Wednesday 30 September 2009

Orson Scott Card

What seems like aeons ago I stated that I was going to be writing a fair bit about Ender's game the book, the graphic novel (comic for the fearless) and the criminally delayed movie.

Well I've been very fortunate in that Mr. Card has kindly agreed to answer some questions of mine about Ender, Ultimate Iron Man and many other things hopefully. Definitely NOT what his favourite colour is though.



I know he's one of the best authors around, when it comes to answering fan questions, but as I'm asking both as a fan AND as a contributor to the Sci-Fi channel website I still feel pretty privileged. He's one of my favourite authors, writer of what I consider to be one of the best books around, as well as numerous other quality works. If anyone has a serious question feel free to let me know, although I may be pushing my luck a little with the number of questions I already have.


Thanks for reading and if you haven't yet read Ender's game.... go, buy it, read it, read it again.

Saturday 26 September 2009

This is NOT a joke, seriously........

This is so bizarre, especially the Red Shirt one.............


No, I don't want it for Christmas

Sunday 20 September 2009

UK & US weekly film charts

Here we go again. The UK & US charts from last week; Friday the 11th to Thursday the 17th.

US Charts courtesy of Variety.com and UK chart courtesy of pa pa, pa pa, pa pa, pa pa, pa pa pa. pa pa, pa pa, pa pa, pa pa, pa pa, pa pa, paaaaaaaaaaaa, Pearl & Dean!

UK Weekly Box Office Sep 11 - Sep 17 






1.) District 9 (15)

2.)The Final Destination (15)

3.) Dorian Gray (15)

4.) Sorority Row (15)

5.) 500 Days Of Summer (12A)



                                       6.) Julie & Julia (12A)

                                       7.) Inglourious Basterds (18)
               
                                       8.) Aliens In The Attic (PG)

                                       9.) Funny People (15)

                                     10.) Adventureland (15)

                                   
                                       US Weekly Box Office Sep 11 - Sep 17 




1.) Tyler Perry's I Can Do Bad All By Myself. - $27,872,109

2.) 9 - $17,354,943

3.) Inglourious Basterds - $106,298,665

4.) All About Steve  - $23,278,421





                                      5.) The Final Destination  - $60,016,733

                                      6.) Whiteout  -  $6,422,590

                                      7.) Sorority Row - $6,380,984

                                      8.) District 9  - $109,772,206

                                      9.) Gamer - $17,583,862

                                     10.) Julie & Julia  - $4,485,999

Featured author on Sci-fi channel website. Is Pulitzer to follow?!


Strangely enough you have to scroll to the bottom to see me, but I have the honour of being the current Featured Author on The Sci-Fi channel's website.


Surely a column in The Times and a Pulitzer prize are just months away!




OK maybe not, but it's still cool, in a geeky kind of way.

Thursday 17 September 2009

3D Like it? Love it? Loathe it? Take the poll and let us know.



Hopefully you've read part one of my 3D series on the Scu-Fi channel's website. Right? Part two is due up any day now and having had a few telephone interviews with the players in the new push for 3D TV parts 4, 5 and 6 will be up soon too.

I need your help here to see what people think about 3d at the moment. Please fill in the (very short) poll and leave any comments you may have here or on the Sci-fi website. (Sci-Fi website is cool as it makes me look even more popular.) :)













































Saturday 12 September 2009

UK & US weekly film charts

A new featuure for me, it will get better I promise.
US Charts courtesy of Variety.com and UK chart courtesy of pa pa, pa pa, pa pa, pa pa, pa pa pa. pa pa, pa pa, pa pa, pa pa, pa pa, pa pa, paaaaaaaaaaaa Pearl & Dean

UK Box office


1-District 9 (15)
A live action sci-fier about a fictional world where extraterrestrials have become refugees in South Africa

2-The Final Destination (15)
In "FINAL DESTINATION: DEATH TRIP 3D" a teen's premonition of a deadly race-car crash spares his life and those of few lucky others, but death continues to stalk them...

3-500 Days Of Summer (12A)
When Tom (Jason "BRICK" Gordon-Levitt), a hapless greeting card copywriter and hopeless romantic, is blindsided after his girlfriend Summer (Zooey ("ELF") Deschanel) dumps him, he shifts back and forth through various periods of their 500 days 'together' to try to figure out where things went wrong

4-Inglourious Basterds (18)
The film "INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS" starring a large ensemble cast including Brad Pitt, Diane Kruger, French actress Melanie Laurent, horror film writer/director Eli Roth, and Mike Meyers, is set during WWII in Nazi-occupied France...

5-Funny People (15)
George Simmons (Adam Sandler) is a very successful yet self-involved stand-up comedian who learns that he has an inoperable blood disorder and is given less than a year to live..

6-Aliens In The Attic (PG)
A group of kids on a family vacation must fight off an attack by knee-high alien invaders with world-destroying ambitions--while the youngster's parents remain clueless about the battle....

