Coraline and Watchmen hit theaters in Spring 2009 (like almost now)

Wow, gee cool, the right movies are being made!

What joy that not both Coraline and Watchmen are coming out in the theaters in the next couple months. Here's the trailer for Neil Gaiman's Coraline:



Gaiman is a master storyteller, famous for his series The Sandman, made a wonderful and little seen feature filmed named Mirror Mask and numerous novels, comics, film and television creativity in his native England and adopted America.

The film has an incredible cast including Dakota Fanning, a Desperate Housewife, Ian McShane (Deadwood), both Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders (creators of Absolutely Fabulous and French & Saunders) and John Hodgman (noted author and A PC). There's a good page on Yahoo! Movies that summarizes details and links to trailers and photos and stuff.

Oh and Hodgman and Gaiman are both on Twitter, btw.

The Watchmen also has a cool compendium page on Yahoo! with some pretty sweet making of videos. It's an Alan Moore graphic novel that I don't have time to talk about in detail. But Time Magazine listed it in the Top 100 novels of all-tim. Here's the sneak peek trailer, which I like better than the one in the theaters now...

Happy New Year! Welcome 2009!!

let the new year in, be aware and take stock

It's just an arbitrary day of course, January 1, not tied to the sun or moon, named for a Roman god who has long gone out of style. But it's a marker, and that's useful. It's been a year (365 "days") since we last had this conversation, right?

I don't go in for resolutions, I don't think betting with yourself in front of everyone is a good or healthy way to motivate or change behavior. But your mileage may vary. But I do think that we tend to be more aware at this time, for obvious reasons (read: hungover). So it's useful to take a look at things (like this desk covered with all manner of crap? no, not that, okay?) and see where that observance takes you. But no dramatic pledges, per se, just run the old problem-solving and optimization scripts against it, and see where you end up. Again, that's me. I should just talk to myself, I suppose.

I want this to be a great year, with focus on the right things--remembering that healthy and pleasurable are not strictly expensive and that they can often be derived by very simple means: taking a walk accomplishes so much. That will be my one Zen outburst. I promise. I have no idea where it came from. But that wish is for all of you as well: a healthy, happy new year.

Also, my advice: find some optimism, which likewise is its own reward, and use it to fuel pragmatic thinking. We need to be practical and somewhat conservative as we proceed into a year that will be difficult. But make sure you know who your friends are, and remember how much that means, and make sure you have their numbers on you. That means write them down, back them up, and probably also get their zip code.

A programming note, as it were, you will tend to find fresher post-dates from me on Laughing Squid (where I guest-blog) than this blog, typically. I think I'll be writing a bit more here, certainly more than I did last year, but in general more and more interesting stuff will tend to pop up there.

That said, more here soon.....

Mikl-em