The 2023 Oscar nominees were announced on January 24. Everything Everywhere All at Once leads the field with 11 nominations, including Best Picture.
Avatar: The Way of Water is also up for Best Picture, and is nominated in three other categories.
Everything Everywhere All at Once’s Michelle Yeoh is nominated for Best Lead Actress, and Ke Huy Quan for Best Supporting Actor.
The 95th Oscars will be held on Sunday, March 12, 2023
The complete list of nominees follows the jump.
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The 2022 Academy Awards winners were revealed on March 27.
Dune took six Oscars, including the Original Score by Hans Zimmer.
Encanto won the Oscar for Animated Feature Film.
The complete list of winners follows the jump.
The finalists in all 23 categories for the 2022 Academy Awards were revealed on February 8.
Denis Villeneuve’s Dune received the second-most nominations, with 10, including Best Picture and Writing (Adapted Screenplay). (The western Power of the Dog leads the field with 12.)
The 10 Best Picture nominees also include Don’t Look Up and Nightmare Alley.
In the Visual Effects category all the of finalists are genre films – Dune, Free Guy, No Time To Die, Shang-Chi and The Legend of the Ten Rings, and Spider-Man: No Way Home.
The 94th Oscars will be held on Sunday, March 27 at the Dolby® Theatre at Hollywood & Highland Center® in Hollywood.
The nominees of genre interest follow the jump. The complete list is here.
(1) INTRODUCING BEST EDITOR. During last night’s telecast: “Harrison Ford uses Oscar soapbox to get some Blade Runner complaints off his chest”.
“I’d like to share some notes, some editorial suggestions that were prepared after the screening of, uh, a movie I was in,” joked Ford. “Opening too choppy. Why is this voice-over track so terrible? He sounds drugged.”
“Were they all on drugs? Dekker at the piano is interminable. Flashback dialogue is confusing. Is he listening to a tape? Why do we need the third cut to the eggs? The synagogue music is awful on the street. We’ve got to use Vangelis. Up to Zora’s death, the movie is deadly dull. This movie gets worse every screening.”
(2) TRUST ME, IT DIDN’T WIN. EscYOUnited, in “Eurovision Movie’s ‘Húsavík’ does not win 2021 Oscar for Best Original Song”, admits its fans are disappointed, but notes how many other honors the movie has received – including a Hugo nomination.
…Sadly things did not go in Fire Saga’s favor, as H.E.R., Dernest Emile II, and Tiara Thomas won the award for their song “Fight For You” featured in Judas and the Black Messiah. Even without tonight’s Oscar, the Eurovision movie is still a two time award winning film. Prior to tonight the music editor team won the award for Outstanding Achievement in Sound Editing – Musical for Feature film and “Húsavík” won the award for Outstanding Original Song for Visual Media….
(3) REMEMBERED. The Oscars 2021 In Memoriam video included Ian Holm, Max Von Sydow, Christopher Plummer, Wilford Brimley, Ron Cobb, Hal Holbrook, Helen McCrory, Carl Reiner, Brian Dennehy, Diana Rigg, Sean Connery, Chadwick Boseman, and others with genre credits.
(4) BONUS MURDERBOT. Tom Becker pointed out Tor.com’s post of “Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory”, by Martha Wells.
Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory was originally given free to readers who pre-ordered Martha’s Murderbot novel, Network Effect. The story is set just after the 4th novella,Exit Strategy.
(5) MARTHA WELLS PROFILE. The Orange County Register’s Erik Pedersen tells “How ‘Murderbot Diaries’ author Martha Wells overcame a career in crisis to create the killer series”.
There was a time before Martha Wells created Murderbot, the character that narrates her award-winning science fiction series “The Murderbot Diaries,” when she thought her career might be dead.
After a successful start in the ‘90s, things had cooled down by the mid-2000s. When the final book in her “Fall of Ile-Rien” trilogy was published without fanfare, the soft-spoken Texan wondered if that was it for her.
“I was kind of at that point in my career where, you know, women writers my age were supposed to quietly fade away. It’s like, ‘Well, you had your shot, and that was it, and now go away.’ So I was not real optimistic about being able to continue to be published,” says the now 56-year-old novelist during a call from her College Station home, which she shares with her husband and three cats.
“I could not sell another book,” says Wells. “I knew my career was in a lot of trouble.”
But she refused to give up. Over the next few years, she got a new agent, started a new series, found a new publisher.
