Michael Mann's first theatrical feature, Thief , is one of my favorite crime movies. The fierce visual style we'd later see in Mann films like Manhunter and Heat was somehow already honed in this thrilling tale of a safecracker (James Caan, never better) who goes up against the mob that hire...

It's hard for me to admit this about my childhood, but the 1970s was a pretty crappy decade for sci-fi TV and movies. As much I like some of the stuff -- the good stuff -- I can't pretend that much of it was representative of the genre at its finest. In the pivotal summer of 1977, I bounced ...

I feel sad keeping track of such things, but it's undeniable that with the passing of Arthur C. Clarke last year, Fred Pohl stands as one of the last surviving grandmasters of science-fiction. Maybe he was never a household name like Clarke (or Isaac Asimov or Robert Heinlein, two writers he kne...

I am immensely, hugely, deeply sad. One of the most electrifying rock performers has left the building: Erick Lee Purkhiser, better known as Lux Interior, lead singer of the psychobilly group The Cramps, died this week of heart complications. I saw the Cramps perform four times but I wish it had bee...

20 years ago today, I quit smoking. (Er, cigarettes, that is.) As the late comedian Sam Kinison might have screamed: Oh, I remember the fuckin' DAAAYYYY!!!! Let me say that I thoroughly enjoyed almost every cigarette I smoked. It made me feel good and I'm sure I looked pretty damn cool while...

My main-most Minnesota man Sean Doolittle has a new thriller, Safer , hitting bookshelves next month. And it's gonna hit 'em hard -- this is Doolittle's first mass-market hardcover and about damned time. Advance praise from folks like best-selling writer Harlan Coben say it's a doozy...

As someone who stood in the unemployment line for the past five weeks, I can tell you I'm not praying for Obama to fail. Neither are the millions of other job seekers struggling in these hard times, no matter what their political leanings. I'm one of the lucky ones. I got laid back onto my o...

Plans to close down Guantanamo. Submitting an AG nominee who stands against torture. Hillary as Secretary of State. Lifting the global gag rule on abortion. Freezing some of the corporate giveaways Bush signed on his way out the door. Pissing off Rush Limbaugh and other Republicans by gently remindi...

Can a liberal love a conservative? As in, take them out to dinner and later rip off their clothes and ravish them like it's the end of the world? I guess so. But I'm stumped as to why in the world you'd wanna. Read more about it in my latest Nerd Date column, "The Love Vote," a...

Damn. Following Tuesday's post, this is definitely one obit I didn't wanna see this week. Actor-writer-producer Patrick McGoohan, dead at 80. Here are photos from two other notable McGoohan films: the troubled Dr. Paul Ruth in David Cronenberg's 1981 psychic sci-fi thriller Scanners , an...