Spoilers. It’s always a bittersweet experience when a beloved book is translated into a film, or in this case, a miniseries. Stephen King’s 11.22.63 was a very long book with a lot of small details. So it is not really surprising that whole swaths of the book are left out. Right off the bat there is the odd casting choice of James Franco as Jake Epping, a man from Maine who travels back in time to 1958. This is odd, because while everyone remember black racism in the good old days, they don’t always remember the racism against Hispanics. The…
Category: sci fi
Star Wars The Force Awakens
I enjoyed that more than I thought I would. ~Wil Wheaton minor spoilers. J.J. Abrams is a damned good director. He does a masterful job of blending practical and digital effects. His story is basically a retooling of Star Wars-which is basically a classic take on The Hero’s Journey. We have two new Heroes to follow around, a woman and a black man, two groups that were in little evidence in Star Wars. The Force Awakens was not a perfect film, but after the abomination of the Prequels, it’s like a ray of light falling into a dank, dark dungeon.…
Ready Player One
That 80’s Nerd Book. Ready Player One tells the story of the future, told through the eyes of a man forced to relive the 1980s. In the future, VR has taken over. Everyone spends most of their time jacked into the Matrix, here called The Oasis. They use Virtual Reality Headsets and gloves, and the richer folks use full body systems. Our hero, however, is not a rich guy. He’s a poor schmuck who lives in a stack of trailers outside of OKC. The creator of The Oasis dies, after becoming very rich, and he proclaims he will leave it…
ALIEN
In space no one can hear you scream. [easyazon_link identifier=”B00GQ4RUP2″ locale=”US” tag=”londonthoug-20″]Alien[/easyazon_link] (I watched The Director’s Cut) is a 1979 science-fiction horror film directed by Ridley Scott, and starring Tom Skerritt, Sigourney Weaver, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt, Ian Holm and Yaphet Kotto. Spoilers We start off with scenes of an empty spaceship. There are odd sounds and bits of paper rustling and small perpetual motion toys in perpetual motion. As we watch a number of lights start to flash, a dot matrix printer starts it’s ratta tat tat, and we hear beeps and blops as the ship…
Jodorowsky’s Dune
The saddest of these are What Might Have Been… We open up with a bit of history about the very odd films of Alejandro Jodorowsky, such as [easyazon_link identifier=”B00LCT48HE” locale=”US” tag=”londonthoug-20″]El Topo[/easyazon_link]. He’s not a formally trained film maker and he liked to make movies starring himself and his young son, who we see in a bit of full frontal nudity. In 1975 it seems that no one really wanted to make a film version of Dune, so when Alejandro asked if he could do it, they said sure, knock yourself out. The bulk of [easyazon_link identifier=”B00J5LXMTG” locale=”US” tag=”londonthoug-20″]Jodorowsky’s Dune[/easyazon_link] is…
Ghost in the Shell
Cyberpunk at its 1995 best. spoilers We open up with a blood and gore splattering murder, a naked woman, and a lot of tall buildings and a lot of men wearing black sunglasses. The opening credits are clearly the inspiration for the opening credits of The Matrix, and several shots of things like falling rain and the fight scenes look like The Matrix as well. But stylistic ticks aside, the anime masterpiece is nothing like The Matrix. They may have the same skin, but they don’t have the same bones-their plots are substantially different. I’m not really a fan of…
Mr Robot and the New World Order
A couple of years ago the Stock Market crashed. The Big Boys of the banking world, Citibank, Chase, Bank of America, etc were all trading for around a quarter a share. The reason for this was they were, and mostly still are, run by greedy, selfish, cheating bastards. Our fine Government stepped forward and said these Institutions were [easyazon_link identifier=”0143118242″ locale=”US” tag=”londonthoug-20″]Too Big Too Fail[/easyazon_link]. Everyone who owed them money was more than happy to see them fail. No more bank, no more debt. Which brings us to [easyazon_link identifier=”B00YCVCBRS” locale=”US” tag=”londonthoug-20″]Mr Robot[/easyazon_link], an often brilliant show from the USA…
Star Trek Continues
Boldly Going, More or Less Fans of [easyazon_link identifier=”B002PQ7JQK” locale=”US” tag=”londonthoug-20″]Star Trek[/easyazon_link] have never really been happy with the newer editions of Star Trek. We all have these fantasies where NBC doesn’t cancel Star Trek and we get another season or two of the Original Series. Star Trek Continues is a group of those kinds of fans that are imagining a fourth season of Star Trek. There are four episodes so far and I have to admit that I like them a lot. They are very much in the meladrama format that Star Trek did so well. Tear jerking episodes that…
Blindspot
Prison Break with a woman. [easyazon_link identifier=”B000FKO3GW” locale=”US” tag=”londonthoug-20″]Prison Break[/easyazon_link] was a great one season show about a guy who had his entire body covered with tattoos. These would help him break his brother out of prison. It was a prefect gimmick for one season. That show lost its way as soon as the heroes escaped. Blindspot also looks like a great one season show. The opening bit of a naked woman being found in a gym bag is fun and creative. Soon enough we find out that the woman has no memory and that her body is covered with tattoos…
The End of Falling Skies
Turn out the lights, the party’s over. spoilers I was never a huge fan of Falling Skies. The special effects were often terrible, the stories were often hokey and silly, the acting was often a bit over the top. Falling Skies could never quite decide if it wanted to be a campy 1950s horror moive or a campy 1980s morality play. In the end, it didn’t really matter. After five years of losing a handful of people every week, but never anyone we knew or cared about, the 2nd Massachusetts Militia drags itself into Washington DC to do battle with…