Christmas came early to us here at Geek Speak, with this panoply of wondrous gifts from you fine, fine folks…
First this, from Launa:
Thanks for a great year of speaking geek, GeekSpeak! What a blast, don’t go away for a long time like you did at the end of last year, ok?
Rachel responds:
Hi Launa! Never fear, we’re not planning on any more hiatuses (hiati?) any time soon.
And then this, from BBBB:
Good stuff in the zine, merry xmas, the hobbit is out and so gr8 wonder what you think?
Here is what …

Because what could be more Christmassy than ghosts, demons, aliens and clay-mation? Well… definitely that last one, anyway.
by the Geek Speak Staff
‘Tis, as they say, the season to be jolly, and then there are a bunch of fa la la’s and rum pa pum pums and the only allusion any of us will make all year to figgy pudding. And when the holiday season is upon us, of course our collective minds can only go to those Very Special Christmas Episodes that so often enliven our December viewing schedules.
Here, a …

Why I’d Be a Superhero
Or, How Could Anyone Even Contemplate Being Anything Else?
Did you know that there are people who, if gifted with superpowers in some way or another (radioactive spider bite, doused with radioactive chemicals, exposed to radioactive isotopes… really, comic land would be nothing without nuclear physics), would choose to use those powers not for good but for evil? That there are those who, when immersed in a hypothetical discussion regarding said powers, deny any wish to don a mask and/or a cape to save their fellow man …

Why I’d Be A Supervillain
Or, There Are Only Superheroes Because They Don’t Think Big Enough
by Brad Crammond
Right now there are over 1 billion people in the world living on less than US$2 a day. Starvation kills hundreds of people every day. Lack of clean drinking water is responsible for at least 30,000 deaths every day. At the same time there are more people in the world who are overweight than there are people who are starving. And the fortunes of the world’s richest 100 people could lift every single person …

Ahead of the Tom Cruise movie adaptation, a look at Lee Child’s phenomenal mystery series
by K. Burtt
I sometimes feel like a traitor to the cause when I read non-genre books. But the truth must come out, and I am here, admitting to you all that not only do I read non-genre, but there is even a series that takes the place near the very top of my to-read list. Indeed, the series of which I still sit and read the latest additions in one go are few and far between, …

Yes, it’s another year end list!
by The Geek Speak Staff
The end of each year brings with it a time of joyous celebration and deep introspection. We get misty-eyed over the good times and maudlin over the bad, we think back to triumphs and disappointments and all the hot, hot people doing cool, cool stuff.
Nowhere is this spirit of retrospective analysis more in evidence than in the plethora of year’s best/worst lists that flood the media come December – and who are we to buck such a winning trend?
So here, Geek …

By filming J. R. R. Tolkien’s epic works, has Peter Jackson unwittingly taken ownership of them?
By Rachel Hyland
The year was 2001, and the world awaited breathlessly the release of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, the first in a much-anticipated blockbuster trilogy from director Peter Jackson. As far back as 1997, Jackson had been attached to the ambitious project, and was eventually given the nod to direct all three movies—a bold choice, he was considered at the time, given a directorial resumé basically consisting of low-budget …

From Beetlejuice and Batman to remake after remake after remake – what went so horribly wrong?
by Kim Sorensen
What happened to Tim Burton? How did a gifted director whose early movies combined a beautifully haunted expressiveness with a deeply humane empathy for the socially awkward outsider end up a mere cliché, trapped in a dull version of his own aesthetic? Burton continues to oblige Hollywood’s bottomless hunger for new crap based on old greatness? Burton hasn’t made a movie from an original screenplay since 1994′s Ed Wood. For the past several …

This New Year, is it time to clean out your television schedule?
by Amy Sharma
Breaking up is hard to do. We all fear change, and the crappy situation you know is at times preferable to the situation you don’t. But sooner or later, the time sometimes comes when we have to let go of even the most special of our relationships; when the bad just overwhelmingly outweighs the good. As we approach 2013 and we begin our physical and emotional cleansing, it’s time to evaluate some of our more personal relationships—and …

Written by: Quentin Tarantino
Directed by: Quentin Tarantino
Starring: Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio
US Release Date: Tuesday, December 25, 2012
In Short: Imperfect, but wildly entertaining from beginning to end.
Recommended: Wholeheartedly.

CANDIE: Gentlemen, you had my curiosity. Now you have my attention.
To tell you that I’m a huge fan of Quentin Tarantino would be stating the obvious. So it will hardly be surprising when I tell you that the only movie I have been thinking about this fall other than Skyfall was Django Unchained. And let me say from the outset, no …