7-The Time Traveler's Wife (12A)
Clare has been in love with Henry her entire life, she believes they are destined to be together, even though she never knows when they will be separated: Henry is a time traveler...

8-G-force 3-d (PG)
A 3D animated/live action feature about a team of trained secret agent animals: guinea pigs Darwin (Sam Rockwell), Juarez (Penélope Cruz), Blaster (Tracy Morgan), mole Speckles (Nicolas Cage), and fly Mooch (Edwin Louis)....

9-Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (12A)
Voldemort is tightening his grip on both the Muggle and wizarding worlds and Hogwarts is no longer the safe haven it once was....

10-Broken Embraces (15)
Pedro Almodovar teams up with Penelope ("ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER") Cruz once again in "BROKEN EMBRACES" ("LOS ABRAZOS ROTOS"), a drama set in the 1990's, but shot with a '50s noir sensibility....

North American Box office


1. Final Destination, The (Warner Bros.)
2. Inglourious Basterds (The Weinstein Company)
3. All About Steve (20th Century Fox)
4. Gamer (Lionsgate)
5. District 9 (Sony)
6. Julie & Julia (Sony)

7. Halloween II (The Weinstein Company)
8. GI Joe (Paramount)
9. Extract (Miramax)
10. Time Traveler's Wife.

Data provided by Rentrak

The 21st century 3D revolution: part 1 Now on Sci-Fi

 OK sorry it's been a while betweens posts.


My latest series has its first instalment posted on Sci-fi.co.uk today. It's about the latest attempt to get 3D cinema up and running, why it's happening how and why we should care. It's also going to deal with 3D video gaming, which is probably the most likely way that home 3D is going to take off.


Side by side with this is the growing campaign to get 3D TV up and running. 3D ready TVs are getting better, cheaper (still around £2,500!) and more varied and soon to be Joining the Japanese BSkyB are to launch Europe's first 3D channel next year.



Here's a peek, please remember to go over to http://www.scifi.co.uk/blog/science-technology/3d-back-to-the-future/ and read the whole thing, whilst telling the world how great it is.





Films, Football and games, Oh My!

If you've been anywhere near a cinema over the past 20 months or so you'll be aware that the third big push of 3D Cinema is at hand. If, like me, you're a glutton for the latest hi-tech news you'll also be aware that a similar push, most likely centred on Sports and gaming, has quietly been gathering pace in the Television department. As is often the way, when it comes to home entertainment, there are several differing methods and technologies vying for supremacy in the home 3D market, and not much in the way of a unified battle plan either. On the cinema front sporadic screenings of films like Chicken Little and Monster house notwithstanding, the third age of 3D cinema truly began with the Christmas 2007 release of the much underappreciated Beowulf.





Wednesday 2 September 2009

Fantasy is Back Part 4 of the Trilogy with 33.333% extra FREE!

Hey Hey

As Promised the 4th and final part of my fantasy series for the Sci-Fi channel's website is now up.
http://www.scifi.co.uk/blog/fantasy/fantasy-month-fantasy-is-back-2/
 It ran a little long so my editor, Pete (great guy even if he needs to watch more Miyazaki films!) wisely trimmed a bit off the end. You can read the whole blog here, but as always I'd love for you to check it out on the site and leave some comments.

Fantasy is back a Trilogy in 3 + 1 parts. Pt 4

Fantasy was taking the 21st Century by storm, in much the same way that Science Fiction had the last quarter of the 20th Century. Harry Potter raced to its third movie, (the first actually decent movie), and Lord of the Rings was reaching its glorious, Oscar laden, climax. The first, probable, result of their success, Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the extremely long titles had arrived to the surprise of most in Hollywood and to the pleasure of the movie going public. Its supernatural themes setting it and its even more successful sequels firmly in the Fantasy realm shared with Sinbad, rather than the pirate / swashbuckling movie pirate realm.


