Mordin Solus: The very model of a scientist Salarian.
Note: this review contains spoilers. Proceed at your own risk. It also assumes you’re familiar with the Mass Effect universe.
Shortly after defeating rogue spectre Saren, his Reaper master Sovereign, and their Geth army, our hero, Commander Shepard, is killed in an attack by the mysterious Collectors. This being science fiction, even death won’t keep Shepard down, and she (or he) is brought back by the pseudo-terrorist human-first group Cerberus (whom you might remember from Mass Effect, where they were involved in all manner of disreputable business). With her old crew having moved on and with a brand-new Normandy, Shepard must now gather a new team (but with a couple of familiar faces) to join her on a suicide mission through the uncharted Omega 4 relay to stop the Collectors and their masters — the Reapers. [...]
Tags: 2000s, BioWare, Casey Hudson, Drew Karpyshyn, Mac Walters, RPG, Science Fiction
Safety first, that's my motto.
The first Skate, released in 2007, was a revelation — it turned the skateboarding game on its head, reinvigorating a genre that seemed doomed to consist of nothing more than increasingly tired Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater sequels. The analogue controls of Skate were fluid and intuitive and, combined with the open game-world, helped propel the game to the top of both sales charts and critics’ year-end lists.
Here, then, is its sequel. And, let’s get it out of the way early: it is a good game. But it’s also basically the same game. There are new features, of course, which range from the good — footplants — to the atrocious — walking. This latter surprised me, since you’d think Black Box would have learned from THPS’s continually poor off-the-board controls that an engine designed for skating will never be good at walking. [...]
Tags: 2000s, EA Black Box, Electronic Arts, Scott Blackwood, Skateboarding, Sports
Arnie (Jerry Mathers) is the first to have trouble with Harry.
The trouble with Harry, not to put too fine a point on it, is that he’s dead. And not only is he dead, he was inconsiderate enough to leave his body lying around, causing no end of problems for the living. Captain Wiles (Edmund Gwenn) thinks he accidentally shot Harry while rabbit hunting, Miss Gravely (Mildred Natwick) thinks she killed him with a hiking boot, and Harry is found and hidden, buried and unburied, more times than anyone cares to remember. Captain Wiles, Miss Gravely, artist Sam Marlowe (John Forsythe), and Harry’s estranged wife, Jennifer Rogers (Shirley MacLaine), try to figure out who exactly killed Harry, what to do with his troublesome body, and how to keep Deputy Calvin Wiggs (Royal Dano) in the dark. Meanwhile, love blossoms between Sam and Jennifer and between Captain Wiles and Miss Gravely, and a millionaire art collector (Parker Fennelly) becomes interested in Sam’s work. [...]
Tags: 1950s, Alfred Hitchcock, Bernard Hermann, Comedy, Edmund Gwenn, Jack Trevor Story, Jerry Mathers, John Forsythe, John Michael Hayes, Mildred Dunnock, Mildred Natwick, Parker Fennelly, Philip Truex, Royal Dano, Shirley MacLaine
Rorschach works out some of his issues with women.
Released in two parts — March and July 2009, respectively — The End is Nigh is something of a prequel to the Watchmen film and comic book series, set in 1972, before the passing of the Keane Act that outlawed masked vigilantes.
In the first part, Rorschach (voiced by Jackie Earle Haley) and Daniel “Nite Owl” Dreiberg (Patrick Wilson) set out to quell a prison riot at Sing Sing. The riot turns out to be a diversion for the escape of crime lord The Underboss, and our caped crusaders end up fighting their way through criminals and cops alike trying to find him, and possibly stop the plot to kill two reporters at The Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. The second part concerns the kidnapping of a girl named Violet Greene, and finds Nite Owl and Rorscach chasing Twilight Lady through strip clubs and brothels, fighting gangs, gimps, and dominatrices. (The voice acting of the gimps and doms is quite funny, especially the ball-gagged ones.) [...]
Tags: 2000s, Action, Deadline Games, Jackie Earle Haley, Len Wein, Patrick Wilson, Watchmen, Xbox 360, Xbox Live Arcade
Yeah. That's a lot of Helvetica.
I’ve studied design — I have a degree and everything — I’ve dabbled with typography (and with lettering), and, beneath my veneer of post-modernism and cyborg feminism, I’m a modernist at heart. So, I’ve always had a soft spot for Helvetica, the quintessential modernist typeface. Still, while its history and ubiquity are undoubtedly interesting, I wouldn’t have thought any typeface, even Helvetica, could generate enough material to fill a feature-length documentary. [...]
Tags: 2000s, Design, Documentary, Gary Hustwit, Helvetica
My mother always talked to me a lot about the sky. She liked to watch the clouds in the day, and the stars at night. Especially the stars. We would play a game sometimes, a game called “What’s beyond the sky?” We would imagine darkness, or a blinding light, or something else that we didn’t know how to name.
John (Eric Close) shows that magic is all about misdirection. Misdirection and telekinesis.
In 1947, a military balloon, part of the top secret “Project Mogul”, crashed in Roswell, New Mexico. Out of this single incident grew an entire mythos of alien crash landings and abductions. And it’s around this incident that writer Leslie Bohem builds his generation spanning alien contact saga, Taken. [...]
