Pixel Scroll 5/29/16 Hell Is Other Pixels

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(1) HE SIGNS AND WONDERS. From the Baltimore Sun: “’Game of Thrones’ author draws faithful crowd at Balticon 50”

The wildly popular HBO series has gone beyond the plot lines of Martin’s books, though more are in the works. In an afternoon interview with Mark Van Name, Martin said he never anticipated that the unfinished book series would end up as enormous as it has become. When he sold it in 1994 with 100 pages written, he pitched it as a trilogy. That quickly became a “four-book trilogy,” he said, then a five-, six- and seven-book series. The sixth and seventh books have not yet been published.

“It hit 800 pages and I wasn’t close to the end,” he said of writing the first book, “Game of Thrones,” the show’s namesake, which was part of a larger series, “A Song of Ice and Fire.” Then “Thrones” became “1,400 pages and there was no end in sight. At that point I kind of stopped and said, ‘This isn’t going to work.'”

Though Martin didn’t speak in detail about the books, he said the Vietnam War was part of what shaped his writing and the complexity of his characters.

“We have the capacity for great heroism. We have the capacity for great selfishness and cowardice, many horrible acts. And sometimes at the same time. The same people can do something heroic on Tuesday and something horrible on Wednesday,” he said. “Heroes commit atrocities. People who commit atrocities can be capable later of heroism. It’s the human condition, and I wanted to reflect all that in my work.”

Martin Morse Wooster emailed the story along with his own observations:

…Nearly all of the piece is about listening to George R.R. Martin or standing in line to get your Martin books and other stuff signed.  This morning I was standing in line for the elevator and heard that they were admitting the 1,070th person to the autograph line.

(2) TIPTREE AUCTION AT WISCON. I’d like to hear the rest of this story…

And I’d like to hear this, too.

(3) CAPTAIN AMERICA SPOILER WARNING. (In case there’s anybody who doesn’t already know it…)

Ed Green snarked in a Facebook comment:

I rather like the bonus factoid that they released this in time to help celebrate Memorial Day. Because nothing says ‘Thank you for your sacrifice!” like turning a WWII legend into a Nazi.

You rotten bastards.

Jessica Pluumer also criticized the choice in her post “On Steve Rogers #1, Antisemitism, and Publicity Stunts” at Panels.

You probably already knew that, but I’d invite you to think about it for a minute. In early 1941, a significant percentage of the American population was still staunchly isolationist. Yet more Americans were pro-Axis. The Nazi Party was not the unquestionably evil cartoon villains we’re familiar with today; coming out in strong opposition to them was not a given. It was a risky choice.

And Simon and Kirby—born Hymie Simon and Jacob Kurtzberg—were not making it lightly. Like most of the biggest names in the Golden Age of comics, they were Jewish. They had family and friends back in Europe who were losing their homes, their freedom, and eventually their lives to the Holocaust. The creation of Captain America was deeply personal and deeply political.

Ever since, Steve Rogers has stood in opposition to tyranny, prejudice, and genocide. While other characters have their backstories rolled up behind them as the decades march on to keep them young and relevant, Cap is never removed from his original context. He can’t be. To do so would empty the character of all meaning.

But yesterday, that’s what Marvel did.

Look, this isn’t my first rodeo. I know how comics work. He’s a Skrull, or a triple agent, or these are implanted memories, or it’s a time travel switcheroo, or, or, or. There’s a thousand ways Marvel can undo this reveal—and they will, of course, because they’re not about to just throw away a multi-billion dollar piece of IP. Steve Rogers is not going to stay Hydra any more than Superman stayed dead.

But Nazis (yes, yes, I know 616 Hydra doesn’t have the same 1:1 relationship with Nazism that MCU Hydra does) are not a wacky pretend bad guy, something I think geek media and pop culture too often forgets.

(4) BOUND FOR BLETCHLEY. The Guardian reports a discovery made by museum workers — “Device used in Nazi code machine found for sale on eBay”.

It was just such a coincidence that led to the museum getting its hands on their Lorenz teleprinter, after they spotted it for sale. “I think it was described as a telegram machine, but we recognised it as a Lorenz teleprinter,” Whetter said.

They rang the seller and drove to down to Essex to take a look for themselves. “The person took us down the garden to the shed and in the shed was the Lorenz teleprinter in its original carrying case,” Whetter said. They snapped it up for £9.50.

