Continuations

I love going to the movies and I love science fiction. This summer is bringing a bumper crop of scifi movies (broadly defined). One of the fun aspects for me of going to see a movie is that I will get to see trailers for upcoming movies. Some people seem to dread this part as they just want to get on with the movie they have come to see, but I love trailers. Except when they wind up being spoilers and that’s increasingly a problem. Too many trailers seem to feel the need to reveal pivotal sce...

UPDATE: As the comment by vruz correctly points out, I am wrong in my use of the term uncanny valley, exactly because the creatures depicted in Avatar are not human. Still believe that we are seeing the beginning of something new and important! On Sunday, I finally got around to seeing Avatar in 3D (not yet IMAX, which was sold out). I was excited to find that it is in fact the 3D and computer animation breakthrough that we have all been waiting for (OK, at least that I have been waiting for)...

Risk taking has been getting a bit of a bad rap with the banking meltdown. The psychologist Frank Farley coined the term Big T personality to describe people who actively seek risk (sometimes also referred to as thrill seeking). There is a neat little interview with Farley about Big T personality and the financial crisis as part of a longer article on TheWhyFiles about fear on Wall Street. In the interview, Farley draws a distinction between T-positive and T-negative types. As Farley puts it:...

I am super excited to be backing our daughter Katie’s film project on Kickstarter. She is making a horror movie about what it’s like to be a teenager. Which sounds about right. Joking aside, here’s the premise:At sixteen, Amelia is almost free of the torment of her cutthroat New York City private high school. To her little group of friends, she’s the perfect student, bound for a prestigious Ivy League college, but beneath the surface things are bubbling over. Since her mother’s death, Amelia’...

I love science fiction movies and recently saw two that couldn’t be more different. Here are two mini reviews: Oblivion: Oblivion was an enjoyable ride while it lasted but didn’t really stay with me. The production values are off the charts with some particularly stunning visuals of a house situated above the clouds. But the storyline is kind of quite predictable (at least for adults, our 13 year old didn’t think so) and the movie borrows very heavily from others. During one scene even our so...

When I started Continuations I was planning to write a fair bit about movies as well … I love movies! It hasn’t turned out that way largely because I haven’t had the time to watch any. And when I have gone it has mostly been with the kids to something like Toy Story 3 (which I thought was OK) that didn’t inspire me to write. But I am happy to report that the kids are getting old enough to appreciate movies that do make the cut. Last weekend I took my older son to see Money Ball and he loved i...

One of the great sacred cows of the movie business has been the theatrical release window. First a movie is only in theatrical release. Then there may be a period where it is only on DVD. And finally it may be everywhere including various online options. Over the years the theatrical release window has compressed as described for instance in this 2009 Wharton piece. But it still exists and I believe is a major contributor to piracy. Maintaining a theatrical release window is really the perfec...