Maximum Ride (2016) -Jay Martin

James Patterson’s young adult novel series, Maximum Ride, takes flight cimematically this week from Paramount Pictures. I read the first book when it came out in 2005. It was fun, engaging. Patterson is a very entertaining and imaginative writer, and Max seemed perfectly suited for exploration in other media. The downside to this big screen…

Heavy Metal 2000 (2000) – Michael Coldewey & Michel Lemire

Almost 20 years after the first film, Heavy Metal 2000 returns with more animated science fiction, as I continue to work my way through the Sci-Fi Chronicles book. While the animation may be stronger this time around, everything else seems to suffer. Eschewing the anthology format that served the first film so well, not to…

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) – Robert Wise

  The Sci-Fi Chronicles lets me settle in to enjoy another one of my favorites… featuring one of my favorite film scores, this one by Jerry Goldmsith, the U.S.S. Enterprise leaps from the small screen to the the theatrical one with this first film which isn’t for everyone, but the older I get, the more…

Star Wars: Bloodline (2016) – Claudia Gray

  Claudia Gray who wowed me with her young adult Star Wars novel, Lost Stars, returns to that galaxy, far, far away, this time centering on a story about Princess Leia Organa. Set twenty years after the destruction of the second Death Star at the Battle of Endor, and ten years before the events of…

Toronto Screenwriting Conference 2016 Day One

  Not that I need a break from Hot Docs yet, if ever, but there is a lot going on this weekend, and Sue and I were delighted to be invited back for our fourth time to cover the Toronto Screenwriting Conference. The conference is always amazing, and Sue and I start with the best…

Star Wars: Dark Disciple (2015) – Christie Golden

  The new Star Wars expanded canon universe is well on its way to being very impressive, and it’s book like Golden’s Dark Disciple that are doing it. Based on a set of unproduced scripts from the Clone Wars series, the book explores a pair of interesting characters and expands on their lives, their emotions,…

Stargate (1994) – Roland Emmerich

  The adventures continue with the Sci-Fi Chronicles book, as I kcik back and enjoy Kurt Russell and James Spader in this science fiction actioner that seems to be heavily influenced by Chariots of the Gods, and wonderfully marries Egyptian mythology, with action, and space opera. Long before the successful television series, Colonel Jack O’Neil…

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003) – Stephen Norrington

  The Sci-Fi Chronicles plunges us into the world of Alan Moore’s graphic novels with this film adaptation of his work directed by Stephen Norrington, which suffers from a bit of a haphazard script that hinted at great potential, and just failed horribly to have it pay off. It’s a great idea (mostly), using characters…