Enjoy the long weekend. I’ll likely be plopping myself in front of the telly tomorrow evening to catch the Dr. Who season premiere. In past years, I’ve waited for the DVD sets, but the hype for the show has reached such heights that avoiding spoilers will be difficult. I’m hoping for plenty of Daleks and at least a couple scenes featuring Karen Gillan in a short skirt.
The first trailer for the movie adaptation of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas is up and it looks, well, awesome! Regular readers of this blog know that Cloud Atlas is one of my favorite books, so I’m doing my best to maintain some perspective lest Hollywood disappoint me yet again. I’m a little wary of the Tom Hanks-Halle Berry dynamic, but the trailer gives the impression that movie follows the novel fairly closely. The scenes of future Korea and far-future Hawaii (two key sections of the book) have my inner geek begging for more. Even if the movie falls short, I suspect I’ll enjoy it. To paraphrase a couple of my friends who share my love for the book, it could be a mess, but a beautiful mess.
I had no idea that The New Yorker was doing a science fiction issue until I received my weekly subscriber update in my inbox this morning, but I’m excited to check it out. It features fiction by Jennifer Egan (whose A Visit from the Goon Squad is well worth your time) and Jonathan Lethem, as well longform pieces on Doctor Who and aliens in movies. Even the cover–an alien, a robot, and a ray-gun wielding human crashing a New York dinner party–is a clever homage to the genre and something I would consider framing. Either editor-in-chief David Remnick is a huge geek or the geeks on his staff browbeated him into greenlighting this issue. Either way, it’s further proof of how thoroughly geek culture has influenced mainstream taste.
A video promo of the issue can be found here.
I have to run, but here’s a video montage of 56 Star Trek episodes playing simultaneously. It has an interesting kaleidoscopic effect that probably makes a profound statement about the power of visual narratives, but I don’t have time to contemplate it right now.
Here’s a photo of Obama flashing the Vulcan salute during a visit with Nichelle Nichols (Lt. Uhura from Star Trek):
Can you imagine Mitt Romney doing this? Or even getting the reference? Romney would probably tear a muscle just attempting the gesture.
I have plenty of reasons to vote for Obama. But this picture pretty much encapsulates all of them. He may be the only nerd-in-chief I’ll get in my lifetime who, at least for a while, kept the White House free of frat boys and bubbas.
I’m going to try to forget my troubles and look forward to Sunday’s season premiere of Game of Thrones. I’m eager to see how the writers adapt the second volume of series, which is a good deal bloodier and bigger in scope than the first book. Dragons and fully grown direwolves also feature more prominently, as well as Tyrion Lannister–one of my favorite characters. Early reviews are glowing and it seems likely HBO will renew the show for multiple seasons, so I hope George R.R. Martin has a plan for finishing the sixth and seventh volumes in the next few years.
A clever viral video clip for the forthcoming movie Prometheus (the kinda-sorta prequel to Alien) has been making the rounds. In the clip, fictional tech titan Peter Weyland (founder of what will become the Weyland-Yutani Corporation) delivers a rousing address to a futuristic TED conference in 2023. Here’s the video:
Alyssa Rosenberg, a smart blogger who blogs smart things at ThinkProgress, praises the clip:
Hollywood is becoming quite adept at creating bits of viral marketing like this that are designed to get people talking about a movie or TV show. And Guy Pearce does a really great job of making Weyland a compelling character over the span of just a few minutes. It’s like he decided to channel the combined egos of Steve Jobs and Richard Branson and then thought to himself, “Hmm, needs more arrogance.” Let’s hope Weyland gets some screen time in the actual movie.
I’m a fan of both Doctor Who and the new Sherlock series, which makes me part of the target audience for this clever YouTube bit pairing the two to the tune of “Anything You Can Do”. This will have to tide us over until the inevitable Doctor/Sherlock crossover episode.
Enjoy the weekend.