Serdar Yegulalp's Blog, page 172
March 5, 2014
Oldboy (2013)
The original 2003 Oldboyranks as one of the greatest films I have ever seen. The 2013 remake is to that movie like an Elvis impersonator is to Elvis. Not just in the sense that the impersonator can only ape the moves of the original, but in that he arrives years too late to the scene. He can only remind people of some glory that it was once possible to experience for the first time.
What’s most disappointing is howOldboy ended up being this thin despite some fairly heavyweight talent on board....
March 4, 2014
Categorically Speaking Dept.
I've got several possible review items on my desk, most of them for the Science Fiction Repair Shop, and something crossed my mind as I was figuring out which one was best to talk about. Is a comic book movie best approached as a kind of fantasy, or can we sneak it into the SF Room by sliding it in under the door, so to speak?
Most nuts-and-bolts SF fans would try to brain me with their copies ofTheFoundation Trilogyif I insinuated thatThe Avengersor whatnot could be called "SF". I agree with...
March 3, 2014
Do It Yourself, Just Like Everyone Else Does Dept.
Barely a day goes by when something doesn't show up in one of my RSS feeds (or my G+ feed, or my Facebook timestream, or event like, or whatever the hell they're calling it now) relating to the nature of creativity. Most of the time it takes the form of some prescriptive advice: do this and you'll be creative. Sometimes it's speculative: what do creative people do that other people don't? Well, creating, for one, but I imagine such a tautology scarcely needs elaboration on my end.
But most of...
February 27, 2014
Ketchup, February 2014 Vintage Dept
Wow. Very work; so busy; much exhaust.
Meme jokes aside, the sheer number of things that get thrown at you when you relocate is not something a checklist can do justice to. The more you plod forward, the more you realize you've left behind or forgotten about, but plod I must.
OK, so some stuff:
Welcome to the Fold continues apace, if slowly. Rather than set an ETA on this, I'm just going to say "end of year" and leave it at that, because it'll be easier to fit into my strange new timeframe, and...
February 24, 2014
The Rest Is Silence Dept.
For many, classical music, its refusal to engage in high-volume harangues, its reliance on aural logic rather than visual spectacle, its commitment to achieving often barely perceptible standards of formal perfection, all serves as a repudiation of late capitalism — a refuge from hideous strip malls, the 24-hour assault of advertising copy, and marketing hype. Ultimately, it is a protest against the cruder, meaner and self-destructive society we have become.
One of t...
