m. c. de marco

Also via FireflyFans: Serenity, the Firefly movie, will be showing on the SciFi Channel Saturday, January 3rd at 9pm.

I’ve been wanting to see Fido (rated R for “zombie-related violence”) for a while. I was not disappointed in this cross between Shaun of the Dead and Lassie, although the reviews at Rotten Tomatoes were mixed and heavy with allegations that the movie is one idea stretched too far.

That one idea is the zombie control collar. In a technicolor alternate 1950s, space radiation raises the dead and the terrible Zombie War pushes them back down again. Like WWII, the Zombie War leads to peace and prosperity for the survivors, safe behind their chain-link Iron Curtain, with zombie maids, butlers, and gardeners for all. But whenever someone dies of natural causes or a tame zombie’s collar malfunctions, the traditional cheesy carnage ensues.

While it's true that a writer never has a vacation, I did finally get to watch Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog over the long weekend. It hardly needs my recommendation after being viewed over 2.2 million times in its first week and topping the iTunes charts for weeks afterwards.

Groundhog Day is this week’s 99 cent movie rental in the iTunes store. According to Wikipedia,

In 2006, Groundhog Day was added to the United States National Film Registry as being deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

Via SFScope: an original print of Metropolis has been found in Argentina.

Museum of Cinema Director Paula Felix-Didier said a private collector brought an original version of the film to Argentina in 1928, where it languished in the museum’s archives. It was rediscovered in April,

SciFi.com reports about the light and fluffy B-movie content of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening, which opens today:

“One of the things that I said to everybody—the cast and crew—I said, ‘This is a B movie,’” Shyamalan said in a press conference in New York on June 9. “Let’s get ourselves straight here. This is just a great B movie. We’re making the best B movie we can here. That’s our job. We’re making a B movie.

Not every movie can star Natan Sharansky, but The Andromeda Strain was an exceptional disappointment. Blogcritics Magazine has a negative review that touches briefly on the movie’s major weakness: poor technobabble.

Since the scientists actually do very little science, the script pads out the running time with plenty of pseudo-science, giving every actor a chance to graft on some ludicrous exposition without actually explaining a thing.