War

Mildly entertaining Korean copy of Top Gun. Watch only if you've got nothing else going on.

This book is sci-fi political philosophy! It's just about as different from the movie as can be possible while still retaining a semblance of the same plot. It is quite amazing that this was written in the 50s.

Bonus of +1 for influencing Haldeman and Scalzi.

A Tom Clancy book ghost-written by Mark Greaney, Threat Vector is a pretty fun read full of cyber-espionage and eventually, war with China. There are some idiotic plot elements and nauseous Hollywoodisation. But on the whole, it was quite entertaining.

While I guess that it's nigh on impossible to encapsulate all the goodness of Joseph Heller's book into a two hour movie, IMO, Mike Nichols and Buck Henry do a pretty good job with this adaptation. It's weird, funny, and poignant and captures the thrust of the novel. While I thought Alan Arkin (who usually annoys me) was perfect for the role of Yossarian, his performance was not consistently above par. There are also a few holes that could have been better patched up.

Well worth the watch.

Joe Haldeman's Forever War is a classic sci-fi novel and no matter how many times I read it, I tend to come away satisfied.

Highly recommended.

"The Recollections of a Certain Pilot" aka "The Princess and the Pilot" is something of a wartime adventure-romance between, believe it or not, a princess and a pilot. The pilot, a half-breed constantly being victimised for his racial inferiority, is a highly-skilled mercenary who is tasked with escorting the rather naïve princess across 12000km of enemy airspace to unite her with her fiancé, the prince of their country. The overall plot is quite good. However, there are, as usual with anime, a number of holes and clichés in it.

The Avengers is interesting as it unites characters from a number of other movies (a first?) to for a "super-team" of superheroes to save the Earth yada yada. However, it is terribly clichéd, the dialogues often vapid, and the plot resembles a sieve. That said, the whole point of the film appears to be a rather convoluted attempt at engineering a situation where the CG guys can have fun giving us a superhero war scene. And my, how they succeeded.

Watch the film for the battle scene towards the end. The rest is mostly dull.

I've just finished reading Old Man's War by John Scalzi - a science fiction novel in a similar vein to Joe Haldeman's Forever War.