But the true value of their purchase was yet to become clear. It was only after cleaning the machine at Bletchley Park, where the museum is based, that they found it was a genuine military issue teleprinter, complete with swastika detailing and even a special key for the runic Waffen-SS insignia.

Is it a suspicious coincidence that this story came out the same month as Steve Rogers #1? You decide!

(5) WISCON CON SUITE. Tempting as it is, if I left now I still wouldn’t get there in time.

(6) FAREWELL FROM THE MASSES. The G has something to say “About that Castle finale…” at Nerds of a Feather.

I finally got around to watching the series finale of Castle last night, and feel the need to vent a bit.

First, let me admit that I’ve watched a lot of Castle over the years. But I didn’t watch it out of any conviction that it’s good. It wasn’t. Rather, I watched it because it was simple fun. At its best, the show took a familiar formula (the police procedural), approached it with an appealing balance of drama and comedy and then let its charismatic leads (Nathan Fillion and Stana Kati?) carry the show. All in all, that made for an enjoyable, if somewhat forgettable, hour long diversion.

Sure there was the ongoing story about an increasingly convoluted and opaque conspiracy, as well as the love story between Castle and Beckett, but at its heart Castle was an episodic show. And now that it’s gone, I realize how few watchable episodic dramas are left on TV.

Which brings me to the finale…

As soon as it was over, my wife turned to me and said “Poochie died on the way back to his home planet.”

With a hook like that, how could I not read the rest, which is an explanation of the reference?

(7) DESPITE POPULAR DEMAND. There will be a movie based on the Tetris video game, in which massive blocks descend from the sky. Don’t be underneath when they fly by… oh, wait, that’s a different punchline.

Larry Kasanoff, producer of films based on the Mortal Kombat video games and Bruno Wu, CEO of China’s Sun Seven Stars Media Group announced that their new company Threshold Global Studios is set to produce the film Tetris The Movie.

 

(8) RECOMMENDATION: REREAD THE BOOK. Gary Westfahl’s analysis, “Alice the Great and Powerful: A Review of Alice Through the Looking Glass”, is posted at Locus Online.

The visual effects are regularly creative and engaging, and there are lines here and there that might make you laugh, but overall, anyone looking for 153 minutes of entertainment on this Memorial Day weekend would be best advised to read, or reread, Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871) instead of watching this film, which borrows its title but none of its unique wit and charm. The work that it most recalls, as my title suggests, is the film Oz the Great and Powerful (2013 – review here), another thumb-fisted effort to “improve” upon a classic children’s book by adding new characters, new back stories for old characters, and an action-packed, melodramatic story line….

(9) MEANWHILE, BACK AT WISCON. Yes, indeed.

(10) CARBONARA COPY. Kurt Busiek commented yesterday about cooking a meal for his future wife using a recipe in a comic book. I thought it might be a pleasant surprise if I could find that American Flagg spaghetti fritatta recipe online. It was there, but I found more than I bargained for in Cleo Coyle’s post at Mystery Lovers Kitchen.

When I first met my husband, he whipped up a fantastic spaghetti carbonara that has since become part of our menu. Because he’s part Italian, and because both his mother and father taught him how to cook, I assumed his recipe came from one of them. Not so. Marc informed me that he found the recipe in a 1980’s comic book.

The comic was Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg!, launched in 1983. Fans of this series include Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Chabon, who hailed Flagg as a precursor to the cyberpunk genre of science fiction.

Flagg is not for everyone. It presents a hard-boiled look at life in 2031—after nuclear war and an economic collapse leave things a tad chaotic in the USA. How bad do things get in Chaykin’s 2031? One example: The broken down piano player who inhabits the local lounge is Princess Diana’s oldest son.

As for today’s recipe, spaghetti carbonara happens to be the favorite dish of Rubin Flagg, the comic book’s hero. The recipe was published in the same issue that Rubin cooked it up. (Recipes included in fiction! Is that a good idea or what?)

Coyle says she’s married to somebody named Marc, so presumably this isn’t Kurt’s wife telling her side of the same anecdote. (I’m also sure Kurt knows his fritatta from his carbonara.) Just the same, it’s starting to sound like that American Flagg recipe is quite the love potion!

