Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 246

Reviews Too Late: Legend of the Shadowless Sword

The lineage of this film is a little unusual: it's a 2005 Korean production with Korean actors, the stunt team is from Hong Kong, the movie was filmed in China, and the screenwriter is someone named Paul Sheen, who has no other credits that I can find. It's no surprise, therefore, that the result is something of a mishmash. It's not bad, in fact the movie's a lot of fun in a no-holds-barred,

Goldman Sucks

I admire a brilliant piece of invective as well as the next guy, and the best I've seen in a long time is Matt Taibi's evisceration of Goldman Sachs, which he blames for both the creation, and the collapse, of every financial bubble of the last century. (Wow! Talk about evil!)The bank's unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pump-and-dump scam,

Charlie, Dunked

Here is our cat Charlie shortly after the catastrophe. It looks like he got totally immersed in water, or had a bucket of water thrown over him, or maybe got sprayed with a hose. I don't know exactly what happened, I wasn't there. I only know that I came home and there he was, on the front porch, looking bedraggled. I suspect that I, or more likely my personal property, will somehow pay for

Reviews Too Late: The Assassination of Jesse James

This may be one of a very few films ever to be doomed by excessive devotion to its literary source material. (Watchmen might be another.) The full title, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, isn't the sort of name that Hollywood gives to its films: it's taken from the the Ron Hansen novel upon which the film is based. I read the novel when it came out and it's terrific.

Standing By

The Iranian revolution has entered a grim and secret phase. Grim, because the news is of mass arrests, protests being smashed, demonstrators beaten. Secret, because the situation may be resolved--- or not--- by maneuvers within the Iranian power structure that are opaque to those of us in the West.Still, the cries of "Allah o akbar" are louder than ever at night. Three weeks ago, Iranians still

Art Film

Women as well as men, everyone watching this film will feel the dissolution of all their certainties, all their illusory grasp on the world... but after you fall into a brazen despair that the walls of reality have become toxic ice cream of a million flavors, you will gasp with a greater realization: that once the world is reduced, forever, to a kaleidoscope of whirling shapes, you are totally

Hostage Facility

All the thinking I've been doing about Iran in the last week has brought to mind something that I always thought was kind of obvious, which is that Iran talks big and swaggers rather a lot for a country that has a built-in on-off switch. By which I mean Kharg Island.Kharg Island lies about 25 nautical miles off the coast of Iran, and is the facility from which it ships the vast majority of its

Levy on Iran

Bernard-Henri Levy on Iran:Whatever happens from this point on, nothing will ever be the same in Tehran.Whatever happens, if the protest gains momentum or loses steam, if it ends up prevailing or if the regime succeeds in terrorizing it, he who should now only be called president-non-elect Ahmadinejad will only be an ersatz, illegitimate, weakened president.Whatever happens, whatever the result

Simple Ways

Simple ways to help Iranian free speech.

Another Long Day

Another long day trying to keep up with events in Iran.For those who wish to help Iranians and dissidents in other nations evade surveillance, check out the Tor Project. Originally a project of the U.S. Navy and now spun off into a freeware company, Tor--- strangely sharing a name with the largest US science fiction publisher--- bounces messages around a distributed network to evade deep packet