Word: sci
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...which was released in April. Based on a 1970s animated series, the movie depicts an Orwellian dystopia where mankind is threatened with destruction by robots and mutants of its own creation, and humanity's only hope is the idealistic android Casshern. Though the premise is run-of-the-mill sci-fi and the actors often sound absurdly bombastic, the movie is visually breathtaking. Director Kazuaki Kiriya brings to life a sooty, machine-age hell that's all grinding gears, clanking metal and monolithic buildings swathed in Cyrillic characters. The fact that the movie was made for only $6 million...
...lousy, but The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (Xbox; $50) might just be better than the movies (Pitch Black and The Chronicles of Riddick) it was spun off from. In Butcher Bay, the bald, bass-voiced badass Riddick has just been locked up in a high-security sci-fi slammer, and he's hell-bent on shivving and shooting his way out of it. Game play is a tasty mix of hand-to-hand fighting and gunplay, relieved by some smartly scripted role playing and problem solving, but the real pleasure is the stunning graphics: everything looks...
Television critics will tell you that The Bionic Woman was just another cheesy '70s sci-fi series, but for Ayanna Howard it was a springboard to a career. When she was 12 years old, she became so captivated by the show's cyborg premise that she started reading books that reaffirmed the concept of integrating machines with humans. A thousand reruns and an electrical-engineering Ph.D. later, she's creating robots that think like humans for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "The Bionic Woman showed real, brilliant people giving life through bionics," says Howard, now 32. "I figured I could...
...resolved in an hour, sell better in reruns. Series like Alias and 24, which have deeply involving serial plots, are poor candidates for reruns, but they have committed fan bases willing to buy DVDs. And while Top 10 hits like Friends and ER sell well on DVD, animated, sci-fi and other kinds of cult shows do best, in proportion to their ratings...
...Gondry had a peculiar story to tell, but "wanted people to get it," so he injected this sci-fi fantasy with flashes of reality - the occasional shakiness of a handheld camera and a palette that, except for Clementine's orange or blue hair, is muted, melancholy and truer to life than Hollywood's Technicolor hues. But the denouement almost veered into classic Hollywood schmaltz. As he prepared to shoot the ending, Gondry was still debating with Kaufman about whether to add a twist in which Joel would wake up as if it had all been a dream...