Slate for Hugo!
Jul. 18th, 2004 12:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
libertangoSlate has a pair of pieces that make one think it's suddenly turned into a fairly knowledgeable fanzine.
Movie critic David Edlestein has a review of the new I, Robot movie that makes great hay of a parody of the Three Laws of Robotics -- "what I call the Three Laws of Robotic Movies" -- and an unwritten, but also funny "Three Laws of Spoiler Nondisclosure." And get this whack at director Alex Proyas' earlier film, Dark City:
"There are people who regard Proyas' Dark City as a masterpiece for the ages—I believe Roger Ebert holds seminars in which he goes through the movie frame by frame for something like two years with breaks only for Yom Kippur and Lent. To me, Dark City felt like the first Matrix without the kung fu, but it did have a nice, Philip K. Dickian is-it-real-or-am-I-reading-a-Philip-K.-Dick-novel eeriness and some good hats."
It's worth remembering at this point that Ebert has pubbed his ish (unlike me).
Then we have the even more remarkable -- for a mainstream magazine -- "Assessment" piece by Chris Suellentrop, Slate's deputy Washington bureau chief. Flinging quotes by Sagan and Doctorow, and handing out parallels to Aum Shinrikyo and the coincidence that Foundation was published in Arabic in 1952 as Al-Qaida, Suellentrop does a fairly straight, informed piece on Asimov.
I haven't felt this eerie sensation of wondering how fannish writing has sneaked into a mainstream publication since I read Gregg Easterbrook's review of Norman Podhoretz' Old Friends in the Washington Monthly, which while ostensibly about the New York lit'ry crowd of the 1940s-1960s, sounded to me like nothing so much as a Harry Warner book detailing the fannish feuds of the same period. Except, of course, that Podhoretz' ego is so much bigger than Harry's. Huh. I wonder if we can get Harlan to write his fannish memoirs...
Anyway. You get the idea.
Movie critic David Edlestein has a review of the new I, Robot movie that makes great hay of a parody of the Three Laws of Robotics -- "what I call the Three Laws of Robotic Movies" -- and an unwritten, but also funny "Three Laws of Spoiler Nondisclosure." And get this whack at director Alex Proyas' earlier film, Dark City:
"There are people who regard Proyas' Dark City as a masterpiece for the ages—I believe Roger Ebert holds seminars in which he goes through the movie frame by frame for something like two years with breaks only for Yom Kippur and Lent. To me, Dark City felt like the first Matrix without the kung fu, but it did have a nice, Philip K. Dickian is-it-real-or-am-I-reading-a-Philip-K.-Dick-novel eeriness and some good hats."
It's worth remembering at this point that Ebert has pubbed his ish (unlike me).
Then we have the even more remarkable -- for a mainstream magazine -- "Assessment" piece by Chris Suellentrop, Slate's deputy Washington bureau chief. Flinging quotes by Sagan and Doctorow, and handing out parallels to Aum Shinrikyo and the coincidence that Foundation was published in Arabic in 1952 as Al-Qaida, Suellentrop does a fairly straight, informed piece on Asimov.
I haven't felt this eerie sensation of wondering how fannish writing has sneaked into a mainstream publication since I read Gregg Easterbrook's review of Norman Podhoretz' Old Friends in the Washington Monthly, which while ostensibly about the New York lit'ry crowd of the 1940s-1960s, sounded to me like nothing so much as a Harry Warner book detailing the fannish feuds of the same period. Except, of course, that Podhoretz' ego is so much bigger than Harry's. Huh. I wonder if we can get Harlan to write his fannish memoirs...
Anyway. You get the idea.
