Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985) from Kennedy Miller Productions The Fast Facts: Who: Directed by Australians George Miller (Mad Max, Mad Max: Road Warrior) and George Ogilvie, acted by scruffy Aussie Mel Gibson, and with an eye-catching performance by non-Aussie Tina Turner. What: The third in the Mad Max series about a rough and ready…
Guess what? It’s spoiler free! —The Editor Captain America: The Winter Soldier has a lot of responsibilities to balance for a superhero action film. It’s a Captain America sequel, an Avengers sequel, and an important building block in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) Phase Two. With fiery car chases, martial arts duels, and more S.H.I.E.L.D….
Spring is here and Summer is on its way—according to the calendar anyway. And that means only one thing: get ready for con season! Falling at the end of March, Emerald City Comicon may not be the very first convention of the year, but it seems to be the one to really kick off con…
Dune (1984) from Dino De Laurentis Productions The Fast Facts: Who: Directed by David Lynch (Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Eraserhead), Kyle MacLachlan (Twin Peaks) debuts as the singular Paul Atreides, while actors like Patrick Stewart, Max von Sydow, and Brad Dourif play secondary characters (!). What: Paul Atreides, the son of Duke Leto Atreides and…
Battling Boy is a small, colorful volume put out by publisher First Second, and written and drawn by Paul Pope. It takes place mainly in the wrecked city of Arcopolis, and stars the eponymous youth known as Battling Boy (or simply Boy). Put simply, if Thor came to an alternate history, early twentieth century earth…
(WARNING: Potential Captain America: The Winter Soldier spoilers ahead. Proceed with caution.) There is no “nerd cred” test to watch a Marvel blockbuster. And if Marvel keeps doing what it’s doing, there never will be. But this little rundown might make it a bit easier to talk to any superfan friends you might have, or just to anyone…
The Thing (1982) from Universal Pictures The Fast Facts: Who: John Carpenter directed, Kurt Russell played the impressively bearded protagonist, and Rob Bottin created some memorable SFX and creatures. What: After bringing us Halloween (1978) and before directing Big Trouble in Little China (1986), Carpenter created this compact film that comfortably straddles the line between…
While it smarts to admit it, I am not the most proficient video game player. Not the worst, mind you, just nothing worth bragging about. There was, however, one game from my younger days that always got me excited to slam those buttons: Super Smash Bros. In what is one of the most plotless set…
Predator (1987) from Twentieth Century Fox The Fast Facts: Who: Directed by John McTiernan (director of Die Hard, The Hunt for Red October), starring the scruffy, cigar-chomping Arnold Schwarzenegger, and with award-winning music by Alan Silvestri. (And Shane Black, now known as a director, acted a part as well!) What: A half-dozen US commandos and…
I still haven’t seen the new RoboCop, but I hear the most striking difference between the 1987 original and this newer version is how many fewer blood squibs make it on-screen. Yes, the improvements in CG animation means that the 300: Rise of an Empire can douse its characters in blood without having to do…
The appeal of the video game Reset, as our Editor wrote in a previous article, stems from its lush visuals, cool time-jump related game play, and an intriguing lack of details on the game’s actual plot. The teaser and later game trailer showcase these to perfection, giving its audience shots of an abandoned city, realistic…
The book-turned-movie Ender’s Game is what made me first ponder this subject, and thanks to the theater release of dystopian YA series, Divergent, I haven’t stopped thinking about it. Perhaps a change in medium can be enlivening to some books, but it is also true that there are just some beloved stories that we would hate…
