I spent the holiday around my 3-year-old nephew.

While he is very cute, with sandy brown hair and vivid blue eyes, he’s also like all children, a child. That means that he’s entirely at the sway of his emotions. One morning he said he wanted yogurt for breakfast. My brother didn’t have any.

What followed was a slow-motion deterioration over about a half hour that led into a full tantrum. It’s said we grow out of this.

Maybe, in the sense that we generally don’t throw tantrums, but the underlying pattern is there. We dress it up in reason and... More

Let’s face it, Star Trek is an objectively silly show. Kitschy, low budget, often poorly acted and on occasion downright terrible.

But I love it dearly, madly and irrationally.

This irrational fan love is probably one reason Leonard Nimoy had a notoriously difficult relationship with his best-known character.

He famously denounced the role in his memoir I Am Not Spock and even asked to be killed off in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. But not even Spock could stay dead for long.

Nimoy later came to embrace the role in the book I Am Spock and finally lived... More

If Christopher Nolan’s movies are anything they are grounded.

His breakthrough Memento is a time travel movie with no actual time travel. His Batman trilogy stripped away Tim Burton’s gothic operatics to create bleeding, bruised Caped Crusader confronting a terrorist siege.

And The Prestige – which I call “Batman vs. Wolverine, With Magic” – doesn’t contain magic or mysticism, just stagecraft, misdirection and technology.

Nolan’s literalism has led some critics to ding his movies for lacking “poetry,” and rightly so. Still, the Batman trilogy remains intriguing and unique, in part, because Nolan seemingly had to understand the... More