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY

  • Born May 29, 1906 – T. H. White author of The Once and Future King.

(12) SUITS. Mr. Sci-Fi, Marc Scott Zicree, takes you along —

While in London pitching series, Mr. Sci-Fi got a tour of the Propstore’s exclusive amazing collection of spacesuits from such films as Alien, Armageddon and Star Trek – The Motion Picture — plus he shows rare concept designs of Space Command’s spacesuit by Iain McCaig (designer of Darth Maul, Queen Amidala and The Force Awaken’s Rey). Not to be missed!

 

(13) WOLFE TALK. Spacefaring Kitten interviewed Marc Aramini who wrote Between Light and Shadow: An Exploration of the Fiction of Gene Wolfe, 1951 to 1986 (Castalia House).

Is there a “right” answer to questions like “what has really happened between the protagonist and Suzanne Delage in ‘Suzanne Delage’” or “which one is the changeling in ‘The Changeling’”?

I’m asking this because I kind of enjoyed the ambiguous atmosphere and the weight of the unexplained in those stories, and while I was reading them I didn’t necessarily feel that there should be one comprehensive solution to be unearthed.

Yes, but you don’t have to get there to enjoy the story. I honestly believe there is a “right” answer from the author’s point of view, but that there are other authors who do not have this kind of rigid, disciplined mindset and write from a place of the subconscious or unconscious. I really do not feel that this is the case with Wolfe, and I have written about 700,000 words so far between the two volumes which argue that his mysteries have universal solutions. I think one of his tasks is using the tool-box of post-modern subjectivity and uncertainty to imply that there is still a universal structure behind the act of creation.

(14) HARDY. David Hardy has created a video tour of his famous astronomical art —

Voyage to the Outer Planets

To follow up my 50s compilation, ‘How Britain Conquered Space in the Fifties’, here is a video made from art of the outer Solar System which I produced 50 years later , for comparison. I like to think I have progressed a little! This is partly a short excerpt from my DVD ‘Space Music’ (available at www.astroart.org), which in turn was edited from German TV’s ‘Space Night’, shown in the early morning from 1994 (google it). They showed two programmes of my art, but for the DVD I added digital images from my 2004 book with Sir Patrick Moore, ‘Futures: 50 Years in Space’.

 

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Spacefaring Kitten, and Martin Morse Wooster for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Hal Winslow’s Old Buddy.]

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129 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 5/29/16 Hell Is Other Pixels”

  1. @jim @vicki. I am trying to remember the last big bank heist movie, and I am coming up only with INSIDE MAN in 2006…and that movie is not even a straight heist–it deconstructs bank heists because of the true goal of the robbers. So, yeah.

  2. Bank robberies seemed to be taking place in NOW YOU SEE ME, 2013. One of my daughter’s favorite movies, and a favorite of quite a few of her friends. I don’t know if she does it when I’m not there, but Sarah always prefaces conversations about the movie with “My dad hates this.” There are times when I can’t keep my opinion a secret from her, and this was one of them. Something about every facet of the picture was like fingernails being raked down a smugboard. Fingernails made out of smug.

  3. Yes, Now You See Me. Was just thinking of that one. Starts promising, but then goes from bad to awful.

  4. (13) WOLFE TALK: I never really get into book discussions about character motivations and such because if I give it much thought at all, it punctures my suspension of disbelief–the answer is always “because the author chose to write it that way.”

    I’ve only read the excerpt of the interview in the scroll, but I get the feeling that Marc Aramini (with his 700,000 words) really, really, really likes to hear Marc Aramini talk.

  5. @Paul @Robert Whitaker Sirignano: Yes, one of the British papers had a big piece a few months ago about the decline of the real-world caper, pegged to the arrest of some aging crooks who were trying for the proverbial one last score. The big heist has almost disappeared because of better security on the one side and, yes, the comparatively greater rewards of cybercrime on the other.

  6. The bank robberies of the past few years–as reported in NYC–have been people who repeat some strange fetish–wearing hats, bad wigs or some other off centered clothing. Or have just gotten out of jail and are looking for shelter.

