Read and Appreciated in 2002
An Editorial Year’s Best List
SciFiction, Ellen Datlow (Editor)
The best sf site on the web, period. With an impressive collection of classics and originals by the likes of Kersh, Fowler, Filippo, Vukcevich, Emshwiller or Lafferty, not to mention Michael Swanwick’s monumental Periodic Table of Science Fiction project, there’s no way it can’t be the best.
Other websites that held my prolonged attention this year: Common Dreams (a beacon of sanity in this mad, mad world), Dusk, The Infinite Matrix, and Jorge Candeias’ E-nigma, along with older favourites like Locus Online, The Register, OpenSource cathedral SourceForge.net, the irreverent History House, Fantasya, GFXArtist.com, and Tatsuya Ishida’s Sinfest.
Sight…
Cinema is a big passion of mine, but last year I didn’t go to the movies as often as I’d have liked. Too busy, too broke, or simply not curious enough to sit through movies that didn’t look in the least promising. I only recently got into DVD, so the future looks brighter as I have a vaster range of titles to choose from. A few of my picks:
Donnie Darko, Directed by Richard Kelly
(Flower/Pandora, 2001)
It took this movie over a year to reach theatres here, and it only did because distribution company New Age Entertainment (praised be) thought that would be a nice way to inaugurate business in Portugal. And not only Donnie Darko is an excellent movie, it was very warmly welcomed by critics and audience alike, which tells me two things about Portuguese distributors: not only they don’t know shit about quality, they don’t know shit about their market either.
Played with eerie flair by Jake Gyllenhaal, Donnie Darko is a bright but disturbed teenager whose constant visions of a demonic bunny rabbit save his life when, out of nowhere, a jet engine crashes into his house. Donnie is immediately told the exact date when the world will end (ironically, the same date as the 1988 elections won by George Bush, Sr.) and is clued, through more dreams and hallucinations, on the principles of time travel and how they might relate to the initial jet engine crash. Donnie Darko is like a twisted It’s a Wonderful Life, with a sometimes nostalgic, though more often embarrassed look at 1980’s suburban America where writer-director Richard Kelly grew up. When he’s not sharing his thoughts on the rampant idiocy of pop psychology or on how PC corrupted education, Kelly weaves a charming and mildly complex time travel story that will give you just as much food for thought.
O Brother Where Art Thou?, Directed by the Coen Brothers
(Universal/Touchstone, 2000)
It’s a musical comedy inspired by the Odyssey... and it works! Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney) is a silver-tongued con man who drags two fellow escaped convicts (played by John Torturro and Tim Blake Nelson) on a series of misadventures that mimic those of Ulysses and his men in Homer’s classic. And although music plays a significant part in the film, there are no awkward moments where performers spontaneously burst into song. Each scene flows naturally and elegantly into the next. This movie is funny, smart, highly unusual, beautifully shot, has impeccable dialogue (I love Ulysses’ excessively overwrought lines), a storyline that skilfully intertwines legend and reality, and a great soundtrack. What more could I possibly wish for?
