FilmCritic entries tagged "i am legend"

John Scalzi on Scifi

John Scalzi - Does Your Favorite Sci-fi Movie Do Right by Its Female Characters?

by John Scalzi on Jul 28 2010
John Scalzi - Does Your Favorite Sci-fi Movie Do Right by Its Female Characters?
Have you ever heard of the Bechdel test? It's a test, popularized by cartoonist Alison Bechdel, that asks three questions of movies:

1. Are there at least two women characters in the film?
2. Who talk to each other?
3. About something other than a man?

If a film fulfills all three, then it passes the Bechdel test. If it doesn't, then it doesn't. The point of the Bechdel test, among other things, is to note that even here, in the twenty-first century, the role of women in film is very often to be support for the male roles or to keep the story and audience focused on the male protagonist. Whether that means something to you or not is really up to you, but, as a creative person myself, I do find it an interesting test to apply to my own work.
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Sigler on Horror

Scott Sigler - The Ten Highest-Grossing (and Grossest) Monsters of the '00s

by Scott Sigler on Jan 7 2010

jigsaw-sigler.jpg

Now, while I'm as down for a gross-out contest as the next guy, this column isn't about the "yech" kind of gross. It's about the box office kind: This is a list of the Top Ten highest-grossing monsters of the last decade.

The movies involved didn't necessarily have to be horror, but they had to have some kind of monster. Human monsters only for slasher and serial-killer flicks, of course, but a scifi flick with a big bad or even -- egads -- a kids' movie with a recurring monster could make the cut. It had to have opened between January 2000 and December 2009, and numbers were taken from The Numbers.com. It's a big list, so let's get right to it.

10. Alien and Predator (tie): $301,428,013
What? How did these '80s throwbacks claw their way into new-millennia box-office gold? Why, with tag-team powers that would make the Wonder Twins just sit the eff down, that's how. Alien vs. Predator and Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem racked up enough dough to land these two classic baddies at number ten. Of course, no monster list is really complete without these cats, so I'm glad to see them walking side-by-side on the red carpet. Not that I want to be at that particular red carpet, mind you. I'm just glad they are.

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Scifi

Toys, Comics, Sequels, Remakes - John Scalzi Charts SciFi's Box Office Success in the '00s

by John Scalzi on Dec 10 2009
Toys, Comics, Sequels, Remakes - John Scalzi Charts SciFi's Box Office Success in the '00s

As we wrap up the decade in science fiction movies, let's look at a list of the twenty most financially successful science fiction movies since 2000 -- as collated by IMDb Pro -- to see what we can learn. Are these flicks especially creative? Do they have big stars? Are they director driven? Put simply, if you're making science fiction, what is your easiest path to ridiculous levels of success?

Easy: Toys, Comics, Sequels, Remakes. Out of the top twenty scifi movies of the last decade, 80 percent -- that's sixteen out of twenty, if you don't want to do the math -- are based on comics or toys and/or a sequel and/or a remake.

Lets go to the numbers, which represent domestic box office take:

1. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen ($402 million): Sequel, Toys
2. Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith ($380 million): Sequel
3. Transformers ($319 million): Toys, Remake (if you count the '80s animated flick, and yeah, I do. Hey, it had Orson Welles in it. And Leonard Nimoy!)
4. Iron Man ($318 million): Comics
5. Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones ($311 million): Sequel
6. The Matrix Reloaded ($281 million): Sequel
7. Star Trek ($250 million): Remake and Sequel, which is a nice trick if you think about it
8. I Am Legend ($256 million): Remake
9. X-Men: The Last Stand ($234 million): Sequel, Comics
10. War of the Worlds ($234 million): Remake

So the entire top ten science movies of the 2000s were Toys, Comics, Sequels, Remakes. What about the next ten?

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Scifi

Harry Potter Producer David Heyman on Cult SciFi vs. Potter-Mania

by Clayton Neuman on Jul 20 2009
<em>Harry Potter</em> Producer David Heyman on Cult SciFi vs. Potter-Mania

The producer for the Harry Potter series explains omitting funerals and battles from Half-Blood Prince and maps out Harry's journey in the seventh and eighth movies.