So there we were, in the era that was supposed to see a Star Wars trilogy leading Science fiction swiftly back to the top of the box office, with not one, not two but THREE fantasy film series proving more popular than the legendary sci-fi goliath. In the meantime Universal rushed out a Mummy sequel, it was another financial success and a children’s favourite, but one does wonder what might have been if they’d shown any amount of patience and allowed time for a better story to be written and, let’s face it, better effects to be rendered. There were other missteps rising out of the rush to make all things fantasy into movies.
The brilliantly conceived, but only partially realised Van Helsing was much more of a financial success than the media would have you believe; it was also more entertaining than certain sources suggest, but it was flawed. It was perhaps a victim of two, very important faults. Firstly, the film simply tried to do too much. It may have been better to add more meat to the bones of the many characters in the film and split it into two or three movies. There’s a lot of potential “untold” story and character development hiding behind the special effects sequences, even the Cartoon prequel could actually have been added to the start of the film lending more time and care to the Mr. Hyde chase. The second was t he casting. Sometimes a person can be TOO good for a role. Hugh Jackman is a fantastic actor, perhaps still a little under-appreciated in some quarters. His portrayal of Logan / Wolverine in the first two X-men films is dead on, (Yes Wolverine is about 30cm shorter than Jackman and his berserker side and killing skills have been used sparingly or not at all in the movies to date) but I defy you to fail to be moved when Rogue asks Logan if it hurts when he extends his claws and Jackman replies softly, “Every time”, the voice pitch, the expression, all of it is note perfect; as his attitude and desire to learn who he is. For those of you thinking “Hey Everton, wake up! You’re doing it again, get back on topic, we’re reading Fantasy, not X-Men!” I say HAH! I am still on topic, you see VanHelsing, as written by Stephen Sommers is basically Wolverine with Blade style gadgets and a slightly better, less amusing, attitude. Also you could argue better hair. So having watched the supreme X2 a year earlier we watched an inferior movie with Wolverine running around, looking for his past, without his Adamantium and yes turning out to have a very bestial dark side.
As mentioned above Van Helsing did not reach the financial heights of the Mummy films but was still a significant money maker.
The studios continued to rush into any fantasy related media in the hopes of making, not only a big movie, but of replicating the “franchise” success of the Rings and Potter movies. The dark is rising; his dark materials, The Spiderwick Chronicles, The Chronicles of Narnia and more were all rushed into production. So far only the Narnia series has definitely achieved Franchise status, thanks to the baffling response to The Lion The Witch & the Wardrobe. There was certainly a Christian push given to the story because of Aslan’s Christ like resurrection and other Christian themes thought to run through the book, but after the Lord of the Rings, and even the post Chris Columbus Potter movies, it was incredibly blah. Not awful, the source material is too good for that, but made with a decided lack of imagination. Tilda Swinton’s White Witch added much needed class, but pretty much everything else, from the flat direction given to Aslan’s voice, through the uninspired realisation of the “magical” creatures and the failure to realistically portray onscreen one of the most difficult parts of the book to believe. Not the creatures, or the reincarnation or Narnia itself. It’s the battles. You see 4 kids with no experience of any of the martial arts, not even fisticuffs. Yet the get pitched into the middle of a brutal war. Not just any war but one with fearsome creatures, with the strength of 10 men, and claws and swords and teeth. With no training at all they join battle and despite looking like children trying to hold weapons that are just a little too heavy and that they don’t quite know how to use. There really didn’t seem to be any imagination there.
Maugrim, the head of the White witch’s secret police is a wolf. That’s it, just an ordinary wolf; Ok he could talk but other than that just a regular, rather sledge dog looking, wolf. Now anyone who’s seen 300 should remember the storybook wolf at the start of the tale; Giant, with demon like eyes and death black fur. That’s what Maugrim should have been like, perhaps a little smaller but much more the “big, bad, wolf “of real faerie tales than a cute petting Zoo specimen. The far superior Prince Caspian made only 60% of the final gross of the Wardrobe movie, perhaps adding weight to the argument that the first film was less than satisfactory. Disney dropped their association with the “franchise” but Fox quickly snapped up distribution rights and the Voyage of the Dawn Treader is being filmed as you read this. (Well unless it’s midnight, or you’re reading this a year from now.)
So here we are at 2009. Two more tales from Middle Earth are on the way in the shape of two films based on The Hobbit. The final Harry Potter book is also being split into two films. A remake of Clash of the Titans is due in March 2010 and we have another Pirates of the Caribbean movie on the way. However it is a proposed trilogy of films based on a children’s cartoon that could prove to be fantasy’s Next big thing. More on Avatar: The Last Airbender or The last Airbender as the movie is known in “A Tale of Two Avatars” part II. http://www.scifi.co.uk/blog/films/a-tale-of-two-avatars-part-two/





Guy Ritchie to Direct Lobo movie

Breaking News.



Breaking Superhero book to movie news

Guy Ritchie has been hired to direct the Movie version of Lobo, the Dc comic book character. Created in the 80s as an extreme parody of Wolverine he achieved super cult status in the 90s and then went the way of all parodies; downhill. Still popular with his fan base he is a perfect movie character and Ritchie is very good when on form so let's hope it works out.


What price a film version of the Marvel/DC Amalgam series where Lobo actually gets into a fight with the object of his comedic origin Wolverine. Fans were more than a little surprised when a bone clawed (and thus severely weaker) Wolverine went toe to toe with and beat Lobo. Lobo had been seen trading blows with Superman and no matter how much you love Wolverine, even with adamantium on his bones Logan aint that strong bub.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
You are the resistance!

Fantay is back part three

Hi there,

Part three of my "Fantasy is back" series on The Sci-Fi channel's website is up now.
The final part will be up tomorrow. Please feel free to leave comments as it's always good to get a discussion going.

Thanks for reading and remember,

You are The resistance!