Tags: 2000s, Alf Humphreys, Aliens, Catherine Dent, Dakota Fanning, Eric Close, Joel Gretsch, Leslie Bohem, Michael Moriarty, Roswell, Science Fiction, Steve Burton, Steven Spielberg, Tina Holmes, Tope Hooper
John Oldman (David Lee Smith) ponders.
What if a man from the Upper Paleolithic survived until the present day?
What would he be like? Mortality is one of the defining characteristics of humanity; what would a man be like who will not die? A man who is fourteen thousand years old: he’s not only seen friends and lovers, wives and children come and go, he remembers the end of the last glacial period. He has, literally, forgotten more than any of us will ever know.
Jerome Bixby (1923–1998) was a science fiction writer, most famous for a handful of classic Trek episodes, including “Mirror, Mirror” which introduced the mirror universe, and for co-writing the story for Fantastic Voyage (1966). He began his last work, a screenplay called The Man from Earth, in the 1960s and finished it on his deathbed. Forty years is a long time to spend on a script, but it pays off in one of the most intelligent science fiction films I’ve seen. [...]
Tags: 2000s, Alexis Thorpe, Annika Peterson, David Lee Smith, Ellen Crawford, Jerome Bixby, John Billingsley, Neil Grieve, Richard Riehle, Richard Schenkman, Science Fiction, Tony Todd, William Katt
Jack O'Neill (Richard Dean Anderson) admires a visual effect.
One year after the mission in Stargate (1994), the Abydos stargate is believed destroyed and the Earth stargate is inactive. However, when a group of aliens, lead by a man with glowing eyes, appear from the Earth stargate, Jack O’Neill (Richard Dean Anderson) is called back from retirement. He leads a team to Abydos, where he finds Daniel Jackson (Michael Shanks) alive and well, and with a new theory — the stargate can go to other places than just Abydos. In fact, says Jackson, there’s a network of stargates all over the galaxy. Just like in the feature, the only other scientist present, Captain Doctor Samantha Carter (Amanda Tapping), initially scoffs at Jackson’s theory, but he’s of course soon proved right, Abydos is attacked, and the stargate program is reactivated. SG-1 (Jack, Daniel, Samantha) heads to Chulak to rescue Daniel’s wife, Sha’re (Vaitiare Bandera), and Skaara (Alexis Cruz, the only actor reprising his role from the feature) and meet up with the “First Prime of Apophis”, Teal’c (Christopher Judge). [...]
Tags: 1990s, Alexis Cruz, Amanda Tapping, Brad Wright, Children of the Gods, Christopher Judge, Jonathan Glassner, Mario Azzopardi, Michael Shanks, Mili Avital, Richard Dean Anderson, Science Fiction, SG-1, Stargate, Vaitiare Bandera
One of Van Gogh's lesser known works: Crazy Woman and Sunflowers.
There are good directors, there are bad directors, and then there are directors like Jesús “Jess” Franco. I like Franco, but the man is a cipher: his œuvre consists of a great many bad films and a few gems; he seems often to be technically incompetent, but he was good enough to A.D. for Orson Welles; his films are often blatantly pornographic and shamelessly exploitative, but a very few of them are honest-to-god works of genius. You can watch ten of his movies, and nine of them will be awful. Then, just when you’re about to dismiss him as a hack, the tenth will be a weird, surreal, seemingly-accidental masterpiece. I honestly can’t decide if he’s just a hack who happened to make a few good films from some twisted law of probability or if he’s a good director who only occasionally cared enough, was given enough money, and free enough reins to put in some effort. My relationship with Franco’s work is a constant search for those aberrations in his œuvre. [...]
Tags: 2000s, Carmen Montes, Exploitation, Fata Morgana, Jess Franco, Lesbian Horror, LGBT, Lina Romay, Snakewoman, Vampire, Vampyros Lesbos
Lady Alexander (Luciana Paluzzi) moonlights as Jane's (Camille Keaton) hairstylist.
Before hitting the big time, such as it was, in Day of the Woman (Zarchi, 1978), Camille Keaton spent several years in Italy making low-budget movies such as this one, which has the lovely, giallo-tinged original title Extracts from the secret archives of a European capital’s police force.
The plot concerns three ostensibly British gentlemen and a girl (at least, the script seems to think it’s set in Britain, given the references to the Scotland Yard): Bill (Tony Isbert), a rich boy with a mommy complex; Joe (Máximo Valverde) and Fred (Giovanni Petrucci), a couple of working-class guys who are seemingly just out to scam some money from Bill; and Jane (Camille Keaton). The relationships between our heroic quartet is never made clear, except that all the boys seem to be infatuated with young Jane. And really, who can blame them? [...]
Tags: 1970s, Black Mass, Camille Keaton, Exploitation, Giallo, Giovanni Petrucci, Horror, Jess Franco, José Calvo, José Gutiérrez Maesso, Leonardo Martín, Luciana Paluzzi, Mario Bianchi, Máximo Valverde, Paul Müller, Riccardo Freda, Robert Hampton, Tony Isbert, Tragic Ceremony