“That kind of got me back going again. I ended up also doing a Star Wars novel and did some work on some stories for Magic the Gathering,” she says, describing herself as plugging away but not soaring during that period. “I thought, ‘Well, this is probably about as high up as I can go,’ you know? It’s like, I’m not gonna win awards, and I’m not gonna be, you know, super popular or anything like that. But if I can keep going at this level, I’ll be okay.
“And then Murderbot just hit big,” she says….
(6) EUROCON. Eurocon 2021 in Fiuggi, Italy will be an in-person con the committee announced.
Just had green light for Eurocon in-person!
All attendees will have to be vaccinated or pre-tested for Covid 19.
If the con were to be held today, we could accommodate a little more than 200 guests. We are confident that it will be possible to increase this number in July. Hope to see you in Italy!!!
(7) B5 WAS THE PROTOTYPE. TechRadar boldly asks “Is Babylon 5 secretly the most influential TV show of the past 25 years?”
… If most TV viewers had no idea what a showrunner was back in the ’90s, even fewer could name one. Only superstar producers such as Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue creator Steven Bochco were big enough to occasionally eclipse their brands. However, the name of J Michael Straczynski was all over Babylon 5, as synonymous with the show as Minbari, Narn and Vorlons – just as much as The West Wing was Aaron Sorkin’s creation or The Sopranos David Chase’s, Babylon 5 was his. Arguably more so, in fact, seeing as he wrote 92 of the show’s 110 episodes, including the entirety of seasons 3 and 4.
Babylon 5 was an auteur’s vision on an epic scale. On the rare occasions guest writers were brought in, they were often genre legends such as Neil Gaiman, Harlan Ellison and regular Star Trek writer DC Fontana – this show was never scared to embrace the harder edges of science fiction. And just as would later become the norm with showrunners such as Russell T Davies on Doctor Who or Dave Filoni on The Clone Wars, Straczynski was the public face of his show, becoming one of the first writers to talk directly to the fanbase via the internet.
A veteran of ’80s cartoons such as She-Ra: Princess of Power, The Real Ghostbusters, and Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, Straczynski always had big plans for Babylon 5. He set out to tell a story taking in space battles, political intrigue, epic mythology and more, and wanted to do it over the course of five years.
That may not feel unusual now, when shows such as Breaking Bad, Lost and even comedies such as Schitt’s Creek make a big thing of spreading their stories over multiple seasons. But in the mid-’90s, the Babylon 5 approach was seriously radical. Most of the TV of the era was built on standalone episodes, with serialization kept to a minimum to ensure episodes could be watched in any order once they ended up in syndication. That Babylon 5 should so brazenly break the mould was a big shock to the system for ’90s viewers…
… It was ‘Westeros in space’ before George RR Martin had even published his first A Song of Ice and Fire novel, a show that rewarded viewers who tuned in for every installment. Babylon 5 was a show purpose-built for streaming and binge-viewing, trapped in the era of broadcast and cable….
(8) ESSENCE OF WONDER. “Strategy Strikes Back: Star Wars And Modern Military Conflict” will be the topic on Essence of Wonder with Gadi Evron on May 1 at 3 p.m. Eastern. Register for the Zoom webinar here.
Strategy Strikes Back authors Lt. Col. Matt Cavanaugh, Max Brooks, August Cole, and Steve Leonard join Gadi and Karen to discuss Star Wars and modern military conflict. In the book, they made understanding strategy fun by the use of a common global language – The love of Star Wars. We’ll be happy to share that love with them.
(9) BILLIONS AND BILLIONS. What Carl Sagan used to say about the number of stars this fellow says about his bank account. SpaceX’s Elon Musk will host Saturday Night Live on May 8 reports NPR.
Saturday Night Live doesn’t usually have business executives host its show, but as pointed out in a story by The Associated Press, Musk is far from a stuffy corporate type. He regularly jokes around on Twitter, where he has nearly 52 million followers and has gotten into legal trouble for making disparaging remarks about critics and hinting that he might lead a buyout of Tesla that resulted him getting fined $20 million by stock market regulators.
… Not counting news interview shows and press conferences, Musk has made guest appearances on the CBS shows Young Sheldon and The Big Bang Theory. His voice has also been heard on the animated shows South Park, The Simpsons and Rick and Morty. Plus he made a cameo in the film Iron Man 2.
(10) WOLFE SPEAKS. Colombian author Triunfo Arciniegas reposted Lawrence Person’s 1998 interview with Gene Wolfe yesterday: “DRAGON: Suns New, Long, and Short / An Interview with Gene Wolfe”.