  7. I’d like to see a superhero taking on the robbing bankers, myself. Lets see Spidey roll up and web the subprime mortgage desk at [thinly disguised analog] to a streetlamp…

  8. @hampus @kip I seem to have missed Now You See Me entirely…and so was confused when I recently saw a preview for its sequel coming out next week…

  11. Steve Davidson/”there was no such thing as a ‘franchise’ with recurring characters and running themes” in film: You need to watch more TCM, which shows movies from The Falcon series pretty regularly, from the same period as The Saint. The Falcon series even had the hero’s brother step in when the original actor left–they were played by brothers George Sanders and Tom Conway.

    Then there were the Western series such as theThree Mesquiteers (as distinct from star-centric movies with Roy Rogers or Gene Autry), plus ensemble comedy series such as the Our Gang and Bowery Boys movies.

    Movie series, soap operas, comics, character pulps, and TV series all face the same kinds of problems of continuity, consistency, cast changes, property ownership and control, imitators, genre drift/crossover, and so on–and the longer the series, the more likely one or more of these will have to be managed.

  12. @ Darren Garrison

    You might appreciate this part of the interview.

    Are you connected to academia or are you strictly a non-academic scholar?

    … currently this is only my hobby. … I think in a perfect world I would have been a college teacher for most of my adult life… where else could I listen to myself talk for hours at a time in front of a captive audience? On a more serious note, sharing my passion and appreciation for intricate and beautiful art has always been one of the motivating features of my character. In my arrogance I assume that I can share some of that love with others.

    Going out on a limb, Marc Aramini agrees with you.

    (And now he retreats once again, lest a giant wooden bunny is hurtled o’er the battlements, or human voices wake us, and we drown).

  13. Hampus Eckerman: Yes, Now You See Me. Was just thinking of that one. Starts promising, but then goes from bad to awful.

    Ugh. That movie really pissed me off.

    Never mind that Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Mark Ruffalo, and Isla Fisher are all really annoying actors to begin with. (Seriously, all they’d had to do was add Nicholas Cage and David Caruso to the cast, and they’d have had a Straight Flush Of Annoyance.)

    But even worse, no, in the end, they try to show that all the tricks were explainable through natural means. But they weren’t.

    I mean, seriously: either your story involves magic, or it doesn’t. But if it doesn’t, then all your tricks have to truly have mundane explanations.

    Gah. I can’t believe they made a sequel to that piece of crap.

  14. lest a giant wooden bunny is hurtled o’er the battlements, or human voices wake us, and we drown

    Even money, really.

  15. Nancy Sauer: @JJ, @Rev. Bob: “But it was too late–she’d already gotten a Kentucky Wonder.”

    Truly, the mind is a strange and wondrous thing. I haven’t heard — or thought of — that in decades. And when I was writing my response about worthless “area resident” sound bites, for some reason that immediately popped into mind. I mean, WTF. Where in the world did my mind dig that up from???

    One of my huge pet peeves about growing up in the Midwest was that, every time there was a tornado, or bank robbery, or some other momentous catastrophe, the national TV news shows, with a metropolitan city of 1.5 million people right there from which to draw interviewees (many of which were highly educated and intelligent), would dig up the most clueless frickin’ rube from a hayfield for a quote — just so that the rest of the country could indeed see that, in flyover country, we were all a bunch of ignorant hicks. Gah.

    GAH.

  16. @JJ

    Reductio ad Rube-um?

    (Really I understand. We moved around a lot when I was a kid, and I’ve moved around a lot as an adult. I think of Vegas as home though. You’d like to think it was apocryphal but I’ve actually had people ask, in all seriousness, if they flew all the casino workers in from California every week. Real city, folks! Off The Strip we even have industry and agriculture plus a honking big Air Force base. It’s not all an adult Disneyland. *Mutters darkly to self about tourists* 😛 )

  17. COMIC BOOK RECIPES: These are quite common in manga where there are enough culinary series for it to be its own genre. Even Shonen Jump, the magazine best known for manly action series like Dragonball, Naruto and One Piece, has two cooking manga, though one of them’s about a guy who hunts fantastic beasts and turns them into gourmet meals, so there aren’t any useful recipes in that one. The other is about a culinary high school full of the children of world-class chefs, who solve all their conflicts by challenging each other to Iron Chef-style cook-offs.

  18. @Jim:

    The one flaw in your list is that Superior Spider-Man was brilliant.

    Eh. It came to mind because the marketing for Captain Hydra is very similar. And the backlash is similar. I certainly had no incentive to seek out Spider-Ock.

