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Tag: Movies Page 2 of 5

Everything not saved will be lost.

I’ve been on a really big video game kick lately, especially enjoying some “indie” games including Fez and The Stanley Parable. Which got me thinking, I really love when different media types get all mashed up into one another. Here, specifically, I’m going to highlight some rad books and movies that feature video games in some way.

The End Games, T. Michael MartinBook cover courtesy of Syndetics

Seventeen-year-old Michael and his little brother Patrick have been battling the monsters in The Game for weeks. Armed with just a rifle between them, the brothers must follow the instructions of the Game Master, which they hope will lead them to a “safe zone”, safe and far away from the terrifying Bellows, the flesh-hungry roaring beasts that roam the land. Michael and Patrick are very good at The Game. They are surviving. But The Game is changing. The Game doesn’t play fair.

This book is so exciting, and it uses well-known video game narrative in a novel format, providing us with a thrilling debut novel from T. Michael Martin. Plus, isn’t this opening quote great?

nintendo

Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life, Bryan Lee O’MalleyBook cover courtesy of Syndetics

“What are you doing?”
“Getting a life.”

You may have seen the awesome movie Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, and this is the first of six graphic novels that spawned the movie. Scott Pilgrim is a bit of a loser, he plays in a band in his friend’s garage and shares a bed with his roommate, because Scott can’t afford a bed. Or rent. But Wallace has that covered. Then, Scott meets the girl of his dreams – literally. Ramona Flowers rollerblades through Scott’s idle daydream and he becomes determined to track her down. But to get to Ramona, Scott must first defeat Ramona’s seven evil exes… Not so easy after all.

Scott Pilgrim is so fun because it mashes up video game tropes into its natural narrative. The battles Scott faces with Ramonas exes play out like video game boss battles, and he even earns coins and powerups when he defeats them. The movie is fairly faithful to the books, so watch that if you want, but then ending is different, and the books delve a lot more into little stories that wouldn’t fit into the film. Both are fantastic!

Level Up, Gene Luen YangBook cover courtesy of Syndetics

Dennis Ouyang feels crippled by his parents’ high expectations of him. They want him to focus on school so he can become a gastroenterologist (a doctor of the digestive system). Dennis wants to play video games. But he does what’s expected of him, until his father’s sudden death leads him to an academic burnout and gets him kicked out of college. Things are suddenly not so straightforward as they once were, and things keep getting weirder when four sappy greeting card angels appear and take charge of Dennis’s life…

Video game tropes have a lot of fun imagery associations so a graphic novel format suits the mashup well, I think!

Ready Player One, Ernest ClineBook cover courtesy of Syndetics

It’s 2044 and the world is a pretty ugly place. Like most of humanity, Wade escapes this grim reality by hooking himself into OASIS, a sprawling virtual reality where you can live and fall in love on any of your choice of ten thousand planets. OASIS holds grim realities of its own though – somewhere in the sprawling virtual world lurks the ultimate lottery ticket, hidden by OASIS creator James Halliday behind a series of perplexing puzzles. The ticket yields immense fortune and power – if you can unlock it. The world is aware only that Halliday’s riddles are based on his love of late-20th-century pop culture, and many spend their days idly researching and debating Halliday’s idols. Then one day, Wade stumbles across the first clue. Suddenly, the whole world is watching and competing with Wade for the ultimate lottery ticket, many willing to kill Wade to get to it. The race is on, and the stakes are high. Ready, Player One?

The living-in-a-virtual-reality trope has been widely used, and perhaps is bearing closer on our reality than we realise? Time will tell!

Eagle Strike, Anthony HorowitzBook cover courtesy of Syndetics

You may already be aware of Alex Rider, teen MI6 agent, but if not, here’s the lowdown. Alex’s uncle was an agent, he was killed, and Alex was brought onboard with MI6. Each book in the series covers a mission assigned to Alex and in Eagle Strike, the fourth book in the series, Alex discovers a plot by popstar-philanthropist Damian Cray to blow up several countries, supposedly for reasons of (obviously crazed) peace activism. Alex has had MI6 backing him up before, but now he’s on his own. Can he stop Cray’s deadly plan in time?

Although not obviously video game based, Eagle Strike does contain this element – Cray catches Alex eavesdropping on him, so he drops Alex into a real life version of Feathered Serpent, the game Cray had been developing as part of his diabolical plot. Pure evil!

Summer WarsCover courtesy of Syndetics

Kenji is good at maths, bad with girls, and spends most of his time in the sprawling online reality of OZ. He lives an insular life until the girl of his dreams hijacks him to be her fake fiance at her family reunion. During the reunion things only get weirder when a cryptic email is received, unleashing a rogue AI in OZ and falsely implicating Kenji in the hacking. Kenji must halt and restore the damage to the virtual infrastructure and stop the rogue AI, named Love Machine, before it causes irreparable damage.

If you know of any other great books or movies that fit into this theme, let us know in the comments!

Books Into Movies, 2014 Edition

Tomorrow it will be three weeks until the opening of Catching Fire. We can’t wait! On the subject of turning a popular book into a (hopefully popular) movie, here are some in production in Hollywood:

Vampire Academy, book (and series) by Richelle Mead.  The film is set to star Zoey Deutch (Beautiful Creatures) and Sarah Hyland (from Modern Family) in March next year. Movie info is here. The trailer’s here.