LP: You have literally dozens of characters in The Book of the Long Sun, yet many times you have scenes with a number of characters all speaking in turn, without being identified, and yet their speech patterns are so clearly and cleverly differentiated that we’re never confused about who’s talking. Just how do you do that?
GW: (Laughs) I’m certainly glad that you were never confused! There are two things. Obviously, you have the speech patterns. Spider does not talk like Maytera Mint. And if you understand speech patterns, you should be able to put in any statement Spider makes, certain characteristic phrases or mistakes, or whatever, that will identify him as the speaker. The other thing is, that if you’re doing it right, the speech that, oh, let’s say, Maytera Marble makes under a certain circumstance, is not the speech that Blood would make under that circumstance. When Maytera Marble talks, she is saying something that only Maytera Marble would say. When Blood speaks, he is saying something that only Blood would say. And so the reader, if the reader is intelligent, knows who said that from what was said.
(11) HWA POETRY SHOWCASE. Horror Writers Association is taking submissions from members to its 2021 Poetry Showcase.
The HWA is proud to announce that it will call for submissions from its members for the Poetry Showcase Volume VIII beginning April 1. Stephanie Wytovich will be the editor for the volume. This year’s judges, along with Stephanie, will include Sara Tantlinger and Angela Yuriko Smith.
Only HWA members (of any status) may submit. The reason for this can be found in the word “Showcase.” The HWA is very proud of the tradition of poetry in the horror genre and of the HWA’s support for poetry. This volume is designed to showcase the talents of HWA members which is why it is now limited to members….
(12) WILLIAMS OBIT. Charlie Williams, a long-time Nashville fan, passed away April 25 reports Tom Feller. He had been residing in a nursing home/rehab facility after being hospitalized for pneumonia. He is survived by his wife Patsy and sister Jennifer. Funeral arrangements are pending.
[NOTE: He is a different Charlie Williams than the fanartist from Knoxville.]
(13) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.
(14) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
(15) I’M JUST DREW THAT WAY. Daniel Dern found the excuse to give this item its title in io9’s production news roundup “Marvel She-Hulk Filming Pictures Sees Tatiana Maslany on Set”:
Tom Swift joins Nancy Drew in the synopsis for “The Celestial Visitor” airing May 12.
TIAN RICHARDS (“BURDEN,” “DUMPLIN”) GUEST STARS AS TOM SWIFT – As things begin to go haywire at The Claw, a striking stranger appears looking for Nancy (Kennedy McMann), and announces himself as the billionaire Tom Swift (guest star Tian Richards).
(16) BIG CHAP. Yahoo! Entertainment’s Ethan Alter discusses a rare find: “’Alien’ Day: The terrifying, long-lost Xenomorph prototype never before seen in public” – photos at the link.
Here’s an #AlienDay reveal that’ll make you happier than a long-haul space tug crew member headed back to Earth: A piece of ultra-rare Alien memorabilia that was blasted out of the airlock four decades ago has been salvaged and is now up for sale. On April 29, Julien’s Auctions is unveiling a long-lost early prototype of H.R. Giger’s classic Xenomorph design as the centerpiece attraction in a genre-themed “Hollywood Legends” auction. Known as “Big Chap,” this version of the franchise’s signature creature features a translucent design that’s distinctly different than the opaque acid-spitting monster we know and love.
It should be noted that bidding on the Big Chap starts at $40,000. But you can get a closer look at the big guy for free courtesy of our exclusive virtual experience, which allows you to zoom in on Giger’s original vision for the Xenomorph, which evolved out of the Swiss artist’s pioneering “biomechanoid” designs. (Giger died in 2014.)
(17) WARP FACTORY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Here is a ten-minute physics briefing on some recent research of SFnal relevance from the wonderful PBS Space Time: there are “NEW Warp Drive Possibilities”.
That Einstein guy was a real bummer for our hopes of a star-hopping, science-fiction-y future. His whole “nothing travels faster than light” rule seems to ensure that exploration of even the local part of our galaxy will be an excruciating slow. But Einstein also gave us a glimmer of hope. He showed us that space and time can be warped – and so the warp drive was conceived. Just recently, a couple of papers contend that these are not pure science fiction.
This briefing builds on another PBS Space Time video from five years ago that introduces the notion of an FTL warp drive asking “Is The Alcubierre Warp Drive Possible?” Since then it has racked up 2.4 million views.
Inspired by Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek, physicist Miguel Alcubierre set out to transform one of the cornerstones of science fiction iconography, the Warp Drive, into reality. But is it even possible? Can we “warp” the fabric of reality so that we can break the speed of light?