    @snowcrash: “Area resident” is also a play on the cliche headline “Local Man {Does Something}”, possibly the most famous example being Florida Man.

  19. 13: I think it’s fairly clear that in some cases Wolfe has a right answer in mind and expects us to be able to work it out, because in interviews he sometimes expresses surprise that people haven’t got it.

    Also, even when there is in fact no right answer, reasoning as if there were a right answer can be a useful way of exploring the possibilities – if you just stop at ‘the author chose to write it that way’, you aren’t actually getting the full force of the ambiguity.

  20. As a comics-only fan with 1) no interest in the movies 2) an IMO justified resentment of “let’s make the comics more like the movies and in doing so flatten out characterizations and other things built up over years of convoluted comics continuity”, I’m oddly cheered by this Cap storyline–not for itself, but because it’s something that the movies would obviously never do and it thus speaks to the independence of the comics line.

    Not to mention that watching people try to explain Marvel canon to Gerry Conway has been a particular kind of ridiculous.

  21. Thanks to Spacefaring Kitten for that interview! I appreciate the chance to learn a little more about the entry and the writing style of its author.

    I get the impression that Aramini’s book is basically aimed at current scholars of Gene Wolfe’s work–a group that doesn’t include me.

    Now I’m willing to take it on faith that Wolfe is worth reading and literary scholarship about him would repay my time if I spent a couple of years getting up to speed. But my world is fairly full of things that are worth doing, many of which I have already invested time and effort into, and I am fairly busy at this point. So I don’t see myself joining that group.

    No problem if other people are into that, of course.

  23. Okay one more comment for Cat.

    It was supposed to be a reference: read a story, read the entry. The entries at the opening are for long complicated works. It really isn’t for scholars. Anyone who has read New Sun should be able to read the essay on it. Anyone who has read the doctor of death island should find something useful in the discussion. By the nature of what I was doing with Fifth head of Cerberus, that essay is esoteric because the book is esoteric. This is a general but in depth reference like the encyclopedia of sf is, not to be read straight through, and a guide for each story, save for the thesis based essays on the longer works. But if you have never read a Wolfe story, then obviously it is of limited utility.

  24. So for example, some are confused about the fate of a character at the end of The Doctor of Death Island. I try to clarify that and provide an argument one way or the other for the character’s fate while also highlighting all of the Dickens references that help shape the theme of the story … so you don’t have to go look up all that stuff. If someone has a vastly different opinion, I confront it and suggest why that opinion might or might not be worth pursuing. I am always trying to answer the question, what the heck happened here? Thematically a story like The Doctor of Death Island is not at all inconclusive, yet many readers see it as ambiguous and feel the ending is abrupt. I never, ever intended this for scholars but for general readers who don’t have time to do all the research I did.

  25. The big money is in hacking the banks.

    Back in the heyday of comp.risks, I remember one heist where the telling insight the crooks had was that while every major transfer of money out of the bank had to be verified from the far end, the bank official at the originating bank who verified that outbound transfers were authorized was also the same (comparatively poorly paid) employer who initiated the transfer in the first place.

    IIRC, the telling insights the crooks didn’t have including “don’t rush out and buy an expensive sailing boat worth several times your annual salary.”

  26. @Little Valkyrie:

    Not to mention that watching people try to explain Marvel canon to Gerry Conway has been a particular kind of ridiculous.

    Wait, this happened?

  27. @Jim Henley:

    Yes, if you go look on Conway’s twitter feed @gerryconway, you can see people explaining how Hydra is obviously this and that and the other, clearly, to him. At least it’s not as bad as the person who answered Marvel editor Jordan White on tumblr with some gifs from the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. tv show, but still, pretty funny.

  28. @Snowcrash:

    John Doe / Joe Bloggs /

    Joe Bloggs is new to me, but John Doe, Jane Doe, Jane Roe, Joe Blow, Joe Schmoe, John Q. Public, Joe Six-Pack, Sally Housecoat, Joe Meatball, Eddie Punch-Clock and Johnny Lunch-Pail are old friends.

    Also I saw a Doctor Who bank robbery/caper episode like, last year. And they did that kind of thing all the time on Leverage, a TV show built around con games and breaking in and breaking out and stealing bad rich people’s money.

