Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals Creators Want Your Recipes

Apparently Ann & Jeff VanderMeer, creators of the bizarre Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals, have run out of ideas and want to pilfer some of yours.

Do you make a mean chupacabra challah? Are you renowned for your Loch Ness latkes? We want your recipes! To mark the release of Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals, Tachyon Publications is asking for your best take on kosher cryptozoological cuisine.

Of course we won’t take your recipes and give you nothing in return. We’ve got prizes, bubala. On April 30 We’ll select the five best recipes and send their authors signed copies of The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals.

Here's some examples to get you started. When you’re ready, send your recipe tokosher@tachyonpublications.com.

Visit www.kosherimaginaryanimals.com to learn more about the book and how to submit your recipe.

My review of this book, barring some scheduling snafu, should be in tomorrow's San Antonio Current.

A Boy and His Dragon

I reviewed How To Train Your Dragon for Moving Pictures.

Resisting the usual Hollywood impulse to Disney-ize all animated movies, helmers Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders (co-directors of the underrated “Lilo & Stitch”) opted for a mature vision fraught with actual danger, human cruelty, risk and ambiguity.

As the charming relationship between the boy and dragon unfolds, the characterization of Toothless shifts from a mysterious, two-dimensional reptilian destructor to an expressive creature that has far more in common with domesticated dogs and cats.

The beautifully rendered animation and seamless 3-D, especially in the “Avatar”-worthy flying sequences, gives this film the visual refinement found in other DreamWorks hits “Shrek” and “Kung Fu Panda.”

Repossess Schrödinger's cat: My Repo Men review

I reviewed Repo Men for Moving Pictures.

Creators need to enact a moratorium on Schrödinger's cat. It was first postulated in 1935 when Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger suggested that a fatally poisoned cat in a closed box is not truly dead until the lid is removed. Thus, while in the closed box, the cat remains simultaneously alive and dead. In recent years, authors have littered the physics-cum-philosophy paradox throughout pop culture in a vain attempt to display alternative or indie chops. After an audio montage of dystopian news reports, “Repo Men” opens with repo man Remy (Jude Law) working at a typewriter (yes, the actual 20th-century device) while his voiceover relates the tale of Schrödinger's cat.

First-time director Miguel Sapochnik does little to bolster the weak script. Incongruously lit as a rosy, optimistic tale, the story incorporates into this bleak world dingy bars, overweight people eating hot dogs from street vendors, and 1950s-style suburbs complete with neighborhood barbecue parties. Save for one excellent scene involving a doctor, the many attempts at humor seem forced. All of the action feels staged and derivative.

Check out all the damage at Moving Pictures.

Review of Repo Men

My review of Repo Men is up at SF Signal.

Upon seeing Repo Men, I drove to a nearby Barnes and Noble and purchased a copy of The Repossession Mambo, the novel by Eric Garcia on which this futuristic thriller from director Miguel Sapochnik is based. My decision to buy the novel had nothing to do with the movie's quality. Or, rather, it did, and that's part of the problem. The movie presented ideas that were likely handled in the novel with exactly the finesse, skill and gallows wit that its adaptation lacked.


The core idea is interesting, even timely, and sounds rife with the potential for satire in the manner of Frederick Pohl's and C.M. Kornbluth's The Space Merchants, with a healthy mixture of Thomas Harris and John Connolly. Unfortunately, action clichés mire the execution.

More here.

Journeys with the Hubble

I reviewed the new IMAX film Hubble 3D for Moving Pictures.

Combining the chronicles of several space shuttle missions with a retrospective of the venerable telescope, the 48-minute “Hubble 3D” brings the viewer inside an awe-inspiring vista of imagery and information. Narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio and made with the cooperation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the film quickly summarizes the initial struggles with the massive telescope — the challenges posed by the 1991 launch followed by the repair of a warped lens — before journeying on an IMAX 3-D tour well beyond our galaxy.

Out past Sirius, the beautiful Orion Nebula contains a nursery of emerging stars, each with its own nascent solar system. These infant suns struggle to survive blasts of wind in excess of a million miles per hour spawned by their combined energies. Those winds blew a hole that parted the clouds of the nebula that allows us a glimpse into what the beginnings our own solar system must have been like.

The political and economic realities of the mid-21st century have caused NASA to halt maintenance on the 20-year-old Hubble. To ensure the telescope's continuing usefulness for the near future, the Agency financed one final mission, documented in this film.

Check out the entire review at Moving Pictures.

Review of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland

My review of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland is up at SF Signal.

It shouldn't have been this way. Given the cast involved, given the director's knack for the grotesque and the surreal, to say nothing of the source material, this Alice in Wonderland should have been a marvel, a milestone in the development of fantasy cinema. After all, the logical games and off-the-wall situations presented by Lewis Carroll in both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There parallel much of the nonsense language and narrative dissociation one sometimes feels living in this first decade of the twenty-first century. It is also, in a way, the movie Tim Burton has been preparing to make since Frankenweenie. Whether or not his movies have taken place in Pee Wee's Playhouse or Gotham City, whether or not he has followed such characters as Edward Scissorhands or Sweeny Todd, he has always taken his audience to some zip code deep in his own Wonderland.

More here.

Fresh from the comix world: A 2010 STAPLE! report

My coverage of the 2010 STAPLE! appears in the March 10 issue of the San Antonio Current.

The Austin self-styled “Independent Media Expo” STAPLE! celebrated its sixth annual show on March 6. By combining a focus on independent, alternative, and small-press media with independent-friendly comic-book-shop sponsorship and an affordable entrance fee, Chris “Uncle Staple” Nicholas, co-creator of the online comic series You Chose Right The First Time, created the first significant and viable comic-book-centric, alt-media expo in Central Texas.

[snip]

Featuring a mish-mash of seemingly unrelated exhibitors, the 2010 STAPLE! abounded with odd delights.

[snip]

STAPLE! offered a full slate of programming events, including sessions with the guests and a performance of the radio play The Intergalactic Nemesis: The Living Comic Book (theintergalacticnemesis.com).