(18) THREE’S A CHARM. Ingenuity buzzes Mars again. CNN has the story — “Ingenuity Mars helicopter achieves fastest, farthest flight yet”.
… Ingenuity exceeded speeds and distances beyond what it proved capable of doing during testing on Earth before launching to Mars.
The helicopter flew at 1:31 a.m. ET, or 12:33 p.m. local Mars time. Data and imagery began streaming into the control room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, at 10:16 a.m. ET Sunday. The Perseverance rover captured an image of the helicopter in flight and shared it shortly after.
(19) AND GNAW, THE GNEWS. Another Dern special, inspired by Gizmodo’s article “Beavers Take Down Canada Internet Service After Chewing Cables”.
…Tumbler Ridge, a tiny municipality in northeastern British Columbia with a population of about 2,000 people, lost service for roughly 36 hours in what Telus described as a “uniquely Canadian disruption!”
“Beavers have chewed through our fibre cable at multiple points, causing extensive damage,” said Telus spokesperson Liz Sauvé in an email to Gizmodo. “Our team located a nearby dam, and it appears the beavers dug underground alongside the creek to reach our cable, which is buried about three feet underground and protected by a 4.5-inch thick conduit. The beavers first chewed through the conduit before chewing through the cable in multiple locations.”
(20) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier Pitch Meeting” on Screen Rant, Ryan George explains that one character’s gratuitous dancing was put in the series “because people enjoyed memes of Thantos twerking.” This spoiler-filled video dropped today.
[Thanks to Tom Becker, Rich Lynch, John King Tarpinian, Daniel Dern, Mike Kennedy, JJ, Martin Morse Wooster, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Andrew Porter, Cat Eldridge, John Hertz, Gadi Evron, and Michael Toman for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jon Meltzer.]
The 2021 Oscar winners were announced by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in a televised ceremony on April 25.
Winners of genre interest are named below. The complete list of winners is here.
ANIMATED FEATURE FILM
MUSIC (ORIGINAL SCORE)
VISUAL EFFECTS
Note: The telecast is still going on as this is posted, however, there are no genre nominees in the remaining categories.
The 2021 Oscar nominees were announced by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on March 15.
Soul, Tenet, Mulan and Pinocchio, four sff films, received multiple nominations.
The awards will be presented in a televised ceremony on April 25.
Nominees of genre interest are listed below. The complete ballot is here.
ONWARD
Dan Scanlon and Kori Rae
OVER THE MOON
Glen Keane, Gennie Rim and Peilin Chou
A SHAUN THE SHEEP MOVIE: FARMAGEDDON
Richard Phelan, Will Becher and Paul Kewley
SOUL
Pete Docter and Dana Murray
WOLFWALKERS
Tomm Moore, Ross Stewart, Paul Young and Stéphan Roelants
MULAN
Bina Daigeler
PINOCCHIO
Massimo Cantini Parrini
PINOCCHIO
Mark Coulier, Dalia Colli and Francesco Pegoretti
SOUL
Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross and Jon Batiste
TENET
Production Design: Nathan Crowley; Set Decoration: Kathy Lucas
SOUL
Ren Klyce, Coya Elliott and David Parker
LOVE AND MONSTERS
Matt Sloan, Genevieve Camilleri, Matt Everitt and Brian Cox
THE MIDNIGHT SKY
Matthew Kasmir, Christopher Lawrence, Max Solomon and David Watkins
MULAN
Sean Faden, Anders Langlands, Seth Maury and Steve Ingram
THE ONE AND ONLY IVAN
Nick Davis, Greg Fisher, Ben Jones and Santiago Colomo Martinez
TENET
Andrew Jackson, David Lee, Andrew Lockley and Scott Fisher
Joker kept genre from being shut out at the 2020 Academy Awards.
The Best Actor Award went to Joaquin Phoenix. In the process he became the second person to win an Oscar for playing comic book villain The Joker. Heath Ledger was the first, who posthumously won for playing Joker in The Dark Knight.
The composer of Joker’s score, Hildur Gudnadóttir also won an Oscar. In accepting the award she said, “To the girls, to the women, to the mothers, to the daughters who hear the music bubbling within, please speak up. We need to hear your voices.”
The full list of winners follows the jump.
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Nominations for 92nd Academy Awards were announced January 13. Genre led the way, as Joker received the most nominations with 11, including nominations in the categories of Best Picture, Actor in a Leading Role, and Directing.
However, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker was the only other genre film to make a splash, nominated for Sound Editing, Visual Effects and Original Score.
The finalists for Best Animated Feature Film are How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, I Lost My Body, Klaus, Missing Link and Toy Story 4.
The full list of nominees follows the jump.
Continue readingThe Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences today announced shortlists in consideration for the 92nd Academy Awards® in nine categories: Documentary Feature, Documentary Short Subject, International Feature Film, Makeup and Hairstyling, Music (Original Score), Music (Original Song), Animated Short Film, Live Action Short Film and Visual Effects.
Genre films, which always do well in categories like Visual Effects, this time around are also the source of nearly half the shortlisted Original Songs.
Nominations for the 92nd Academy Awards will be announced on Monday, January 13, 2020.
The 92nd Oscars® will be held on Sunday, February 9, 2020, at the Dolby Theatre® at Hollywood & Highland Center® in Hollywood.
DOCUMENTARY FEATURE
Fifteen films will advance in the Documentary Feature category for the 92nd Academy Awards®. One hundred fifty-nine films were submitted in the category. Members of the Documentary Branch vote to determine the shortlist and the nominees.
The films, listed in alphabetical order by title, are:
DOCUMENTARY SHORT SUBJECT
Ten films will advance in the Documentary Short Subject category for the 92nd Academy Awards. Ninety-six films qualified in the category. Members of the Documentary Branch vote to determine the shortlist and the nominees.
The films, listed in alphabetical order by title, are:
INTERNATIONAL FEATURE FILM
Ten films will advance to the next round of voting in the International Feature Film category (formerly known as Foreign Language Film) for the 92nd Academy Awards. Ninety-one films were eligible in the category.
Academy members from all branches were invited to participate in the preliminary round. They must have viewed the submitted films theatrically and met a minimum viewing requirement to be eligible to vote in the category. Their seven choices, augmented by three additional selections voted by the Academy’s International Feature Film Award Executive Committee, constitute the shortlist.
In the nominations round, Academy members from all branches are invited to opt-in to participate and must view all 10 shortlisted films in order to cast a ballot.
The films, listed in alphabetical order by country, are:
MAKEUP AND HAIRSTYLING
Ten films will advance in the Makeup and Hairstyling category for the 92nd Academy Awards. All members of the Academy’s Makeup Artists and Hairstylists Branch will be invited to view seven-minute excerpts from each of the 10 shortlisted films on Saturday, January 4, 2020.
Members will vote to nominate five films for final Oscar® consideration.
The films, listed in alphabetical order by title, are:
MUSIC (ORIGINAL SCORE)
Fifteen scores will advance in the Original Score category for the 92nd Academy Awards. One hundred seventy scores were eligible in the category. Members of the Music Branch vote to determine the shortlist and the nominees.
The scores, listed in alphabetical order by film title, are:
MUSIC (ORIGINAL SONG)
Fifteen songs will advance in the Original Song category for the 92nd Academy Awards. Seventy-five songs were eligible in the category. Members of the Music Branch vote to determine the shortlist and the nominees.
The original songs, along with the motion picture in which each song is featured, are listed below in alphabetical order by film title and song title:
ANIMATED SHORT FILM
Ten films will advance in the Animated Short Film category for the 92nd Academy Awards. Ninety-two films qualified in the category. Members of the Short Films and Feature Animation Branch vote to determine the shortlist and the nominees.
The films, listed in alphabetical order by title, are:
LIVE ACTION SHORT FILM
Ten films will advance in the Live Action Short Film category for the 92nd Academy Awards. One hundred ninety-one films qualified in the category. Members of the Short Films and Feature Animation Branch vote to determine the shortlist and the nominees.
The films, listed in alphabetical order by title, are:
VISUAL EFFECTS
Ten films remain in the running in the Visual Effects category for the 92nd Academy Awards. The Visual Effects Branch Executive Committee determined the shortlist. All members of the Visual Effects Branch will be invited to view 10-minute excerpts from each of the shortlisted films online or attend satellite bake-off screenings in January 2020. Following the screenings, members will vote to nominate five films for final Oscar consideration.
The films, listed in alphabetical order by title, are:
(1) COLLECTIBLE PAPERBACKS SPOTLIGHTED. [Item by Andrew Porter.] This daily series of short videos concentrate on vintage and collectible paperbacks. It began barely more than a month ago, and so far, nearly 50 have been uploaded to Gary Lovisi’s YouTube channel.
