Ridley Scott

Gimbling in the Wabe – Wherein Andy Weir Blows My Mind (well, kinda sorta)

I didn’t know anything about Andy Weir until I read his novel, The Martian. It even took me a while to read the book; for some reason, I would check it out of the library, then let it sit around until it was time to return it. I think this […]

Kidman/Strong Set To Film ‘Before I Go to Sleep’

From Variety: “Zero Dark Thirty” thesp Mark Strong is set to star opposite Nicole Kidman in Rowan Joffe’s psychological thriller “Before I Go to Sleep,” which is being shopped to foreign buyers at AFM. Joffe is adapting S.J. Watson’s bestselling book of the same name for Millennium Films/Nu Image. Story […]

Birthdays

On this day, June 21, in 1905, Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris, France. This champion of existentialism, which posits that beliefs come from not from merely thinking about life, but through feeling and acting upon it, was drafted into the French Army in 1939 and captured by the Germans a year later, spending 9 months as a POW. His 1943 treatise, Being and Nothingness, written to prove that free will exists, remains a monumental philosophical work. Politically active throughout his life, he refused the Nobel Prize in 1964 because he felt a writer should not become “an institution.” Long time companion to feminist Simone de Beauvoir, he died of edema of the lung in 1980 at age 74.

Birthdays

On this day, December 3, in 1857, Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Imperial Russia (modern
Ukraine, then a part of Poland). While he settled in England and wrote in English, he always considered himself a Pole. Heart of Darkness, one of the most famous of his 20 novels (which explores colonialism and the attitudes regarding what constitutes a barbarian versus civilized society) is considered one of the best English novels of the 20th century, as is his novel Lord Jim, which chronicles a crew’s abandonment of its disabled ship. Conrad died in England in 1924 at age 66.