  31. Joe Bloggs is new to me

    He’s the British relative of the other guys you listed.

  32. Joe Bloggs is new to me

    He’s the British relative of the other guys you listed.

    Is he often found on the Clapham omnibus?

  33. There was a heist movie when I was a kid that I can’t for my life remember the name of. The only thing I remember that part of the heist was having a monkey climb on a wire to replace one vase (I think?) with another. Would like to see it again, no clue on how to find it.

  34. @bigelowT To Catch a Thief is my favorite Hitchcock movie. I recognize that other films of his are more technically brilliant. Still, I adore it.

  35. IIRC, the telling insights the crooks didn’t have including “don’t rush out and buy an expensive sailing boat worth several times your annual salary.”

    My father (a retired bank manager) told me once about the person who couldn’t have been more than twenty or so robbing a bank once, getting the teller to put the bills into a brown paper bag for him.

    They caught the person involved in a bar less than half a block away, where he had just bought a round of drinks for everybody in the bar and paid for it in small bills out of the same brown paper bag.

    The sorts of people who still try the classic walk in and steal money from the bank counter heist tend not to be on the high end of the intelligence or creativity scales. If they were, they’d have already realized why it’s a bad idea.

  36. @JJ:

    Now I have “The Streak” interspersed with that Patrick Stewart scene from Extras (“I’ve seen everything…I’ve seen it all.”) stuck in my head. Thanks for that?

  37. Joe Bloggs is new to me
    He’s the British relative of the other guys you listed.

    Is he often found on the Clapham omnibus?

    “The man on the Clapham omnibus” has largely given way to “the man in the street” in recent years. Probably something to do with the way bus fares have gone up.

  38. Yes, if you go look on Conway’s twitter feed @gerryconway, you can see people explaining how Hydra is obviously this and that and the other, clearly, to him.

    An Gerry, he just set there, goin no, that not true…

  39. Possibly some bank robbers are now ATM robbers instead. Hacking-style robberies are probably easier to keep out of the news as well.

    I got The Hippogriff Cookbook, Lost Recipes and Forgotten Delicacies from the Manchester Folio of 1528, as an iPad app. The recipes have cute introductions, sketches, and directions such as “Fry hippogriff a second time for half a minute on each side. It should turn to a dark brown crisp. If it was already crisp after the first fry, then turn back time and ignore this step.” Substitution suggestions are offered for people who can’t acquire hippogriff milk, eggs, meat, etc.

  41. The preferred method of bank robbing is blowing up ATMs with propane/another explosive gas.

    Or just stealing the ATM with a backhoe.

  42. I have a theory about caper/heist movies: they are fantasies of project management. All the lead characters in them are project managers, all of them have access to the resources they need, and are able to rejig the project plan on a dime when the situation changes under their feet,

    Which leads me to a project I have: a book of project plans for classic caper movies done in the style of the movie.

    So Soderbergh’s Ocean’s films are Microsoft Project charts, with 11 wrapped by 12 and leading into 13. The original Italian job is a pencil sketch on the back of an envelope. Now You See Me gets the Trello treatment, while The Sting is careful draughtmanship on blueprint paper.

    Now if only I could find someone to fund me to put them together…

  44. @peter j @cally As a reasonably regular traveller on both the 37 and 337 I resemble that remark!

  45. @snowcrash Mark Van Name worked at DEC with friends of mine. They were most amused to see he’d finally made it to print. The Jon and Lobo books are recommended; an interesting critique of milSF disguised as light-hearted capers that turn into revenge on the procurers and users of child soldiers.

  46. We don’t do omnibuses of the vehicular sort nowadays; we do, however, leave the 76 bus shelter outside the Barbican with a big sign saying Not in Use for at least a decade.

    Someday that bus may proudly serve us once more, but it is not this day!

  47. You’re only supposed to scroll the bloody pixels off!

    @JJ

    I quite liked Harrelson and Eisenberg in Zombieland, just watched that the other night.

    @Peter J

    Mondeo Man was popular for a while too, until people stopped buying large saloons.

  49. Steven Soderbergh’s The Hobbit aka Gandalf’s 13
    With…
    George Clooney as Gandalf
    Brad Pitt as Thorin
    Julia Roberts as Bilbo Baggins
    And the voice of Eliot Gould as Smaug

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