Batman Begins

Christian Bale : Bruce Wayne/Batman
Michael Caine : Alfred
Liam Neeson : Ducard
Katie Holmes : Rachel Dawes
Gary Oldman : Jim Gordon
Cillian Murphy : Dr. Jonathan Crane
Tom Wilkinson : Carmine Falcone
Morgan Freeman : Lucius Fox
Directed by Christopher Nolan

I kept hearing that the latest version of the Batman saga, Batman Begins, was Batman done right. The movie, for the most part, has been getting rave reviews and since I’m a fan of comic book based movies I figured I’d give it a try. My take on it is that the movie is good, but not the great movie that everyone would have you believe that it is.

The movie can be split into three parts, the first part shows us the origins of Batman, the second part demonstrates the logistics of becoming a super hero and the third part is a classic good guy versus bad guy action flick.

Unless you’ve been living on another planet you’re probably aware that the seeds of Batman were planted when young Bruce Wayne witnessed the murder of his parents at the hands of a thief. After his parents death, Bruce grows up under the tutelage of the family butler Alfred, but is an angry, despondent young man who blames himself, in part, for the demise of his …

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Bicentennial Man

Director : Chris Columbus
Writer : Isaac Asimov, Robert Silverberg, Nicholas Kazan
Robin Williams - Andrew Martin
Embeth Davidtz - Little Miss / Portia
Sam Neill - Sir

In one off Isaac Asimov’s three autobiographies, “I, Asimov”, he states that the second best story he ever wrote was “Bicentennial Man”. I am a big Asimov fan and have read every novel he has ever written, but “Bicentennial Man” was one of his short stories and not being a fan of the genre, I never got around to reading it. When I first heard that a “Bicentennial Man” movie was being made, I was excited by the prospect and put it high on my list of movies to view.

Then the reviews came out.

“Bicentennial Man” was panned by just about every reviewer and fans in the Asimov news group seemed to universally hate it. Suddenly, it wasn’t a “must see”, and I postponed viewing it until this weekend, when it finally on appeared on cable.
So is it as bad as everyone said it was?

Well, not really but I think the director made three big mistakes that turned this movie in to something less than what it could have
been. I’ll discuss those mistakes shortly, but first a summary of the story.

“Bicentennial Man” is the story about …

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Borderlands of Science

Written By : Charles Sheffield

The subtitle of this book is ‘How to Think Like a Scientist (and Write Science Fiction)’. I’m not sure that after you finish this book you will be able to do either, but you will have a good working knowledge of the latest concepts in cutting edge science.

Sheffield wrote this book as a reference for would be science fiction writers. It does not contain any information on writing technique or style but instead is a one stop shopping place for new story ideas and concepts. The book contains fourteen chapters, three of which are devoted to physics, one to chemistry and one to biology. There is an introductory chapter, a chapter on planetary studies, two on space flight and one each on computers, chaos theory and future war. A ‘Beyond Science’ chapter covers assorted topics that did not fit any where else and in the final chapter “The End of Science”, Sheffield takes on the belief that we are running out of scientific frontiers.

The book is very well written. Sheffield does a fine job presenting just the right amount of material for the layman without being condescending. He respects our intelligence but doesn’t assume that our backgrounds include a PHD in astrophysics. He uses math only when really necessary and walks us step by step through the relevant equations. After …

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For the last two or three years, I’ve been wanting to update the website.  I wasn’t happy with the look of the old site and the content had gone downhill as I lost interest.  Every once and a while, I would toy with a new design, but every time I put something together, I was disappointed with it.  I’ve finally decided to just put something together and improve it as time goes on.

I like the new design better then the old one, but there is still a lot of room for improvement.  As time goes on, hopefully I’ll be able to make the improvements.

If any one has any suggestions on things that I can do to make the site look better, your feedback is more then welcome.

If some of the content looks familiar, it’s because I’ve taken the reviews from the old site and ported them to the new site.  I wanted to start with some content from day one and this was an easy way to do it.  Anyway, most of the reviews should still be valid.

- Al