Z/Web

This is an excellent collection of science fiction short stories and novellas that were made into great motion pictures. It’s wonderful, with incredible variety that makes science fiction so awesome. We’ve got the original stories that inspired The Fly, Total Recall, The Thing, 2001 — A Space Odyssey, Re-Animator, The Illustrated Man, The Day the Earth Stood Still, They Live, Death Race 2000, Damnation Alley, Millenium, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Enemy Mine, and many more. The stories are often quite different from the films (“The Fly,” for instance, is set in Paris), but they’re obviously special stories that inspired directors to make them into films. This is a profound collection that will make you think and inspire you to watch some great science fiction films.

A decent mystery movie with Sandra Bullock as a detective trying to nail two high school students for murder. The main problem is that we know from the beginning the students did it and framed someone else, so there isn’t much mystery. There’s some attempts at characterization, with Sandra’s character haunted by her past, but that’s mediocre at best. What’s interesting are the characters of the two high school students, a bored rich kid and an intellectual geek who knows all the forensic secrets of the police. Unfortunately, the ending is rather ordinary: I would have much prefered a Primal Fear type ending (where the geek gets away with it) — that would have been cool.