Film & TV

V was one of my favorite mini-series as a kid, and not just because it was one of the first times I was allowed to stay up late on a school night. The theme of benevolent oppressors struck a cord with my proto-libertarian self, and I loved the battle for Earth that unfolded over the course of several nights.

ABC is resurrecting the series for Fall 2009, and I'm cautiously optimistic. Here's the trailer:

My column about  science fiction folks worth following on Twitter is up on SciFiWire.com. It's a pretty expansive list, with 18 people in the main story, and another five that didn't make the active list, but were still worth noting. This pretty big project -- you wouldn't think it would be, Twitter being Twitter -- but it takes a goodly amount of time to find, follow and read this amount of Twitter feeds (actually, there were more than this during the research phase).

I'm a creature feature kind of guy. There are few things I enjoy more than a bowl of popcorn, a cold beer and a monster-of-the-week movie. So it goes without saying that BBC's Primeval - in which portals to the past unleash horrors upon modern Britan -- is my kind of show.

The complete Robotech series is available as digital downloads on Amazon.com, iTunes, and Xbox Live. Each major story arc -- Macross Saga, Southern Cross and New Generation -- is sold seperately. You can also buy or rent the sequel to the series, Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles.

If I ever get back to writing my Libertarian Gamer columns, I'll be sure to do one on the Living Dead. Zombie flicks have had political overtones almost since the beginning reaching their pinnacle with George Romero's Dawn of the Dead. Reason.com writer Tim Cavanaugh surveys  three books on the subject -- including my favorite Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture by Annalee Newitz -- and offers his own thoughts on the subject matter: 

Frak has gone mainstream. In the article "The curse word 'Battlestar Galactica' created" looks at the science fiction origins of the word, and how it's been creeping out of fandom, and into non-genre use.

The Dark Knight is brilliant. It’s intellectually challenging. It’s psychologically terrifying. And there’s a damn good chance it’ll scare the living daylights out of your 13-year-old.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to those who saw Batman Begins. The movie hews close to the comic books, which have run to the dark side ever since 1986’s The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller. Miller’s re-imagined Batman lived in a brutal, gritty world in which hope was a distant dream rarely realized. It’s a tradition that continued in some of the best Batman stories since then, such as Batman: Year One and The Long Halloween.

I remember when LOST jumped the shark. It was the episode dedicated to the mystery of Jack’s tattoo. It was an inane episode, one that existed entirely to buy time for the writers, while simultaneously keeping a popular character on screen for the majority of an episode. The episode could have been good – after all, LOST is all about those weird coincidences and strange meanings of every day occurrences. By this point in LOST’s evolution though, we had enough mysteries. We wanted answers. We got a tattoo.

Don’t watch The Mist. You may think you know how things go, having read Stephen King’s short story of the same name. You might like horror and think, "tentacled monstrosities from beyond the edge of time? I can deal with that."

But trust me. If you’re a geek dad or mom, and the kind of person who’d fight to the very end to protect your family, you don’t want to watch this movie. Hell, I watched it, and I wish I could unwatch it.

Yeah, it’s that disturbing.