The first of ten Galactica webisodes premieres today to bridge the gap between the previous season, or half-season, or whatever they’re calling it, and the next, um, ditto.
SPOILER ALERT #1: If you haven’t finished watching the previous season, or half-season, or whatever they’re calling it, you shouldn’t watch these webisodes yet.
SPOILER ALERT #2: Don’t read the comments section here until you’ve watched the first webisode.
Check out the trailer for Chandni Chowk to China, an insanely strange and silly but oddly-appealing-in-a-WTF?-kinda-way fusion of Hong Kong martial-arts movie and Indian musical comedy, about a poor Delhi street vendor who becomes convinced he’s the reincarnation of an ancient Chinese 
warrior. Gordon Liu seems to be playing a cross between Yul Brynner and the hat-throwing guy from Goldfinger.
Another film that looks like it might be fun is this Ocean’s-Eleven-esque-looking film Duplicity. Any preview that starts out in front of the Pantheon automatically biases me in its favour. Seeing Clive Owen as an MI6 agent makes me wonder how he’d play James Bond ….
Wow. So George Lucas had enough self-knowledge to ask someone else to help direct and write the parts of the Star Wars prequels where there were, like, actors talking and stuff.
But, alas, not enough to ask a second person after the first turned him down.
Is Fables (a tale of real-life fairy-tale characters like Snow White and Pinocchio living among us in the ordinary world) a good comic book series? Yup.
Do I think ABC can adapt it without producing something truly hokey and godawful? Nope.
The man who coined the term sci-fi (unless he didn’t) has died.
Take a look at this scene from Doctor No.
What’s the most remarkable thing about this scene? The fact that Bond is obviously scared shitless.
How often have we seen him that way? In most Bond movies he’d be cool as a cucumber, disposing of the threat calmly and with a quip (or, if it’s the Daniel Craig Bond, with swift brutal efficiency and no quip – but no fear either).
But this scene was from the very first* Bond movie, before the films had drifted as far from the books as they eventually would. I’ve recently started reading through the original Bond books, and the James Bond of the novels is a far cry from the supercool superhuman of most of the movies (and almost as far a cry from the ice fury of the recent movies) – instead he’s a fallible, flawed, psychologically messed-up human being who pops pills, whimpers in his sleep, irritates people (I mean unintentionally), and doubts the morality of his missions. Oh yeah, and he looks like Hoagy Carmichael.
I wouldn’t mind seeing a Bond movie that was actually based on the books. But I’m not holding my breath.
* Movie trivia fact: okay, strictly speaking the first Bond film was a low-budget 1954 tv-movie of Casino Royale (unconnected with either the 1967 spoof or the 2006 reboot). But hardly anybody’s seen it (I have – they’re not missing anything).