BilmBlog500

Duplicity.  Seen Wednesday evening March 25, 2009 at Clearview's Chelsea Cinema, auditorium #6.  2.5 slithy toads. So I did mention that I was wanting to see this movie, and I was able to catch it on a decent-size screen after my synagogue's annual meeting Wednesday night. Duplicity is written and directed by Tony Gilroy.  He did the Bourne screenplays, and he is the mastermind behind the very entertaining Michael Clayton.  It stars Julia Roberts and Clive Owen.  Julia is Julia!  Clive Owen first came to my attention with Croupier, part of the Shooting Gallery film series which I touched upon in my lengthy digression here and has gone on to often be the good part of mixed bags like Shoot Em Up or the first Steve Martin Pink Panther, and occasionally as in City of Men very good in very good films.  The supporting cast is filled with nice names, giving the movie that old studio veneer that Michael Clayton had and which I admired in the work of Sydney Pollack . Bryce commented t...

Maybe my blog readers can have a bit of a vote. As a rule, most foreign translation licenses are for a set period of years, and usually require that a book also sell x copies per year or have y copies actually selling for each of those years else the book would be considered out of print or off market and the agreement would terminate.  A few contracts were for a set period of years, but with the prospect of the term extending indefinitely so long as the publisher was selling q copies or paying r dollars in royalties. One of my agents abroad revised boilerplate recently.  Instead of requiring publishers to have 500 copies in stock (and in truth, that was kind of harsh to the publisher, and increasingly so in the POD age) the new boilerplate defines in print as simply being able to supply a copy of the book within 21 days.  This could enable the term license to last for the full five or eight years of the term regardless of how many copies were actually selling. From my US perspective, ...

Adventureland.  Seen Sunday evening March 22, 2009 at the DGA Theatre.  1.5 slithy toads. This new movie from director Greg Mottola is essentially the straight version of the much much better Edge of Seventeen .  Released in 1998, Edge of Seventeen is a very tender gay coming of age story set against a summer job in an amusement park where the young lovers have a boss played by a comedian (Lea Delaria).  If you like that kind of thing this is definitely the sort of thing you like, and a little bit down the road I was very happy when the debut director David Moreton set his sights on a book I represent, James Robert Baker's Testosterone , as the source material for his second film .   Two years before the release of Edge of Seventeen, Greg Mottola's first film The Daytrippers was released.  It was a dull-ish but critically well received (overly well-received, one should say) film with decent actors schlepping to NYC in a station wagon.  After a long time in the movie wildernes...

I should really be reading the first draft of The Desert Spear right now, which I'm around halfway through.  But this " tax the bonuses" law  has me in a bit of a ranting mode. According to that NY Times article: “The people have said ‘no,’ ” Representative Earl Pomeroy, Democrat of North Dakota, shouted on the House floor. “In fact, they said ‘hell no, and give us our money back.’ ” “Have the recipients of these checks no shame at all?” Mr. Pomeroy continued. Summing up his personal view of the so-far anonymous A.I.G. executives, he said: “You are disgraced professional losers. And by the way, give us our money back.” But...  For oh so many years now, I've been reading proxy statements for most of the companies I've held shares in, and I've been casting endless "withhold all" on the board elections because I stare at the proxy reports and look at the money that's being handed over, and it's been apparent for ten of fifteen years that execut...

I highly recommend Rachel Getting Married .  This was one of my Best of 2008 . I highly recommend Role Models , especially and strangely to my sf loving Brilligaholics. Both are available March 10 on DVD. And of course, The Warded Man !  I'm very proud of Peter Brett and of his debut fantasy.  If you like fantasy fiction at all, I think he is somebody you will want to be reading, along with Brandon Sanderson .  I spent many years and a lot of sweat equity looking for a Terry Goodkind of my own for the JABberwocky list, and I am amply rewarded to have these two fine thirtysomethings to work with.  You can't get free shipping with The Warded Man alone, so tuck in one of these videos or a Brandon Sanderson book along with your copy of The Warded Man, and you'll be getting a boxful of pleasure before you know it.

The world is full of so many marvels that we sometimes lose sight of just how amazing some of them are, and I've been wanting for a while to talk some about how my business has changed over the 20-25 years I've been in it. It's 25 years ago this summer that I started my summer sojourn at Baen Books.  Honestly, I can't recall too much about the technology at Baen.  There must have been some computers somewhere because Baen was one of the first publishers to do a kind of fancy-pants royalty statement that told you how many copies were shipped and returned instead of just making up a number after a mysterious reserve against returns.  I think that was done very early on in Baen history, though I can't recall if it was done that way from the very start.  Most of my Baen work was old-fashioned scutwork.  I do know they had a very nice photocopier for back then.  & writing this just got me to thinking that we're just a few months away from the 25th anniversary of ...

Rant #1:  That guy on CNBC who has to go walking purposefully across the trading floor at 3:59PM and who almost knocked somebody over on Friday.  Are there actually people in the world who feel his reporting on the day's events is better because he's walking purposefully across the trading floor at 3:59 PM.  He's not interviewing people on the floor for the day's news.  This isn't the tracking shot at the start of Goodfellas or Touch of Evil.  I yearn for the days when these people were stuck in some booth overlooking the trading floor. Rant #2:  People backdrops for political events.  I'm tired of having the stage behind the president or candidates for political office filled with people.  So during the campaign we can discuss why/how/who the guys were with the Abercrombie shirts at some event.  So President Obama can talk about his Iraq plans before a stage full of marines, or somebody else can talk about their tough on crime measure before a stage full of pol...

Taken.  Seen Sunday Afternoon  February 22, 2009 at the AMC Loews Lincoln Square, Auditorium 5, The Valencia.  2.5 slithy toads. I'd kind of liked the coming attraction for this, but it's also the kind of movie I've been seeing less these days with more demands on my time.  Ultimately, the fact that it's been holding very nicely at the box office served as a tie-breaker, and it also worked out that I could also combine with seeing my nephew's a capella group performing at the JCC .  It was perfectly pleasant and a fine way to spend the time so long as you don't go expecting too much.  Liam Neeson performs well, and the script is written with brisk classic Hollywood efficiency.  It's also nice to have a movie that only lasts 90 minutes, though in this case a minute or two longer wouldn't have hurt to show the parents of the girl who survived giving a brief thought for the girl who did not.  It's as good a movie on the dangers of sex slavery as the ov...

I guess I could sign up for their e-mail list and learn about things well in advance, but I enjoy the serendipity in finding out wassup at the Loews Jersey only when I pick up the Village Voice and see an ad on Wednesday for something that's happening that weekend.  Of course, this may not work for very long because The Village Voice is going downhill fast like so much one finds on newsprint so who knows how long they'll think it pays to advertise. But it works for now, so I suddenly had plans for Saturday several weeks ago when I'm leafing thru the film section of the Voice and discover that the Jersey is doing a weekend of Roger Moore James Bond movies, with For Your Eyes Only on Saturday afternoon and Octopussy that night. My first time with James Bond was with Roger in The Spy Who Loved Me.  I know I saw it in Monticello,  NY, which was a 45-ish minute drive we would sometimes do in the old days when you had to travel further to find a movie to see.  My father drove.  ...