Lesson one: The aliens never, ever come in peace

‘Battle: Los Angeles’ is sure to round up some of our favorite alien-invasion cliches

Global warming and the occasional hurricane aside, the Earth is a pretty nice place to live. No wonder aliens are constantly trying to conquer it. The latest assault by hostile visitors from outer space comes in “Battle: Los Angeles,” debuting in theaters March 11.

If it seems a little familiar, well, it is — the basic template of alien-invasion stories has been in place for more than 100 years, ever since novelist H.G. Wells created the definitive model in 1898′s “War of the Worlds.” Here’s a look at the time-honored traditions — or, when done badly, the hoary cliches — you’ll find in nearly every alien-invasion movie.

Originally published Feb. 24, 2011 on msnbc.com. Read the complete article.

Meet the characters of ‘Harry Potter’

Over the course of seven books and (soon) eight films, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series has become a rich and complex world populated by dozens of characters, each with their own personalities, histories, and agendas. There’s so much happening, you might need a scorecard to keep up. To get you up to speed before the Nov. 19 release of “Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows,” the first of the movie series’ two-part finale, here’s a quick primer on the major characters in Harry’s story. In these final two films, the evil Voldemort begins him final assault on the wizarding world. The key to his defeat rests on whether Harry can unravel the secrets of two sets of mysterious magic items. First, he must find and destroy the seven horcruxes into which Voldemort has sent his soul. And Harry must also discover the three fabled Deathly Hallows, which can make their possessor the Master of Death.

Originally published on msnbc.com Nov. 16, 2010. Read the complete article.

Can young ‘Potter’ stars maintain career magic?

Wizard franchise made them famous, but breaking free of these roles could be tough

The magic is ending soon for the long-running Harry Potter series, which will close out with “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” being released in two parts Nov. 19 and July 2011. But filming is already over for its three stars — Daniel Radcliffe, who plays the boy wizard, and Emma Watson and Rupert Grint, who play his best friends Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley.

Now it’s time for them to look ahead to their future, and answer a question even a Hogwarts professor might have trouble seeing in a crystal ball: Can they make the transition from child actors to successful grown-ups?

It’s not an easy one for any young celebrity, says Stephanie Zacharek, chief film critic for Movieline. “Because they’re working in this very weird world, a lot of things can go wrong for them. It isn’t what we would call a normal way to grow up. Different child actors handle it with varying degrees of success.”

Originally published on msnbc.com Nov. 15, 2010. Read the complete article.

‘Takers’ fits right into heist-movie tradition

Film features a star-studded crew, big-money prize and plenty of twists.

This summer’s biggest hit, “Inception,” put a novel twist on the caper film by setting its action in the world of dreams. But you don’t need to go quite so high-concept to get some juice out of the heist movie, one of the most reliably entertaining variations on the cops-and-robbers story for as long as there have been movies about crime. The latest straight-up heist film to hit the big screen is “Takers,” out Aug. 27 and starring Idris Elba (“The Wire”), Hayden Christensen, Paul Walker (“The Fast and the Furious”), and rappers T.I. and Chris Brown.

Heist films are one of the most formula-bound of genres, but that can be a big part of the fun of watching them. The basic drill is always the same — a group of thieves work together to pull off some seemingly impossible job — but the best heist movies stay fresh while letting viewers indulge in the vicarious thrill of getting away with the perfect crime. Here’s how “Takers” fits in with its shadowy brethren.

Originally published on msnbc.com August 23, 2010. Read the complete article.

Gateways To Geekery: Sherlock Holmes

Geek obsession: Sherlock Holmes

Why it’s daunting: Everyone knows who Sherlock Holmes is, and it seems like everyone has written about him, too. It’s amazing just how much Holmes material is out there. The London sleuth, invented by Arthur Conan Doyle in the 1887 novel A Study In Scarlet, has come to personify the very idea of the private detective who relies on logic and deductive reasoning to solve the most baffling crimes. Conan Doyle wrote relatively few Holmes tales—four novels and 56 short stories that fans collectively call “the canon”—but that’s just the tip of it. Holmes wasn’t the first fictional detective, but he was far and away the most influential, and it’s impossible to overstate his importance to the mystery genre. His continuing adventures in the hands of subsequent authors and filmmakers have been estimated to number at least 25,000 novels, movies, TV shows, radio plays, cartoons, games, and other media over the last century.

Originally published on avclub.com June 17, 2010. Read the complete article.

