"Puppet wrangler? There weren't any puppets in this movie!" – Crow T. Robot
Of Lucky Number Slevin, Roger Ebert writes:
[The movie] goes to some pains to make it clear it is only an exercise in style. Here we are looking at a crime mystery involving warring hoodlums and beautiful neighbors and a confused guy from out of town and a gunman and a cop, and the movie knows we’re deluded and they’re all just conceits. It’s smarter than we are. Well, it must be, because it got us to watch it.
From Sci-Fi Wire:
Science fiction makes an interesting pact with its readers, [Robert Charles] Wilson said. “We often write about events and technologies that are implausible or even impossible. I don’t expect the Earth to be temporally dislocated by extraterrestrial forces, any more than H.G. Wells expected a basement tinkerer in 1896 to invent a time machine. But the time traveler in the Wells novel was immediately thrust into the forefront of what was known and could be imagined within the best (and most controversial) science of the time—evolution, the long-term geology of the Earth, the fate of the human species,” Wilson said. “People who describe SF as ‘limited only by the imagination’ may forget that we use scientific plausibility as an artistic constraint, like the five-seven-five syllable count of a haiku.”
I haven’t yet read any of its Best Novel competition, but Spin is easily my favorite book so far this year. I’m maybe a little wary about this sequel Wilson apparently has planned, but there’s no doubt I’ll pick up a copy when it’s published.
Last Friday, when some co-workers and I were enjoying our lunch in the park and commenting on the beautiful weather, I joked that, with the way the weather had been going lately, it would probably be snowing less than a week later.
At least, I thought I was joking. Apparently not. It’s snowing right now.
I continue to tell the story of how, on my first visit to Austin, TX, my hosts kept apologizing for the weather.
“It’s usually not this cold this time of year,” they told me.
It was the very beginning of April. It was a little cloudy sometimes. It might even have rained just a little. And I wasn’t uncomfortable in a light jacket in the evenings.
When I got back to Pennsylvania, yes, you guessed it — it was snowing.
I think I’m going to have a cold walk to the train station this evening.
Executive producer James Van Praagh credits Ghost Whisperer‘s success to the mood of the country, “I think especially in a time of war people question beliefs, and I don’t think people are going to religions as much for answers.”
“Oh, and Jennifer Love Hewitt has these really nice breasts,” added Praagh.