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Any given actor may have a particular type of character whom he or she portrays repeatedly, and any given actor may be very close in type to another actor. In the black-and-white movie era, Bela Lugosi not only played Dracula...

New member Sleepy Mouse is known elsewhere as "Nevermore Poe." I still is not clear to me whether new members are still on probation before they can create new threads; therefore, I've given him a boost. Mouse, now you can go ahead and post what you want about Edgar Allen Poe.

I grew up (in a small city) as a dog person. I didn't hate cats, but I preferred the obvious love given by a good-natured dog. In all of my life until recently, there have only been two cats whom I "owned" in any sense. They were family cats, first a male and later a female, coming before I got...

Fiction, even supposedly-frivolous fiction, can improve a person's vocabulary. When I was a nerdy teenager, I enjoyed the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and I don't mean only the Tarzan books. I learned many words from Burroughs. Among these were "dissolution" and "accoutrements." Look...

There is a young woman to whom I have become as a grandfather. Not the first such case. I'm trying to get Benisse to assist her in joining the revival of TDL; if the young woman gets on forum, she will probably use the name Wood Nymph. Wood Nymph is a major fan of metal music, and has educated...

SCREEN CRAWL TO OPEN: It is a universe with flesh-and-blood people, whose lives are mysteriously affected by The Fuss: a power associated with imagination and entertainment. The Fuss causes life in this time-space continuum to resemble various movies. Only a few persons in this peculiar...

If you explain to people, clearly and carefully, that you have been diagnosed pre-diabetic and you need to REDUCE your starch and sugar intake, I guarantee, sure as the sunrise, that nineteen people in every twenty WILL reply like this: "Okay, I've got just the thing for you! Eat this...

If the writing of a book predates the existence of cinema, and if the book is widely known and loved, you can expect that MORE THAN ONE movie or television adaptation of it has been made, or will be made. The work of Jane Austen lends itself well to the exercise of judging whose adaptation of...

In 2005 (but I only found out this week), independent studio Pendragon Pictures did an astonishing thing: they filmed H.G. Wells' novel "The War of the Worlds." And I mean they filmed WELLS' NOVEL, not a vehicle for Tom Cruise or Gene Barry. They followed the book, and showed THE EVENTS WELLS...

When computer networks were new, users had to accept limitations like waiting for dial-up connections. (I remember how, in my courtship with my now-deceased Janalee, she had that kind of limitation on her affectionate e-mail correspondence with me.) Well, Janalee now enjoys the use of Heaven's...

This will be more comprehensible if you have read Frank Herbert's "Dune" books, which pass for science fiction but are at least forty-nine percent fantasy. You'll be still better off if you've gone so far as to read the fill-in books Frank Herbert's son has written since his father's death...

When a man meets a beautiful woman who is physically much stronger than he is, or who enjoys some other serious advantage, the man will experience one of the following reactions: 1) NO special reaction specifically relating to her advantage, if circumstances are such that the woman's advantage...

On Facebook, I recently wrote my observations about how the sci-fi cinema (except Star Wars) has stubbornly doubled down on making everyone use bullet-guns to the exclusion of rayguns. Let me now relate how one sci-fi novelist came up with a variation which is, well, novel. Numerous writers in...

Anakin Skywalker, guilty of mass murder, aggravated spousal abuse, and choosing to be a childish idiot, lay defeated and legless at the edge of the lava lake. The victorious Obi-Wan Kenobi _almost_ walked away.... but then he remembered how ridiculously fast people could travel through space...

Visiting with my mother who has Netflix, I got to see the "Borgia" miniseries, which refutes Renaissance-era urban myths to show that Lucrezia Borgia was actually a decent person and _never_ committed murder. Sadly, she seems to have been almost the _only_ decent person in 16th-century Italy...

(an alternate-universe Marvel Universe fanfic) "Just BE there," Peggy Carter half-sobbed over the radio. Captain America, born Steve Rogers, had put the Red Skull's futuristic bomber into a death dive toward the ice-dotted North Atlantic. But suddenly he cried out, "Wait a minute!"-- and...

I just saw the latest Disney movie. I will say no spoilers at this time, unless it be a spoiler to say: DON'T LEAVE THE THEATER until the ending credits are COMPLETELY finished. (Think Marvel movies.)

A couple of weeks ago, in downtown Denver, I met Frank Running Shield, a political activist for the Lakota Sioux nation. He told me a few things about his campaigns, which have included successful court action against the state of Nebraska for illegally occupying an area of land which by treaty...

Almost fifty years ago, partly inspired by the Conan of Cimmeria stories, I began designing a fantasy world. And I mean a SEPARATE WORLD, not a shortcut whose geography is Europe almost unchanged and whose people have names like Robert and Alice. Imagine an island with land area about equal to...

Colonel Brandon in Emma Thompson's movie of Sense and Sensibility has left us. Many fans prefer to remember him for his villain roles, and of course you need _somebody_ to play the bad guy; but he proved that he could be a truly _likeable_ good guy.