The Pirate Bay is carrying this spot-on cartoon on what we already knew about labels and studios: Their "new media—first radio, then TV, then tapes, then video—will kill our industry!"......

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...

There's never a shortage of hypocrisy in Tinsel Town. The world's entertainment capital practically invented the double standard and lives by a simple edict: do as we say, not as we do. After all, it's the Hollywood crowd that lectures us on free speech, then black balls anyone who doesn't tow the l...

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 ...

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...

Like many millions of folks, including fellow marketeers, I spent a good part of Super Bowl 2009 watching the ads looking for memorable creative that would be worthy of $3 Million per spot. Unfortunately folks, most ads were dull, boring, meaningless, stupid and certainly not memorable. If you are g...

Olympic Gold Medalist Michael Phelps has proved that his publicity machine can't prevent bad judgments from undermining his marketing value. A tabloid picture of the 8 gold medal winner smoking a pot water-pipe at a university party this past November has caused the Olympian to make a public apo...

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...

Ever browse the sci-fi aisle at your favorite video store and realize you've seen 'em all? You haven't, not by a long shot. Over at the Internet Review of Science Fiction, Mark Cole presents his list of science fiction movies not yet available on DVD. Most of the films are foreign and so...

All 17 episodes of The Prisoner, a ground-breaking 1960s sci-fi series from the BBC, are streaming for free at AMC's website. The cable channel is doing this as a promo for their revamp of the show. Given the pedigree of other AMC shows like Mad Men and Breaking Bad, my hopes are high (especiall...