Side Story: You knew Paul Newman?

With apologies to the 1961 American
musical romantic drama directed by
Robert Wise & Jerome Robbins

Paul, you or someone said you used to know Paul Newman? There is obviously a story here. Tell!
—Chuck Smythe

Reply by Paul Clark (aka motomynd)

Most people think of Paul Newman (1925-2008) as a famous American actor. I knew him as a race car driver. Preparing for the 1969 movie Winning, Newman took a driver’s course on the famed Watkins Glen road course in the Finger Lakes region of New York. From then on, acting may have made him rich and famous, but racing was arguably what inspired him.

Movie Review: The Martian

Hard Science Fiction

By Chuck Smythe

Once upon a time, there was Hard Science Fiction. It has deep roots, but the modern, genre paperback tradition started with the Greatest Generation. They came back from the war with heads full of The Bomb, computers, and rockets, and were an eager market for pulp science fiction. Quite a bit of this, of course, was formula adventure fiction tarted up with spaceships. Some of the most interesting examples, though, had scientifically literate authors, who were interested in exploring the possibilities, for better or worse, of all this new technology. This was Hard Science Fiction, and the best of it insisted on getting the science right.

Sunday Review: Two war films

That question yet again: can art rescue us from World War II?

By Jonathan Price

The Oscars have just been awarded, and I’m going to write about two films that those Oscars largely ignored, for different reasons: The Book Thief, because it got nominated in only one category and seemed a minor film in comparison with the others; and The Monuments Men, because it opened too late to be considered for this year’s Oscars. Both are films about World War II and, for me at least, raise interesting questions about that key twentieth century event, which, for most of us in 2014, some 70 years after its ending, is just history, the past: but each succeeding year is still good for a film or two.

Sunday Review: The Informant! and Behind the Candelabra

Matt Damon in two by Steven Soderbergh

By Morris Dean

In the last ten days, we've watched four films directed by Steven Soderbergh: the 2011 medical thriller disaster film, Contagion; the 2013 psychological thriller Side Effects, with Jude Law, Rooney Mara, and Catherine Zeta-Jones; Behind the Candelabra (2013); and The Informant! (2009).
    Matt Damon stars in three of these (all but Side Effects) and has appeared prominently in at least three other Soderbergh films—his Ocean's Trilogy of caper comedies: Ocean's Thirteen (2007), and Ocean's Twelve (2004), and Ocean's Eleven (2001), which was a remake of Frank Sinatra's Rat Pack's 1960 Ocean's Eleven. We remember the caper comedies as diversions and barely remember that Matt Damon was in them at all—of course, he had lots of competition for the camera—George Clooney, Andy García, Brad Pitt, Casey Affleck, Scott Caan, Bernie Mac, Elliott Gould, and Carl Reiner were in all of them, Julia Roberts in two, and Catherine Zeta-Jones and Ellen Barken in one each.