Just For Fun: My Top Ten Villains!

  While, at least in theory, we cheer for the victory of the heroes, it is often the villains that define a work, and certainly the villains tend to get the best lines, best music, and commonly the coolest "style" in a work.   This probably partly stems from the fact that villains are more "free" than the heroes; they get to do what they want rather than what they should or must. In addition, the villains tend to be in control, the ACTIVE force, in the story, at least up until the end; the heroes spend much of their time reacting [ Continue reading... ]

On My Shelves: The Golden Voyage of Sinbad

       Today, making fantastic creatures onscreen seem to move and breathe and interact with real people is commonplace, almost easy; one can go online and see some pretty darn impressive work being done by people with a little time and money on their hands.        But back before the days of computer animation, there were only three ways to put fantastic things onscreen. The first was to have a human being (or, rarely, another animal) wearing a suit that looks like the fantastic creature in question. This rarely worked very [ Continue reading... ]