SF Sunday

• An interesting review of a movie, and some of its American viewers. I obviously will have to go see V for Vendetta, and track down the graphic novel too.
  

So it has come to our attention that some people are not able to get past
the "politics" of V and enjoy the flick. Which is odd, as the "politics"
consist pretty much of "Fascism is bad." I'm not one to make blanket
judgements, but you cannot simultaneously root for Luke Skywalker and be
offended at V without revealing something ... curdled in your understanding
of your self and your relation to the world around you.

The rest of kungfumonkey's post is illuminating, and the comments thread is well worth a read, too.

• I'm reading Snowcrash, a novel I could have read years ago but I wasn't that keen on cyberpunk generally after about my third Gibson. Enough people have said this is a classic that I'll give it a go. I haven't read enough to critique anything of the book yet, so that will be an upcoming post.
  

• We recently got the collector's edition of Lynch's Dune, with 2 versions: the original cinema release, and the extended 3-hour TV release with the infamous storyboarded prologue but which restored many cut scenes. I love the style of the cinema release, but always wished it had had more scenes of the Bene Gesserit and the Fremen. I love the extra scenes in the extended version, but wish it didn't have the awful awful prologue, that they'd bothered to spend the bit it would have taken to give all the Fremen the blue-in-blue eyes in the restored scenes, and that they'd cut the new scenes into the earlier movie more coherently. No wonder Lynch did an Alan Smithee on the the extended version.

• The togster has seen enough pop-culture references to Alien that he wants to see it. So, some upcoming weekend afternoon I get to scare the socks off my son and probaby the tigling as well, while watching my favourite hoyden hardarse, Ripley.

So many books to read, so few really good sf films.