Q: When it comes to the Harry Potter movies, the decision is always what to include and what to skip. Did you find that process more difficult for Half-Blood Prince?


A: The governing principle with all of them is to tell the story from Harry's point of view, so, necessarily, a lot falls by the wayside. I feel like this movie is the most faithful to the spirit of Jo's book: The way we flip-flop back and forth between comedy and drama, the focus on the relationships -- that's a real pleasure. In a way, a lot of this is the set up for the next movie -- Voldemort is not as active a player, so we spent a little less time with the memories of him. We wanted to spend more time with Ron, Hermione, Harry -- and of course Malfoy's struggles and the parallel notion of him being the chosen one, too.


Q: Tom Felton, who plays Malfoy, really grew into his character -- which seems fortunate for you. Did you run into any surprises over the years as the actors have aged?


A: You certainly don't cast for the future: When we began, we were casting for the immediate, for the first film. So we've had good fortune in the sense that they haven't gotten into trouble, they haven't checked into rehab, and at the same time they've developed as actors. Really, the surprise is that we haven't had any duds.

Q: Harry Potter has gone through its fair share of directors. What made you decide on David Yates to finish the series?

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Scifi

SciFi Dept - Hit the Post-Apocalyptic Road, Jack

by AMCtv.com on Jan 21 2009
Join members of a post-apocalyptic book club while they journey through the best and worst scifi survival movies and look ahead to Viggo Mortensen's The Road.... more »

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Horror

Horror Power Ranking - January 19, 2009

by Alex Zalben on Jan 19 2009
My Bloody Valentine sticks it out at number one, while two vampire comedies round out the top three.... more »

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Horror

Horror Power Ranking - December 8, 2008

by Alex Zalben on Dec 8 2008
Zombie start to take over the Horror Ranking, but vampires are holding on for dear life.... more »

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Horror

Horror Vampire Power Ranking - December 1, 2008

by Alex Zalben on Dec 1 2008
Vampires take over the Horror Power Ranking this week, but it's a Vampire Slayer that takes the top slot.... more »

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Horror

Horror Power Ranking - September 29, 2008

by Alex Zalben on Sep 29 2008
Fears of the Dark stays at the top of the list, while Twilight remains in the number-ten slot.... more »

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Sigler on Horror

Scott Sigler - Werewolves? No. Ghosts? No. Microbes? Now That's Real Horror

by Scott Sigler on Sep 18 2008
Scott Sigler - Werewolves? No. Ghosts? No. Microbes? Now That's Real Horror

Novelist Scott Sigler's horror column appears every Thursday.

Zombies, werewolves, and ghosts can be downright frightening, and entice us to toss down $11 for a movie ticket, but we all know these creatures aren't real. We can watch those flicks and know we are safe -- Dracula isn't going to kick in the back door and feast on Aunt Mabel. There is, however, a certain strain of horror that gets us where we live, because it has happened before and will happen again.

Microbes. The Black Death whacked 75 million peeps. Let's see Jason beat that body count. The Spanish Flu of 1918 killed an estimated 100 million people -- around five percent of the entire world population. Bird Flu, SARS, flesh-eating bacteria; the media constantly tries to fire us up about "the next plague." I referenced microbial terror in Monster Taxonomy, Chapter Two, but only in the context of zombies. Here's a professional opinion:

"Microbes are probably related to somewhere around 25 percent of all fatalities worldwide, whereas the undead are probably only responsible for heart palpitations," says Dr. Kirsten Sanford, Ph.D. "Microbes are scarier than imaginary monsters because they are really here, and we don't know nearly enough about them to protect ourselves. The next big killer could be lurking in the shadows of the jungle waiting for its chance to spread. Or, it could be in your bathroom..."

That gestalt of fear makes for great movie terror. A comprehensive list of microbial horror movies would be too long to list, so I've thrown down a few interesting flicks along with a "plausibility rating" to show if the movie's concept could actually happen (that is, make you literally puke your guts out until you die a very nasty death).

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