Category Archives: Films

Birdman

Posted on 5 January 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

(Copied from Facebook post, 1 Jan 2015) We saw BIRDMAN today, the film starring Michael Keaton as a fading action hero movie star trying to redeem himself by staging a Broadway adaptation of Raymond Carver’s short story “What We Talk … Continue reading →

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It’s a Wonderful Life

Posted on 4 January 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

We watched the film “It’s a Wonderful Life” this past week, as a holiday event, for the umpteenth time, as everyone does, and what I was most struck by this time is one of the most obvious points: how long … Continue reading →

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The Science of Interstellar

Posted on 10 December 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Just finished reading Kip Thorne’s THE SCIENCE OF INTERSTELLAR, a big trade paperback with lots of diagrams and a few photos. Takeaways: 1) Thorne was one of the creators of the initial premise for the film, long before Christopher Nolan … Continue reading →

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Interstellar

Posted on 1 December 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

To begin with, I haven’t seen anyone note the coincidence that recent two films, Interstellar and The Theory of Everything (the Stephen Hawking biopic), both key off a major unsolved problem of physics, the unification of gravity and quantum theory. … Continue reading →

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Inherit the Wind

Posted on 23 November 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Saw the movie INHERIT THE WIND today for the first time in many years. This is the 1960 film version of the 1955 play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, as directed by Stanley Kramer, about the famous 1925 … Continue reading →

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Scientific fidelity vs narrative; anti-gay bigotry and socialism; the ecology of faith; Valerie Tarico on religion; Hans Zimmer and conceptual breakthrough

Posted on 18 November 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Here’s one of several articles in the past week or so about why we should not nitpick the science in Interstellar: Slate: Back Off, Scientists: Don’t be so nitpicky about the technical details of sci-fi movies like Interstellar I have … Continue reading →

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Hans Zimmer and Interstellar, again

Posted on 13 November 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Very happy to see this post on Slate by J. Bryan Lowder: Music of the Spheres: In Interstellar, Hans Zimmer scores the universe. This is to follow up my earlier post, Interstellar…Music, which concerned complaints that the music overwhelmed to … Continue reading →

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Interstellar… Music

Posted on 11 November 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Gary Westfahl’s reviews save me lots of time and money. Whenever I think a new SF film might be interesting enough to see…. his review often persuades me otherwise. (And when I do see them, my reaction is much the … Continue reading →

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Journey to the Beginning of Time

Posted on 27 October 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

I got two responses to my query late last week on Facebook about a film I’d seen in the mid-1960s and only vaguely remembered, a film about boys in a rowboat going back in time — responses from Alan P … Continue reading →

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Skiffy Flix: Assignment Outer Space

Posted on 23 October 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

There was a period in the mid to late 1990s when I watched a whole bunch of 1950s and ’60s science fiction films, via a video store around the corner from my house then, back in the days when there … Continue reading →

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