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Film: The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
What this is: a pretty good, very stylish and often quite funny Cold War spy romp.
What this is not: a film with Illya Kuryakin in it.
Oh, it has a character called Illya Kuryakin, but he's not the Kuryakin of the TV series as played in a career-making role by David McCallum. Armie Hammer plays the film version as a suaver version of Arnold ( Read more... ) -
Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970)
(Warning: cut-text discussion contains spoilers up to the end of S4 of Person of Interest)
This was a Christmas present to myself, so S and I sat down to watch it last night. I've long been aware of C:TFP but had never actually seen it; my interest was reignited by seeing a comment from Jonathan Nolan that it had been one of his inspirations for ( Read more... ) -
Star Wars: The Force Awakens
Saw this last night in one of the Gold Screens at the local Vue, i.e. the cinema-within-a-cinema with fewer but bigger and comfier seats, a bar, and no under-18s. Despite the corespondingly higher ticket costs, the 9.15pm showing on the second day after opening was three-quarters booked by the time I logged on to buy tickets back the day they ( Read more... ) -
First fictional British astronaut?
A follow-up to yesterday's post: what was the first fictional depiction of a British astronaut? The earliest one I can think of is HG Wells' The First Men in the Moon (1901) featuring Bedford and Cavor.
Cavor and Bedford were of course on a private expedition. Was there any depiction of an official British human spaceflight programme before 1953's ( Read more... ) -
British Astronauts - an FAQ
Tim Peake isn't the first British astronaut, is he?
No. By any practical definition that would be Helen Sharman, who flew on the Juno mission to Mir in 1991.
So why is he being described as the first 'official' British astronaut?
Because his flight is formally supported and (via the UK's contribution to the ESA human spaceflight programme - which the ( Read more... ) -
The first draft had WALL-E meeting a different robot...
My birthday present from attimes_bracing was the new Lego kit of WALL-E.
I finally got around to building it last weekend (it's quite a complex kit despite its small size, and took about 3 hours.) It seemed fitting to have it meet a kit I got about 12 years ago, 7471 Mars Exploration RoverIt turns out that, probably by coincidence, both models are roughly to ( Read more... ) -
IPMS Scale Modelworld 2015
Last year was my first trip to Scale Modelworld, as described (with lots of picture) in this post. In short, imagine combining the dealers' room and exhibit areas at Loncon 3, then about doubling it, all dedicated to scale plastic model-making.
This year I had company on my trip to Telford in the form of gummitch who came up for the day. If this was meant ( Read more... )
