SCI FI Wire (Free subscription) | yesterday
So ABC's V is here (episode 2 airs tonight), reminding us for the zillionth time that gigantic, mile(s)-wide flying saucers are THE conveyance of choice for any kind of alien visitors. (See: District 9, Independence Day, the original V, Alien Nation, Close Encounters ...) The trouble is, aside from providing an excuse for awesome "reveal" shots where the giant ship blots out the sun, it's...
SF Gospel (Free subscription) | 11/07/2009
I want to like V; I really do. I have fond memories of the original series from the '80s, and when I heard that Kenneth Johnson-- also responsible for one of my favorite SF shows ever, Alien Nation-- was bringing...
TV Squad (Free subscription) | 11/04/2009
Syfy has become known not just for cheesy sci-fi and horror flicks but also remakes, or "reimaginings," of several classic films and shows. They had Children of the Corn recently, they had Tin Man (a modern take on The Wizard of Oz ), and they have an Alien Nation remake in the works (not to mention Quantum Leap ). They're also doing Alice , which is their take on Alice in Wonderland. Here's...
Waveney Valley Blog (Free subscription) | 10/16/2009
www.dissfilmsociety.com Next Screening: 26th October 2009 The Park Hotel, Diss Film Starts 8pm Members £3 Non-Members £4 Students £2 (under 21) * * DOUBLE BILL * * Somers Town (15) Origin: UK Year: 2008 Run time: 171 mins Director : Shane Meadows Cast : Thomas Turgoose, Perry Benson, Kate Dicki Two teenagers, both newcomers to London, forge an unlikely friendship over the course of...
I.E. Lester (Free subscription) | 10/04/2009
I have watched a lot of films in my life. Okay that statement hardly means I stand out from the crowd, most people in Britain (not to mention the USA, France, Italy, Germany, Japan, etc) almost certainly watch a lot of movies. From time to time I like to revisit some films I liked in previous decades, most notably the 1980s. This is the decade when I started really getting into movies, and science...
VDARE.com: Blog Articles (Free subscription) | 10/01/2009
Hiroshi Motomura’s Michigan Law Review article about Alien Nation showed up in a search result recently, and I had a look at what are some standard soundbites that critics complained of at the time. (An early example of what Kathy Shaidle calls “Ransom Note Racism.”) Motomura wrote Brimelow asserts that were it not for U.S. [...]
The Day Hollywood Stood Still (Free subscription) | 09/24/2009
What do you get when you take a South-African director with barely any experience, give him $30 million and let him go? The best summer blockbuster of the last ten years, that's what. Peter Jackson's new protege Neill Blomkamp was recently ditched by Hollywood execs who didn't think he was up to putting Halo on celluloid. To apologise, Jackson gave him the aformentioned budget and let him remake a...
D I Z Z Y (Free subscription) | 09/12/2009
This summer's crappy crop of movies nearly redeemed itself this week by squeezing in what I believe to be the best the season had to offer. Apart from the aforementioned Red Cliff , the brilliant Chinese war epic, the summer has now blessed us with South Africa's District 9 , Spain's Broken Embraces , and a very funny American rom-com, (500) Days of Summer . District 9 is worth all the hype it's been...
Wired: Danger Room (Free subscription) | 09/10/2009
District 9 is a good action flick that presents a neat allegory without getting overly preachy: Think Alien Nation meets Cry the Beloved Country. But like all sci-fi movies, some of the military stuff is a little, uh, questionable. So while the movie’s still in theaters, we thought we’d get the discussion going about some of [...]
(Southern Cross) Words (Free subscription) | 09/07/2009
Alien Nation That's an obvious parallel, although technology has improved markedly, enough so that aliens can be depicted as something other than Mandy Patinkin in a spotted skin-head wig , but District 9 is also generally better, mostly for the cringing, cowardly anti-hero Wikus, but also for a better pay-off at the end.
Slobber And Spittle (Free subscription) | 09/06/2009
Image credit: Publicity still from District 9 I don't get to see many science fiction movies anymore. The last one I saw, the new Star Trek , was a mindless explosion fest, so full of contradictions and absurdities I think I spent the last half of it dumbfounded. So, it was with a fair bit of trepidation that I went to District 9 , a South African production by Peter Jackson. Some of that trepidation...
Critic After Dark (Free subscription) | 09/05/2009
. Prawn salad The mix of genres that is Neill Blomkamp's District 9 (2009) is, I would argue, more monstrous than anything you see in the movie itself--imagine a military action thriller that mixes in huge flying saucers, hideous genetic experiments, various alien body parts, racism, crushing poverty, political satire; the resulting lurching, stitched-together, patchworked Frankenstein of a creation...
The Other Side of the Story (Free subscription) | 09/02/2009
I'm going to be a little more philosophical this week than normal, because I saw an interesting movie last night and it still has me thinking today. A bunch of us went to see District 9 . For those of you unfamiliar with the story, it's about a ship full of aliens that are spacewrecked on Earth and have spent the last twenty years living in a controlled area called District 9. Although they never say...
From the Dust Returned (Free subscription) | 08/25/2009
Recent years have seen quite the horrific drought in decent science fiction films. In an age where the rape of childhood IP's like the big screen adaptation tripe of Transformers and G.I.Joe: The Rise of Cobra (okay, okay, they both always sucked) top the box office, my assumption is that genre fans, both core and peripheral moviegoers have simply given up on quality, content to feed their complacency...
Queerty (Free subscription) | 08/19/2009
A new study that had participants thinking they were involved in a Alien Nation-style simulation — where instead of cooperating with gay humans, they were cooperating with aliens who operate under their own set of rules — finds such interventions can help lower prejudiced beliefs. All it takes to get some otherwise possibly homophobes to [...]
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