Smorgasbord Fantasia

An intelligently done zombie movie? I hear you scoff and hide that smirk behind your cough. Well believe it or not, Brad Pitt has backed this mega-scale epic zombie “war” movie through long tiresome years of rewrite and production delays and has come up trumps with a solid action-thriller that should feature on your must-view zombie movies.  Or must-view action-thriller movie… Take your pick but it does not deter the fact that World War Z is one hell of a well-made movie with its “scary” moment homages and stunningly epic action set-pieces. Brad Pitt of course makes it worth the tense journey starting in New York and traipsing through South Korea, Israel and coming to end in Cardiff, England. World War Z follows UN investigator Gerry Lane as he races against time and deranged zombie killer-mobs to find the cure for a deadly viral infection that turns the infected into the “undead” across the globe. The movie starts off in a fascinating manner – the directo...

I am a huge fan of Mark Lawrence - I absolutely loved the wicked little sociopath Jorg Ancrath seething for revenge and carving up his own bloody path towards getting closer to the goal of becoming Emperor. Here is my review . For all the fans, there is a double cheer. The third book, which I have heard from early reviews, is a mind blowing ending to all that gets sown in the first couple of books of the "Broken Empire", is coming out soon. July I think ? Secondly, Mark takes up one of his friends on a dare and weaves in a fairy tale into the world of the Broken Empire. Imagine Jorg with Cinderella. or the Sleeping Beauty. Or Jack the Giant-Killer. Or whoever man! Think about it. The world will be a tough cruel place that pits our charming killer boy into the serene calm fairy tale worlds. I think it will be monumental. and kick-ass. Check it out here. A free short story by Mark Lawrence featuring some of the well known characters from our childhood fairy-tales. St...

Man of Steel was outrageously bad, an assault on your senses and an insult to one of the greatest DC Comics Superhero. I know am late to the party, much has been said about how Zack Snyder got this one completely wrong ; Senseless treatment that relied on too much shock and awe - more shock than awe - as a result coming up with a completely soul-less movie if ever a superhero movie was made. In spite of a stellar star-cast with heavy weights like Russell Crowe, Diane Lane, Kevin Kostner, Lawrence Fishbourne all pulling in their weights along with story from the incredibly talented mindstore of Christopher Nolan, the movie was awful. Period. The ingredients were all right - Let us go one by one: The actual story of birth - Krypton's destruction and the parents' ultimate sacrifice to let the baby escape in a sealed pod from the exploding ( or rather imploding) planet. Disconnect#1 - in spite of a nuanced acting performance by Russell Crowe, the gallant scientist w...

I had heard of Brandon Sanderson a while back, the Elantris and the Mistborn trilogy skimming the outer edges of my “maybe-to-read-in-future” list. I never really went back to visit whom all I had missed out on that list. But with the Wheel of Time series getting a shot in the arm, Tor bringing in Sanderson to revive this series and bring it to a satisfactory completion, the author shot to international limelight. Suddenly people all over were sitting up to take note of this young prolific talented author saddled with this enormous task of completing what is considered, an epic that defined the genre in the 90’s.  I got my hands on a juicy seven-chapter freebie on Kindle of his steampunk-ish novella set in the same world as Mist Born, but set ages later – with the introduction of guns but with similar systems of magic, called the Alloy of Law. Crackler. I was sold on his ability to spin a yarn and spin it engagingly well. Then I read the Legion – Read my review here. A br...

Order of the Scales is the third book in the planned trilogy: Memory of Flames set in the Dragon Realms and follows the individual storylines of the different Kings and Queens of the Dragon Realms to a satisfactory closure.  Stephen Deas continues to do what he does best: skyrocket the tale forward in a brutal breathlessly frenetic manner and kill off people you care about, leaving the world a burnt-out smoky ruin with stragglers and fire-breathing dragons for survivors. If anything, the pacing is even better in the third book as we finally get to the big showdown that the Dragon Realms have been waiting for, for the past two books. All that scheming, skullduggery, backstabbing and bloody politicking finally comes to a grand finale – fiery, brutal and shocking one at that – as the battles for supremacy between Kings and Queens and the awakened dragons and the Adamantine Men comes to a head. It is guaranteed fireworks and wholesome entertainment – bloody pitched battle...

There is always something captivating about the concept of apocalypse, right? Is it that dread, that helplessness? Or as Joseph Adams claims, it appeals to our sense of adventure, that thrill of discovery, the desire for a new frontier? And yet here we are on the other side of the fence thinking that all this is all in a distant future. We all have had dreams of a desolate, deserted Earth littered with abandoned broken down hulks of concrete and asphalt that stretch from nowhere to nowhere or is it visions of a dying world suffocating on noxious fumes and people wasting away from radiation?  Whatever be your imaginations of a post-apocalyptic world – guaranteed they are going to be blown away by the visions of these twenty-two different works of genius from over the last two decades, smartly edited and collated in this one slim volume, aptly called the Wastelands by John Joseph Adams. Wastelands is a definitive collection about an all-too possible bleak future...