Len enjoyed Hellboy 2 for its look as well. Guillermo gave him a nod in the EW article that ran last week.

We went to see a mystery-murder film that Gillian Horvath wrote for Here! at Outfest yesterday. We really liked the film, but Gillian said it bore very little resemblance to what she wrote, and, in the end, lots of it did not make sense. But there were some very nice directing moments. The director–who neglected to even point out that one of the writers was in the audience when he spoke before the film–talked about how he’s wanted these films to be Nick and Nora Charles-like mysteries, with a gay married couple. In fact, much of the banter between the detective and his partner was light and funny. It actually makes me want to find the books they were based on and read them. Margo Kidder made for one-half of an interesting lesbian couple. With only one nekkid male tush, this film could easily be shown on regular TV, but it’s got a limited release and can be seen on Here!’s subscription cable and on the Internet.

Then I realized it was a cartoon, and somebody wasn’t rigorous so I made up a little metal story. “There was a force field around them so the plant didn’t die.”

Oy. Bad plant science in a movie about ecology. Much worse than explosions in a vacuum.

I know it’s a cartoon. But still. I think I’m going to blog about this at SFNovelists later this week.

I agree with you about the human scenes…the wordless robot scenes were so wonderful that we wondered if the whole movie could have been done as a silent and still worked. My vote is yes (as long as they still included the “Hello Dolly” clips!).

At this exact instant, my collection of players is 60% female, though that’s partly because one of the guys who’s signed up for a planned campaign hasn’t finished designing his character, and I’m not sure he’ll make it—we’ve already postponed the first session by a month on his account, and if he holds us up again he’s out. But they’re oddly sorted out: three men and a woman in the present-day superhero campaign, five women and a man in the high fantasy campaign about privateers sailing under Atlantean letters of marque in the seas of myth (but three of the five women are playing cross-gender—on the other hand, so is the laggard man in the superhero campaign). I suppose there is some tendency for women to play cross-gender, but some of my most combat-enthusiastic women have never done so, not even in campaigns in historical settings. Of course, a campaign about the vampire slayer in 1817 Alta California had an excuse for taking liberties with history and authentic cultural attitudes. . . .