Watch Flashforward, Episode One Robert Sawyer’s Flashforward has been made into an ABC miniseries. It is a masterpiece. I haven’t read the book, so I don’t know how faithful the series is to the original book, but the book won an Aurora Award. The premise is that everyone blacks out at the same moment for [...]
Archive for the ‘review’ Tag
Flashforward: the Excellence that “Knowing” could have been Leave a comment
Realistic Science Fiction: District 9 3 comments
This is an amazing film, both for what it sets out to do, and for what it accomplishes. Taking the form of a documentary, it brings science fiction as close to real as I’ve ever seen it. It is the documentary form, I think, that convinces a viewer that this is happening, or has happened. [...]
Star Trek: Playful, Exciting, Character-driven 3 comments
Star Trek has come a long way and just when you thought there were no surprises left, they show up. I’ll admit, the last few Star Trek movies left me cold. Nemesis bombed because the writer tried to copy too much from ST2 but without any of the heart. Insurrection was a trite story line. [...]
The City of Ember: Clever Assignments For Everyone 1 comment
The City of Ember is a great fun family film, full of clever, unlockable mysteries. It comes with a map, all torn up and faded; it comes with a “ticking clock”–the fear that the city will wind up in the dark; and plenty of menacing obstacles. The ending leaves you wishing to be back in [...]
Stardust Shines: Character Motivation-ism 3 comments
Sometimes it’s simply about giving everyone something to want, something realistic, and then setting them on their paths. Stardust, the Neil Gaiman-inspired movie, does a great job of giving characters real desires and then setting them at odds with each other. If you are writing science fiction or fantasy, even well-developed characters function at half-power [...]
The Wonderfulness of “It’s A Wonderful Life” 3 comments
This is my favorite Christmas movie. So I’m a bit palled by recent articles that this is a dark film, or that George Bailey should never have been born. Mainly, this is a response to a NYT article (and a short video commentary) about the “dark side” of “It’s a Wonderful Life.” (But you can [...]
New Armour, Same Climax: a review of Iron Man 2 comments
Now the title is gonna make you think I didn’t like Iron Man. But I did. I enjoyed it. Robert Downey Jr. is not the most conventional superhero actor–and he definitely brings a new level of cycnism and self-deprecating humour to the superhero idea. The heart-device is completely cool–and makes our hero vulnerable. There’s great [...]
How Kung Fu Panda Gets Fantasy Writing Right 1 comment
Brilliantly concevied and executed, Kung Fu Panda soars as a Fantasy compared to The Forbidden Kingdom. And essentially, they have the same plot. Take a fan of martial arts and make him the only one who can stop the big villain in a martial arts film. The post-modernism of films is actually a delight to [...]
How not to write Fantasy: The Forbidden Kingdom 2 comments
The movie is based on one of the oldest known novels, Journey to the West, a Chinese Epic. Written down finally in the 1590s from oral stories dating much farther back, it’s 100 chapters long and is one of the four classic novels of Chinese literature, so any screenwriter would have challenges in writing up [...]
