To Every Other Jobu Tupaki After Jamie Lee Curtis’s Oscar Win | Tor.com:
Except it’s not our failure, and definitely not Stephanie Hsu’s. It’s the Academy’s. Sure, that’s a strong feeling, and sure, I shouldn’t make a habit out of exhausting myself when incredible QTPOC stories get overlooked for awards, especially when this film did sweep in other, crucial, beautiful ways. But the specificity of the situation makes me want to put the entire Academy on an everything bagel. With extra salt. To balance out the salt in the wound that makes it impossible to ignore.
That character? In that role? In this movie? It would be one thing if she’d lost to another actor in the category. But both Hsu and Curtis play supporting characters with queer storylines who change Evelyn Wang’s life. Hsu plays every version of Joy: Jobu Tupaki, daughter and monster, supervillain and depressed queer second gen kid who just wants her mom to see her. Hsu embodies the role thrillingly, flayingly well. It’s in the way she moves, the history of hurt behind her eyes. The familiar, complicated intricacy of loving your mother in all her messy truth and wishing she would just goddamn do the same for you. It’s there, that rarely told story of shame and sharp longing.
What is The Most Successful Hollywood Movie of All Time? — Information is Beautiful
February 6, 2023
What is The Most Successful Hollywood Movie of All Time? — Information is Beautiful:
The most common answer to the question What is The Most Successful Hollywood Movie? is of course Avatar. James Cameron’s 2010 masterpiece grossed close to $3bn worldwide, very closely followed by Avengers: End Game at $2.8bn.
It turns out, if you ask better questions you get more useful answers:
Best Sci-Fi Movies of the Last 15 Years | Den of Geek
February 21, 2022
Best Sci-Fi Movies of the Last 15 Years | Den of Geek:
Fifteen years is a long time. We at Den of Geek can certainly attest to that as we’ve seen the industry change and grow, embrace streaming, and pivot toward intellectual property. Yet even as our present stays in a constant state of flux, our fascination with the future remains unwavering.
What dreams may come in 15 years? Or 30? Or a hundred as technology evolves and its relationship with humanity is renegotiated?
If you told a room full of geeks in early 2007 that 2022 would be a world filled with smartphones and tablets, social media-shaped democracies, and something called “TikTok,” they might think you’d written a sci-fi movie. Still in that upheaval, we saw some pretty good science fiction stories come out in their own time, both Hollywood blockbuster big and intimately indie; iconic and underappreciated.
It’s why we’ve polled our complete staff, along with thousands of reader votes, to determine what are the 25 best sci-fi movies to be released during our first 15 years.
Five Ways Denis Villeneuve’s Rendezvous With Rama Could Be Truly Great | Tor.com:
Give Women the Spotlight
…sigh. My biggest gripe with Arthur C. Clarke books remains the same with every tome I read. In books already devoid of relatable, meaningful characters, Clarke shunts women into the dark recesses of his stories. Rendezvous With Rama has one incriminating passage that always irks me. Essentially, a crew member of the Rama exploration crew shares an internal monologue about how distracting low gravity can be when a woman is on board. He mentions how the lack of gravitational force makes for excessive jiggling of the breasts. The character goes so far as to question whether women should be astronauts in the first place. I remember reading the passage (which is by far the most egregious, though there are others) with jaw agape.
Beyond the outright sexism, there are precious few women characters in the book at all. It would be an easy (and necessary) win in terms of representation for Villeneuve to gender-swap a few characters and allow women to showcase their scientific talents in the movie. The story only stands to improve by broadening this particular horizon: In a story about humanity’s place in the universe, everyone should be included.
Horror’s Ongoing Reckoning: The Final Girl Seizes Control of Her Story | Tor.com:
The slasher was born and raised in a time of male anxiety. The FDA approved the Pill—the first effective form of oral contraception to be close to 100% effective and widely available—in 1960. For the first time in human history, women could take full control of their reproductive cycles. Second wave feminism, which took aim at patriarchal systems and structures embedded in our culture, empowered a whole generation of women to take control of their own lives.
What wipes in Star Wars teach us about the brain and also interface design (Interconnected)
December 25, 2021
What wipes in Star Wars teach us about the brain and also interface design (Interconnected):
The brain has a limited amount of resources, so it has to choose what’s going to be regarded and what’s going to be ignored. The feeling of this resource allocation is what we call attention.
This seems to match with my experience.. From a technical point of view this was the point of the doorway transitions in Resident Evil, but narratively it really worked well too.
Time Travel Movies Ranked by How Much Sense the Time Travel Makes
December 20, 2021
Time Travel Movies Ranked by How Much Sense the Time Travel Makes:
Ultimately we have no idea what time travel would actually look like, but we all have ideas of how to understand time travel because of movies like these. Here is a list of some of the best time travel movies, ranked in descending order of how much the time travel adheres to internal consistency and sense .
Everything Everywhere All At Once
December 15, 2021
Everything Everywhere All At Once:
I don’t know anything about this movie and its directors (Daniels? Oh, Swiss Army Man!) but it has Michelle Yeoh kicking ass in it and I want to see it at the first possible opportunity. Getting some Jackie Chan meets Marvel multiverse meets Being John Malkovich vibes here.
I had never heard of this movie coming, but I think I’m totally here for it…
Michael Dorn, Actor-Director-Star Trek: The Next Generation-ENCORE – Storybeat with Steve Cuden
December 13, 2021
Michael Dorn, Actor-Director-Star Trek: The Next Generation-ENCORE – Storybeat with Steve Cuden:
Michael has appeared more times as a regular cast member than any other Star Trek actor in the franchise’s nearly 55-year history, spanning some 272 TV episodes and 5 feature films. He also appeared as Worf’s ancestor, Colonel Worf, in the film Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.
Pocket Realities 