Comics panel: Darwyn Cooke, Richard Stark’s Parker: The Hunter

The late crime novelist Donald E. Westlake was notably protective of his most prominent fictional creation, the hard-as-nails master thief Parker, who starred in more than two dozen books written under Westlake’s major pseudonym, Richard Stark. Though the Parker books were adapted into films seven times, including the acclaimed Point Blank, Westlake insisted that the filmmakers change Parker’s name if they weren’t going to bother with a faithful rendition of the series. It’s a signal of both Westlake’s approval and Darwyn Cooke’s intentions, therefore, that Cooke’s graphic-novel adaptation of the first book, Richard Stark’s Parker: The Hunter (IDW), gets to give its protagonist the right name. Developed in collaboration with Westlake before his 2008 death, The Hunter is pitch-perfect in capturing not just the story, but the lean, gritty noir spirit of the original novel, starting with the classic opening line, “When a fresh-faced guy in a Chevy offered him a lift, Parker told him to go to hell.” A long, largely wordless sequence introducing Parker highlights that Cooke both knows the original story inside-out, and knows how to retell it in a new way. Cooke’s noir bona fides include the 2003 Catwoman story Selina’s Big Score and the 1950s-set DC: The New Frontier, which also captured his aptitude for mid-century design aesthetics. Here, he creates a black-and-cool-blue early-’60s New York that’s both evocative and appropriately unglamorous. Cooke reportedly plans to continue adapting at least the next three Parker books; based on this one, it’d be a crime if he didn’t… A

Originally published on avclub.com July 24, 2009 as part of a group-written roundup. Read the complete article.

The world of Harry Potter: A guide to the major characters

A guide to the characters in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, published in advance of the Order Of The Phoenix movie.

Originally published on msnbc.com July 7, 2009. Read the complete article.

Gateways To Geekery: Classic crime fiction

Geek obsession: Classic crime fiction

Why it’s daunting: The roots of American crime fiction go all the way back to Edgar Allan Poe, but like science fiction, the genre exploded with the pre-World War II rise of the pulps, magazines like Black Mask and Weird Tales, which were printed on cheap paper, and written and published by people who were often after a quick buck more than they were interested in lasting, quality literature. Which means there’s a metric ton of the stuff out there, even if you focus solely on the golden age of crime fiction, and much of it is just awful—cliché tawdry tales penned by hacks. But just as H.P. Lovecraft’s horror stories lived alongside a mountain of garbage in their original magazine appearances, there’s gold to be found in the old-school noir stories as well.

Possible gateway: Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest

Why: Of all the many fine writers who made their name in the pulps, Hammett ranks among the very best, with a lean, diamond-hard prose style that’s part of the DNA of just about every important piece of crime fiction that came afterward. He’s also one of the few who not only wrote it, but lived it, and Red Harvest springs directly from his experience as a strike-breaking detective for the Pinkerton Agency in the 1920s. Also, and not inconsequentially, Red Harvest is a hell of a ride. Set in a corrupt Western mining town nicknamed “Poisonville,” the novel follows a tarnished, grizzled detective—never named, and known by fans as The Continental Op—who is hired to solve the murder of the son of the tycoon who supposedly runs Poisonville. In actuality, the town has been carved up by cutthroats and mobsters, and the Op decides the only thing to do is tear the whole rotten, stinking thing down by force, powers-that-be be damned. The book is short enough to be finished in a single evening, with a nonstop mix of gun-blazing action and eminently quotable, tough-talking dialogue. Here’s the Op, declaring that he isn’t going away easy: “Your fat chief of police tried to assassinate me last night. I don’t like that. I’m just mean enough to want to ruin him for it. Now I’m going to have my fun.”

Originally published April 9, 2009 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

Crime writer Donald Westlake dies at 75

Prolific and influential crime novelist Donald A. Westlake died Jan. 1 after collapsing of a heart attack on his way to a New Year’s Eve party the previous day. He was 75. Westlake wrote more than 100 novels over the course of his long career, turning out material of extremely high quality with such speed that early on, he found it necessary to use a variety of pseudonyms, most famously Richard Stark, because publishers were leery of releasing more than one book a year by the same author. His writing was notable for its brisk, inventive plotting, sharply drawn and believable characterizations, and especially his mastery of both the drolly absurd and the starkly hardboiled. Westlake often used his pseudonyms for particular kinds of stories, something like a brand name. As Westlake, he wrote mainly lighter-hearted crime stories, including the recently republished Somebody Owes Me Money, as well as harder-edged material including the terrifically bleak thriller The Ax, in which an out-of-work job-hunter raises his chances of landing a new position by systematically tracking down and murdering the other qualified applicants in the area. Writing as Richard Stark, he created what became his quintessential character: master criminal and heavy heister Parker, the antihero of more than two dozen novels. Originally, Westlake intended the character to die at the end of his first book, and so never bothered to give him a first name. That choice stuck with the character, though, because it fit both his taciturn personality and his workmanlike attitude toward thievery, which he treated as a job to be done, carefully and thoroughly.

Originally published Jan. 2, 2009 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

When monsters attack! The movies’ best beasts before “Cloverfield”

Something very big and very angry stalks the streets of New York City in Cloverfield, being released in theaters this week. The brainchild of producer J.J. Abrams (of the TV hit Lost and the upcoming Star Trek remake), Cloverfield aims to revitalize the giant-monster genre with a Blair Witch Project-style filming approach; the big beast’s victims film their flight from New York’s destruction with handheld video cameras.

But Cloverfield, of course, has some pretty big shoes to fill if it wants to be King of the Monsters: Giant monsters have been a cinema staple since at least 1925, when audiences thrilled to dinosaurs battling to the death in The Lost World.

If you want to get caught up on the genre, it’s not hard—400-foot fire-breathing monsters leave a trail that’s easy to follow. Here’s a few of our favorites.

Originally published on msnbc.com Jan. 14, 2008. Read the complete article.