Episodes have covered (starting with the most recent): Hardboiled Crime Fiction “Frank Kane” with Ron Lesser GGA covers; Dell 10¢ Paperbacks; Edgar Rice Burroughs “John Carter” inspired Pulp SF “Jon Kirk of Ares”; Sherlock Holmes Books; Sleaze “Kozy Books” Series; “The Thing” SF Horror in Paperback; ” UK Cherry Tree Books; Sexy Digest GGA Sleaze; Mysterious Bookshop NYC Tour; “Shuna” Jungle Girl Series; Best Rare US Dime Novels; Hardboiled Pulp Fiction Books; Rare British “World Fantasy Classics”; Fredric Brown early Bantam Paperbacks; “Boardman Bloodhound Books”; Checkerbooks US Paperback Book series; Gold Star “The New Tarzan Book Series”; British Gangster Digests; “Avon Science Fiction Reader” Series; Early Avon SF Fantasy & Horror.
(2) PETER RABBIT DEUX. The sequel arrives in theaters next Easter.
In PETER RABBIT™ 2: THE RUNAWAY, the lovable rogue is back. Bea, Thomas, and the rabbits have created a makeshift family, but despite his best efforts, Peter can’t seem to shake his mischievous reputation. Adventuring out of the garden, Peter finds himself in a world where his mischief is appreciated, but when his family risks everything to come looking for him, Peter must figure out what kind of bunny he wants to be.
(3) TOLKIEN GENESIS. Verlyn Flieger’s Scholar Guest of Honor Address for the 2019 Mythcon, “The Arch and the Keystone”, can be read online at Mythlore.
…Moving forward is more challenging. How can we contrive to move forward when, like Alice’s Red Queen, we have to run faster and faster just to stay in place? The growing body of writing both by and about Tolkien ensures that not only can we no longer read the unknown book I discovered in 1956, we can’t even all read the same book in 2019. We have too many opinions based on too much information from too many sources to come to a consensus. In spite of his fame, in spite of his position at the top of the heap, in spite of The Lord of the Rings’ established position as Waterstone’s Book of the Century, the world has and probably will continue to have trouble agreeing on who/what he is….
(4) BACK IN COSTUME. The Washington Post’s Tim Grieving interviews Mystery Science Theatre 3000 founder Joel Hodgson about why he returned to the series and why he is involved in Mystery Science Theatre 3000 Live, which is playing in Washington DC this weekend. “‘Mystery Science Theater 3000’ takes its audience down memory lane — with an eye on the future”.
…This weekend, Hodgson, 59, will sport the red jumpsuit for the first time since 1993 and bring the Great Cheesy Movie Circus Tour to the National Theatre, a live version of the MST3K format familiar to fans: making fun of bad movies — in this case, the British schlockfest “Circus of Horrors” (1960) and the 1986 kung fu flick “No Retreat, No Surrender” — interspersed with sketches.
(5) SF CONFERENCE IN CHINA. At Yunchtime, Mlex shares what he’s found out about “Chinese Science Fiction Conference 2019”, a November event sponsored by Science & Fantasy Growth Foundation.
…With the fourth annual conference scheduled to take place very soon in Beijing Nov 2019, I thought I would delve a little deeper into the conference and the organization behind it.
The 2019 conference will, for the first time, include participants from outside of China. These include Andrei Heim, Kevin Anderson, Leonard Mondrino, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Neil Clarke.
The Conference theme for 2019 is divided into tracks: “science fiction + culture”, “science fiction + technology”, “science fiction + science”, “sci-fi + film” “, science fiction + games”, “science fiction + youth.”
Organizationally, I get the impression that this has a professional team, strategizing about how to capitalize on the popularity of science fiction in China today, and that they are looking for not only ideas, but actual talent….
(6) BACK TO DUBLIN. I’m a bit overdue to link to España Sheriff’s conreport, “Worldcon 2019 in Dublin”.
…Besides the art show and print shop, Warehouse One was also housed several cool displays and craft items. There were half a dozen large scale lego constructions, including a massive Star Wars one by James Shields, a Community Drawing Wall, and a wall of art by Irish artist, including some Steve Dillon comic pages and Ian Clark’s wonderful Dublin 2019 artworks. There was programming in the Odean movie theatre screen rooms, and next door at the Gibson hotel, and some of it looked quite good. But ultimately when deciding what to see I factored in the walk there and back, and unless there were two items one after another there just didn’t seem worth it – by the end I attended no programming at Point Square excepting the art show and artist reception. In retrospect the 7-day LUAS transit pass would have been a good idea, but we didn’t see that option in time.
