BilmBlog500

Once upon a time I used to take a free weekend afternoon and do a grand circuit of Manhattan bookstores, up 2nd Ave. maybe stopping at Black Orchid mystery store if it was open, two Barnes & Nobles on E. 86th St., thru Central Park, 2 B&Ns on Broadway on the Upper West Side, then the Borders on Columbus Circle and the Borders on Park Ave. That was a long time ago! Now, it's been months and months and months since I've been to the mega-B&N on E. 86th that replaced two smaller and inadequate locations.  But I needed to buy three books by a couple published authors who are talking to us, I decided to buy them the old-fashioned way, the B&N was supposed to have all three. So up 2nd Avenue I went, for the first time in ages. Sadly, the United Artists Gemini at 2nd Ave. and 64th St. closed quietly in the fall, there's a "for lease" sign touting the "unique footprint" for retail.  According to Cinema Treasures, the theatre opened as the Columbia...

Films don't need to be over two hours to be long sits, nor under two hours to fly by in the blink of an eye. An example of the short but long sit:  The Deep Blue Sea, which I skipped when it opened in theatres, it didn't sound like a movie for me, but Moving Image was doing a screening and the film has gotten some award attention -- the lead actress Rachel Weisz won the NY Film Critics prize -- so why not? It's too conscientiously arty. I can't fault Weisz, she has previously gotten attention in The Constant Gardener and other films.  But her role here is thankless.  London, a few years after WWII, still fresh in mind, there's a reminiscence of she and her husband hanging out being serenaded in the Aldwych tube station during one of the bombing runs.  Not really her husband now, he left her after finding out she is having an affair.  The other man had forgotten her birthday which inspires a suicide attempt, the film takes place over the next 24 hours with abunda...

OK, let's wade into this debate, and let's say pretty bluntly, anyone who agrees with "best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is to have a good guy with a gun" post-Newton argument doesn't have the right end of this argument.  Reasonable gun control is perfectly reasonable, and we should have a whole lot more of it. And I'm not the crazy one for saying this. And FYI, I grew up in a small town in rural New York State, first day of hunting season kids would take off from school, the highway would be full of people doing the hunting thing, full of police doing spot checks that cars didn't have more dead deer than the allocation.  Wasn't my scene, but I'm not without familiarity with a culture of sport hunting. However: The common sense way to keep bad things from happening, the way that we keep any other bad thing from happening that you can possibly think of, is to make it more difficult for that thing to happen.  You want less speeding, you add speed...

So it's not all that long ago that we were told what a big mistake it was for Borders not to have invested more in the e-book reader business. Now, after a confused holiday season where Publishers Weekly was running articles right after Black Friday telling us how wonderful the indies were doing with the Kobo and now runs an article to say " oops never mind " and where Barnes & Noble was touting its Black Friday success with the Nook and now blaming a drop in holiday sales on a huge drop in sales for the Nook, can we still say that the problem at Borders was failure to invest in an e-reader?  Barnes & Noble doesn't have much to show yet but a lot of red ink or maybe saying that things would even be worse for the retail stores if it wasn't for the Nook, and it's hard to know if there's any way to monetize the business.  Maybe e-readers aren't dead, but tablets are so much better and are now available at prices comparable to the earliest e-reade...

One topic which I covered in my 2012 review which I think deserves a little more attention is that of the global market for English language books. As a quick primer, there are three basic kinds of publishing deals, most all deals fall into one or the three categories: North American.  You give the publisher the right to publish the book in English in the US and Canada.  You keep rights to the British Commonwealth (Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, different definitions after that which can range from a couple dozen to several dozen countries).  The world outside of North America and the British Commonwealth is something called the "Open Market" where everyone can distribute a book on a non-exclusive basis, mostly countries where English isn't a first language, like continental Europe or Brazil or Russia. World English:  You give the publisher the right to sell the book everywhere throughout the world in English, the publisher can either license...

My big sit two weeks ago really can't compare to seeing Django Unchained, Les Miz and Zero Dark Thirty back-to-back-to-back.  The good news, I guess, is that I saw all three in different theatres so I got some fresh air in-between. Django Unchained was kind of frustrating to me.  The writer/director Quentin Tarantino is an auteur, a student of cinema, a craftsman.  He does films that won't be confused with anyone else's.  This one is, as many of his often are, a bit wacko in the descriptions.  A German bounty hunter in the pre-Civil War south decides to buy a slave, teach him to assist in his job, the slave proves to be a natural with a gun, and then agrees to go to buy the slave's wife.  The slave is played by Jamie Foxx, the German by Christoph Waltz who was a deserving Oscar winner for Supporting Actor in Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, the plantation owner who has Foxx's wife by Leonardo DiCaprio.  Quite a cast.  Kerry Washington is the wife...

It's been a nice last past couple of weeks! My niece was graduating college, which turned into a whole week away from the office.  I could have rushed back to put in an appearance on Dec. 21, but I'm not that dumb, so I hung out in the DC area for a few days. I saw plays and movies, I had dinner with Justin Landon of Staffer's Musings, and another dinner with a young writer I met at WorldCon whom I think has some potential.  I walked, at least 80 miles over the week away from the office, including my first ever walk along the Custis Trail that parallels I-66 and the Orange Line in suburban Virginia.  I visited the Hole in the Wall bookstore for the first time in many many years, a wonderful little used book store in Falls Church, and discovered that when I used to go there more often I had been taking a walking route from the Metro that was half again as long as it needed to be.  I had lunch with a high school friend in Baltimore on the way down, on the way back I st...

The weekend of The Big Sit, I also managed to make my way through a few weeks of accumulated comic books, so let's do a quick check in... Batwing was one of the best debut issues in the New 52, but it seemed to be fading, almost as if Judd Winick had been surprised that the book was successful and didn't have a lot of scripts mapped out, or as if he was ordered to tie in to the main Batman continuity in ways that were at odds with his own vision for the series, making for some awkward issues trying to meld the corporate mandate with his vision.  So maybe it wasn't such a bad thing that Winick left the series , and I am encouraged by issue #15 with new writer Fabian Nicieza.  Nicieza's first issue isn't great, but it is a reasonably self-contained story that begins things back to basics a little, focusing on the things Winick was doing in the earliest issues of the series that made Batwing interesting to read, his mythology instead of Batman's.  The art by Fabriz...

Some quick reviews of other films recently seen: Lincoln.  This is good, I'm not sure it's that good.  Daniel Day Lewis is amazing as Lincoln, and there are other good performances to be had.  But the second half of the movie was way more interesting.  The first half, there's a lot of political arm-twisting taking place but it's a very prosaic kind of arm-twisting, partronage jobs for votes.  Boring, nod off.  In the second half, the deadlines are approaching, the stakes are clearer, things are more fraught and more taut, the arm-twisting is more subtle and much more strong-armed, the morality of everything is more clearly heightened.  John Williams isn't just for superhero movies, he delivers a score here that is good in an almost invisible kind of way. The Impossible:  Kind of like Lincoln, parts of it that are very good and parts of it that are much more prosaic.  Not yet in wide release but being touted for Academy Award attention, Naomi ...