BilmBlog500

I've had a generally good relationship with Penguin over my 28 year career, but right now I am not feeling very charitable toward the folks on 375 Hudson Street. Sometime in 2012 or 2013, it's hard to know exactly when because they don't really announce these things, they started a Print on Demand program. Which is not, in and of itself, a bad thing.  POD has come a long way since its early days, and you can do very attractive POD books, especially trade paperbacks, that are hard to tell from the standard offset edition. But that's not what Penguin is doing.  They are doing mass market POD editions, and they are awful and crappy and markedly inferior to the regular offset editions in pretty much every way imaginable. Today's example, a copy of Simon R. Green's Hell to Pay, the 7th Nightside novel, spotted at a Barnes & Noble in CT. I knew it was POD the second I opened the book.  That's kind of bad sign #1.  You shouldn't be able to tell a POD book f...

Over the weekend I saw Lone Survivor with Myke Cole, my favorite Coast Guard Reserve officer. Wow! The only real question is this:  In ten years, when it is movie night at FOB Somewhere, are the troops going to be downing their popcorn with this, or Black Hawk Down.  Lt. Cole votes for Black Hawk Down.  I vote Lone Survivor. An odd choice for me.  Black Hawk Down tried hard to let us get to know its characters, and Lone Survivor tries hardly at all.  The context comes from a montage of SEAL training under the opening credits, to give you some sense of what these men endure to get where they are.  And other than that, an email or two with the gal at home, some discussion of whether to get the gal an Arabian (or is it Arabic?) horse, a race around the base channeling either the yard race in Chariots of Fire or the volleyball in Top Gun.  Hazing the new guy.  But not much.  And all the guys are buried in facial hair so you can't see their featur...

Rather to my surprise, Her turns out to be a great science fiction film, every bit as worthy of your attention as Gravity.  If you read my blog, there's an excellent chance that you have an interest in science fiction, and so you really really do need to go and see Her. Why a surprise?  I like Spike Jonze's Weezer videos, but his previous feature films haven't been favorites of mine.  Being John Malkovich was a nice concept but petered out, and Adaptation I thought was just plain bad.  I've disliked these or thought these overrated enough that in my mind I've given Spike Jonze credit for other bad films by people he worked with on his own bad films.   While the coming attraction for Her made it look interesting, I just thought of Adaptation of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or other dreary critics darlings. Color me wrong! Take your Mac worship to the next level, and imagine that Siri has a crush on you, that you have a crush on Siri, and that your conver...

In case you haven't noticed, I'm trying to catch up on a year of movie reviews in the week of/after the Golden Globes and before the announcement of Oscar nominations. Lots of people have seen the excellent Captain Phillips.  As well they should! Tom Hanks is fantastic in this movie.  Unlike in Saving Mr. Banks, you never forget that he is Tom Hanks.  But the much talked about last scene of the movie which is harrowing and amazing (and all the more so for being partially improvised, with Hanks playing against a non-actor) is all the more so for us knowing that if it's Tom Hanks in this situation, it really could be any of us.  It's directed by Paul Greengrass who is a quite perfect choice.  He started out as a documentarian, moved to doing documentaries like the quite excellent Bloody Sunday and United 93, jas done action-oriented feature films like Green Zone and two Bourne movies.  So here, he gets to take a real story which is full of ways to show off h...

This post is going to link three movies that have absolutely nothing to do with one another -- Gravity, 12 Years a Slave, and Philomena.  One movie is called Gravity, and the other movies are about very serious subjects, slavery in the US, and the Magdalene laundries in Ireland.  And the reason I'm doing all three in one post is that I'm not sure what to say about two of them, so I'm reaching to find a way to throw in a third movie. Gravity:  The problem with talking about Gravity is -- well, if you're interested in the movie you've probably read lots and lots about it already, and what can I add to that.  Furthermore, it's often harder to talk about something that's really good than something you can pick at.  There isn't anything to pick at in Gravity.  I saw it in 3D, the rare movie that's worth seeing that way, on a pretty small screen in Connecticut.  Would have liked seeing it on a bigger screen, but that was how it worked out.  The movie's...

What makes a brand last forever? Well, Frozen is an example of the kind and quality of animation that's never entirely left Disney, even during the darker time periods of the animation studio -- and which, just to say, a lot of other studios would probably be happy to have their darker periods defined by some of the movies that define Disney's. And on the specifics, Frozen shows how brands that do last for just about forever manage to do it.  They go for that which is timeless, for things which will resonate decades after the advertising itself has ended. Coca-Cola does this really well.  Coke would like to teach the world to sing .  The sentiment is timeless.  The shirts are a little period, but the hairstylings even today aren't so of their day that you notice them.  And Coke is The Real Thing.  It's Always Coca-Cola.  McDonalds has done this really well in many of their best advertisements. And Frozen will be timeless without being frozen in time. ...

I first remember Bruce Dern from Family Plot, not considered the best Hitchcock, but definitely the last Hitchcock and possibly my first Hitchcock.  That was some 40 years ago, and this veteran actor now gets to chew some scenery in Nebraska, which won him the acting prize at Cannes, and is the newest film from Alexander Schmidt.  Schmidt has garnered more consistently wonderful reviews over his career than Dern has over his of twice the duration, often for films like Election or Citizen Ruth or About Schmidt that have often been good or had their moments but not really been that good, and in the case of Sideways been downright dreadful.  But he is coming of his clearly best film, The Descendants. So Nebraska... It isn't The Descendants.  It isn't that good, though I venture to say some the pleasures of Nebraska might longer longer than those of The Descendants. It is much better than his raft of other never-really-that-good movies. God knows it isn't Sideways! This ...