(7) BACK IN 1938. Let the LA Times’ Michael Rechtshaffen tell you about a cinematic discovery: “Review: Unreleased 1938 silent sci-fi film ‘As the Earth Turns’ boasts analog ingenuity”. The 45-minute film will be shown tonight in Glendale, CA.
Had Steven Spielberg been a 16-millimeter camera-toting teen in the 1930s, his home movies might have looked like “As the Earth Turns,” a black-and-white, silent 45-minute science-fiction film about a peace-crazed scientist named Pax who attempts to persuade the world to put down its weapons by inducing extreme climate change.
Made by Richard H. Lyford, a 20-year-old Seattle-based budding playwright and filmmaker who would go on to work as a Disney animator and Oscar-winning documentary director, the digitally restored 1938 original has been outfitted with a period-appropriate score by contemporary composer Ed Hartman.
(8) CROWDED FRAME. Variety headline: “Record 32 Animated Feature Films Submitted for Oscars”.
“The Addams Family,” “Frozen II,” “Toy Story 4,” “Abominable” and “The Secret Life of Pets 2” are among the record 32 movies submitted for the animated feature film category at the 2020 Oscars.
Last year’s Academy Awards race boasted 25 entries, while 2017 had 26 and 2016 had 27 (a then-record).
(9) ROAD MAP. This week’s Nature offers “Tips from a Pulitzer prizewinner” — author Cormac McCarthy. Though this advice is for writing research papers, it’s good, general writing advice…
• Use minimalism to achieve clarity. While you are writing, ask yourself: is it possible to preserve my original message without that punctuation mark, that word, that sentence, that paragraph or that section? Remove extra words or commas whenever you can.
• Decide on your paper’s theme and two or three points you want every reader to remember. This theme and these points form the single thread that runs through your piece. The words, sentences, paragraphs and sections are the needlework that holds it together. If something isn’t needed to help the reader to understand the main theme, omit it.
• Limit each paragraph to a single message. A single sentence can be a paragraph. Each paragraph should explore that message by first asking a question and then progressing to an idea, and sometimes to an answer. It’s also perfectly fine to raise questions in a paragraph and leave them unanswered.
• Keep sentences short, simply constructed and direct. Concise, clear sentences work well for scientific explanations. Minimize clauses, compound sentences and transition words — such as ‘however’ or ‘thus’ — so that the reader can focus on the main message.
(10) WHERE’D SHE GO? NPR’s Scott Tobias sighs, “‘Maleficent: Mistress Of Evil’ Clips Angelina Jolie’s Wings”.
As Disney continues to plunder its animated IP for live-action remakes, where these films fall on the spectrum of pointlessness has to do with how closely they adhere to the source. The remakes that simply copy the material from one format to the other, like Beauty and The Beast or Aladdin, have been consistently enervating whereas the ones that attempt a full gut rehab, like Dumbo or the excellent Pete’s Dragon, at least have the benefit of an independent artistic vision. In this particular creative desert, every droplet of water counts.
The 2014 fantasy Maleficent wasn’t a remake of Sleeping Beauty so much as an alternative telling, an act of playful revisionism that relates to the original as the novel and Broadway musical Wicked relates to The Wizard of Oz. The main twist — that Maleficent isn’t evil, but a wronged fairy taking revenge on a duplicitous king — riffs cleverly on the idea that everyone has their reasons. The film also nests other bits of commentary inside, like questioning whether Prince Phillip and Princess Aurora could have fallen in love so quickly or snickering at the notion that Aurora could dodge Maleficent’s curse by hiding in the woods for 16 years. But it works best as a vehicle for Angelina Jolie, whose enhanced cheekbones and villainous cackle suggested the making of a camp icon.
…Mistress of Evil loses the emotional stakes of the first film, which were rooted in a terrible injustice and the unlikely bond between Maleficent and the cursed princess she comes to adore. There’s a good angle here about the destructive potential of myth, tied to the stories that unfairly poison Maleficent in the human world, but Jolie goes missing for long stretches of the film as Ingrith does her scheming. And while it’s a pleasure to see Pfeiffer lay into a regal villain, it’s odd to see a Maleficent film with so little Maleficent, and all the giggly little sprites in the world can’t make up for it. Jolie was born to play the role, and the best strategy would have been to let her.
(11) TODAY IN HISTORY.
