Author: Harper Kingsley

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Title: Pandorum
Genre: sci-fi, horror
Rating: R
Director: Christian Alvart
Writers: Travis Milloy (screenplay)
Stars: Dennis Quaid, Ben Foster, Cam Gigandet

Summary borrowed from IMDB: A pair of crew members aboard a spaceship wake up with no knowledge of their mission or their identities.

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If you like gritty sci-fi horror, then this movie is for you. A pretty slick trip into a future of horror, though the story is a little too good for simple popcorn fare. A great science fiction movie.

Amnesiac Bower (Ben Foster) wakes up in his stasis tube aboard the Elysium. Hypersleep can cause memory loss and a dangerous hallucination-laden mental state called Pandorum, amidst which other ships have had their commanders jettison the whole crew.

Upon waking, Bower is joined by Lieutenant Payton (Dennis Quaid) and they quickly discover that something is very wrong. The flight crews are supposed to be rotated over the course of their 123 year journey to Tanis. The rotation has been broken and no one has been maintaining the ship. They have no idea how long they’ve been asleep, and to top it all off they’re trapped in their crew berth, unable to access the bridge or its crew.

Desperate to gain control of the ship and discover what’s going on, Bower crawls through the innards of the ship in hopes of figuring out what’s happening. And that’s where everything really starts.

Featuring a hot chick with attitude, a Vietnamese agriculture worker that doesn’t seem to speak English, a crazy guy that just wants to survive, and a bunch of strange creatures that like to EAT people. Bower wonders how the creatures got on board the ship. He wonders if his family is somewhere in the family crew berths below or if they’re … Read the rest “RE MOVIE: Pandorum [sci-fi, horror]”

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"A Frozen Flower"

Movie: A Frozen Flower
Genre: mm, Korean, historical
Director: Ha Yu
Writer: Ha Yu (screenplay)
Stars: Jin-mo Ju, Ji-hyo Song, In-seong Jo
Rated: R for graphic violence, sex

IMDB says: A historical drama set in the Koryo dynasty and focused on the relationship between a king and his bodyguard.

HanCinema says: Source http://www.koreanfilm.or.kr  Synopsis:  In the end of Goryeo era politically manipulated by the Yuan Dynasty, the ambitious King of the Goryeo Dynasty organizes Kunryongwe. Hong Lim, the commander of Kunryongwe, captivates the King of Goryeo, and the Queen keeps her eyes on the relationship between Hong Lim and the King with a reluctant view. Meanwhile, the bilateral relation between Goryeo and the Yuan gets worse as Yuan demands to install the cousin of the King in the Crown Prince of Goryeo with ascribing it to no son the King has. The King refuses it resolutely, so the high-ranking officials of Goryeo, who are in submission to Yuan, are discontented with the king. One day, the King gives Hong Lim a covert yet unobjectionable order to sleep with the Queen instead of himself to protect the independence of Goryeo from the Yuan by making a son, the successor to Goryeo throne.

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So, okay, I watched this the other day and the only thing I can say is that the cinematography is excellent, as is the camera work in every scene. I fell in love with the characters and I desperately wanted them to have happiness in every regard. But given the nature of what they were doing and the time period when they were doing it in… well, there’s no other way it could have gone, not with the tone the movie was taking.

I honestly wish the King and guard could have loved each other the … Read the rest “RE MOVIE: A Frozen Flower [Korean]”

Title: Real Steel (2011)
Genre: sci-fi, boxing, ROBOTS
Directed by: Shawn Levy
Written by: John Gatins (screenplay), Dan Gilroy (story)
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Dakota Goyo, Evangeline Lilly

Summary borrowed from IMDB: A future-set story where robot boxing is a popular sport and centered on a struggling promoter (Jackman) who thinks he’s found a champion in a discarded robot. During his hopeful rise to the top, he also discovers he has an 11-year-old son who wants to know his father.

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My rating: 3 out of 5. A great popcorn movie, but as I’m not a 12-year old boy, probably something I’d only watch once.

Review: Charlie Kenton (Hugh Jackman) is a down on his out ex-boxer, current robot boxing contestant. A foolhardy risk taker, he owes money all over the place and is desperate for a single win. But when his ex-girlfriend is killed in an accident, Charlie is left with the custody of the eleven year old son he’s never met.

The boy, Max, has been taken in by his maternal aunt who wants to have custody of him. Charlie agrees to sign the custody papers after talking her much-older husband into ponying up $100,000 to pay for the child–half now and half later.

Charlie takes the boy and uses the money to buy himself a new robot boxer. From there, it becomes an all-out rock ’em, sock ’em  robot experience.

What you have here is Hugh Jackman, a bunch of giant robots, a cute kid, and an underdog story. So if you like all that… this is your movie. And even if you don’t like all that, it’s still a popcorn movie that will leave you thoroughly entertained.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2Qsng9CPwI

Title: Merchanter’s Luck (Company Wars, #2)
Author: C.J. Cherryh
Genre: sci-fi
Summary: The fateful meeting between the owner of a tramp star-freighter that flies the Union planets under false papers and fake names and a proud but junior member of a powerful starship-owning family leads to a record-breaking race to Downbelow Station — and a terrifying showdown at a deadly destination off the cosmic charts.

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

This is a great book. I liked Cyteen, but I didn’t like a lot of the other Alliance-space novels as much. I just wasn’t that into the ideas behind them.

“Merchanter’s Luck” has a different feel from the Alliance-space novels, at least it does to me. It’s about a man alone on his merchant ship that comes to a station and meets a girl. It just so happens that the girl is from a powerful merchant family that numbers in the hundreds. They’re like a nation all their own. And he’s just one man.

After she bails him out of jail, he gets talked into taking the woman and a couple of her cousins on as crew. They basically take over his ship, which has him freaking out. Then they go to deliver a cargo they manage to get and the story starts.

This is a “classic sea tale,” but on board a spaceship. It features a protagonist coping with severe mental trauma who now has to deal with strangers invading his personal space. It’s not some socio-political treatise on the life and times of people in the future. It’s just a straight up story with interesting, likable characters and entertaining scenes of action. And maybe a little bit of romance.

Haunted by the ghost of you,
the things you said,
and made me do;
the darkness that called out to me,
pulled me in,
set me free.
I lie here in my bed at night,
dream of you,
our Maybe Life,
regret the choices that we made,
the love you took into the grave.