs can GTFO.)