October 18, 2016 — The new edition of The Star Trek Encyclopedia by Michael Okuda and Denise Okuda was released. They were production staff on Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager. It was illustrated by Doug Drexler. Now a two volume. set with a slip case, it has five hundred new entries.
(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
(13) COMICS SECTION.
(14) CELEBRATING LONGEVITY. “Wonder Woman gets monumental, all-star 750th issue” – SYFY Wire has the story.
Wonder Woman is getting a special giant-sized comic book to commemorate an upcoming landmark issue.
Today, DC Comics announced it will assemble an all-star roster of writers and artists who will pack the 96-page super-sized one-shot with stories and artwork that chronicle the Amazonian princess from the 1940s all the way through to today. Contributing to the issue are long-time Wonder Woman scribes Greg Rucka and Gail Simone, along with the book’s current writer, Steve Orlando.
(15) THE LATEST COUNT. John Kelly in the Washington Post has a profile of Dick Dyszel, who played “Count Gore De Vol” in Washington’s creature feature on Channel 20 from 1979-87. The count is still busy, with his website, (countgore.com), and streaming short films on Vimeo. “The horror! Homegrown Count Gore De Vol is back for some Halloween high jinks” (2018 article.)
…I asked Dick which movies scared him as a kid growing up in Chicago. Not many, he said. “What I really liked were the big bug movies: ‘Them.’ ‘Tarantula.’ Things like that.”
In fact, Dick said he didn’t actually see the movie that scared him the most.
“I’m being very honest: There was a trailer I saw in the movie theater,” he said. “There was a closet door opening and some thing came out of the closet. It scared the living daylights out of me. I left the theater. Let’s face it, it’s a cheap horror thing: the unknown coming out of a door.”
Cheap but effective, just like Count Gore.
(16) SOUND RETREAT. SYFY Wire hopes this house may do as much for visiting writers as it did for the original owner: “Stephen King’s Bangor home to serve as archive, writers’ retreat”.
Great news, Stephen King fans … and aspiring writers! The Victorian mansion in Bangor, Maine, that King and his wife Tabitha have called home for decades has been reorged as a nonprofit and will open its ornate bat-decorated gate to scholars and authors.
The Bangor City Council on Wednesday approved the Kings’ request to rezone their home, per a story from Rolling Stone. Going forward, the red mansion at 47 West Broadway where the Kings raised their three children will serve as an archive of King’s work, while a guest house next door would serve as a writers’ retreat. The archive was previously at the Kings’ alma mater, the University of Maine….
(17) THE TIFF SPREADS. Another country objects to a map shown in this animated movie: “Abominable: A DreamWorks movie, a map, and a huge regional row”, followup on a Pixel from a few days ago.
Malaysian censors have ordered a scene to be cut from DreamWorks film Abominable before it is screened there – because of a brief glimpse of a map.
It is the third South East Asian country to take offence at the scene in the film, a Chinese co-production.
The contentious map shows the “nine-dash line”, which China uses to show its claims in the South China Sea.
Parts of the sea and various island groups are claimed by five other Asian countries, as well as China.
Vietnam has already pulled the movie – while Philippine politicians are calling for a DreamWorks boycott.
It might be merely a backdrop in an animated movie – but it shines a spotlight on one of the world’s hottest territorial disputes.
(18) SOME HOBBY. Meet “The man who owns 1,000 meteorites”.
On Christmas Eve 1965 a 4.5 billion-year-old meteorite exploded over the Leicestershire village of Barwell.
It was one of the largest and best recorded meteorite falls in British history: witnesses reported a flash in the sky accompanied by a loud bang, followed by a thud as one of the first pieces of space rock landed on the ground. As news of what happened emerged, the media descended on the village and a frantic search for the hundreds of scattered fragments began.
For nine-year-old Graham Ensor, who lived nearby, it was an event that would change his life, sparking an enduring passion for space rocks. The former lecturer now owns about 1,000 specimens, which experts believe could be the largest private collection in the UK.
(19) LOAFING AROUND. Kitchen Overlord celebrates this literary occasion with a ghastly looking baked good: “Dune Week: Spice Stuffed Sandworm Bread”. At the end of the post there are links to even more Dune-inspired recipes.
Since you honor my sietch with your visit, I will share the secrets of creating a proud, impressive, spice-scented effigy of the Great Maker of Arrakis….
(20) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In “The Truth About Test Screenings” on Vimeo, SHAZAM! director David F. Sandberg gives an insider’s view of when test screenings matter and when they don’t.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Mlex, Chip Hitchcock, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Michael Toman, John Hertz, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jack Lint.]