Fallen, book by Lauren Kate. Fallen was one of our most borrowed fiction titles back in 2010, so it’s been a while coming! There’s not much info on IMDb yet, but watch this space.

The Giver, book by Lois Lowry. The Giver was first published in 1993, a long time before dystopian novels were the it thing. The series has been growing slowly: Son was published last year. The film stars Alexander Skarsgard (True Blood), Taylor Swift (yes that Taylor Swift) and Katie Holmes. Slightly more information is here

If I Stay, book by Gayle Forman. What a wrench the movie will be, if the book’s anything to go by!  It stars Chloe Grace Moretz. IMDb info here

These are just the additions to the ones we reported on in March. Other more rumour-ish movies include Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs, Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher, Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver, Heist Society by Ally Carter, The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness… the list is very long; we’re wondering if there are any script writers writing from scratch? And are movies ever better than the book?

Winter Blues

It’s more than officially winter! Which to us means curling up under a lot of blankets (preferably with a fire or other such heat source nearby) with some movies* to while away those cold, rainy days.

*note: this also works with a good book, but for now, here are our movie picks:

The Adventures of Tintin : the secret of the Unicorn
Part-animation, part-live-action, part Spielberg, part Peter Jackson. How could you not?

An Angel at my Table
Directed by the genius Jane Campion, this is in my list of top ten films of all time. It will make you laugh, it will make you marvel at our little country and it will break your heart. Janet Frame is one of our greatest writers and (fittingly) this is one of our greatest films to tell her story.

Charlie’s Angels
Three ladies kicking butt and taking names. That never gets old.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, part 1 (and part 2)
Because why not. Why not spend your holidays re-reading all seven books and then re-watching all eight movies. We guarantee they’re just as good as the last time you did it.

The Hunger Games
In preparation for the hotly anticipated release of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire perhaps? Mark it on your calendars, it comes out in New Zealand on the 21st of November.

I Am Number Four
Oh, Alex Pettyfer. Need we say more. And sadly, it doesn’t look like the rest of the series will make it to the big screen.

Kaitangata Twitch
Because Margaret Mahy needs to be included in as many lists of recomendations as possible.

Mythbusters
Need some science project ideas? Just want to watch people blow stuff up? Good thing we have a whopping NINE seasons of the hit show here at the library.

Pitch Perfect
Absolute favourite movie of 2013.

William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet
See where Baz Luhrmann’s magic began. We recommend you follow up with Moulin Rouge, Strictly ballroom and The Great Gatsby.

WinterBlues!

Winging Your Way Through The Weekend, 8-9 June

What up! Another weekend looms and here’s some sweet stuff to do with it.

No doubt you’ve heard about The Great Gatsby (a lot) by now, it feels like they’ve been building hype for eternity. It’s finally here and it looks pretty suave! (Rated M)

But did you know it was a book first? Sure was, it’s an American Classic by one great F. Scott Fitzgerald. Also, it’s not The GG’s first dance across the silver screen.

Matariki 2013 celebrations start up in Poneke with the arrival of waka Te Matau a Maui. There’s a calender load of events to keep you busy over the next few weeks of the Maori new year celebration.

Sporty peepz!  The Championship Tournament of the Woman’s Basketball League is at Te Rauparaha Arena over at neighb’s Porirua. Maori ball game Ki o Rahi will have a Matariki special in Waitangi Park from 6pm Friday night (brought to you by body R2R).

The other big thing this weekend is our (Wellington’s) Jazz Festival. Before you scoff take note, Jazz is the original bad boy of music. You can thank it for paving the way to all our modern jams and the term “hipster”. Appreciate. There is a caps worthy TONNE of events going down for it. One pretty special looking one is the pop up jams planned for the city streets Friday and Saturday – keep your eyes peeled.

Shakespeare fans beware this Globe On Screen viewing at Lighthouse Cinema (a nice follow up to the recent Sheila Winn festivities).

Feeling exhausted yet?

Here’s a diddy for the weekend playlist. Lorde’s most recent ‘Tennis Court’. Peace!
Tennis Court by LordeMusic

Winging Your Way Through The Weekend

Highlights this week; term time’s almost up, we’re seven days into having brought the sun forward for winter and apparently the rain’s coming back for a visit. Enough small talk though, here’s this week’s ender-entry to give you a two day break from the school work.

If you’re an adventurous titan, and like to work alliteratively, here are some things to do on Saturday – that start with ‘S’:

Skating takes over the waterfront in two forms. The Richter City roller derby season kicks off on Saturday night at the TSB arena in a home season battle between Smash Malice and Comic Slams. For a quick scrub-up on the ins and outs of the game look no further than Y/A novel Whip It and its sister movie starring Ellen Page.

Real Groovy linkWhip It (the movie) Image Courtesy SyndeticsWhip It (the book)

Still keen on skating but not so sure about all the aggression – why not try your hands, or feet – or feet then hands, on the ice? The ice rink is in full operation on Queens wharf just a short hop from the TSB. For our older readers Blades Of Glory might be a quick introduction on how not to act on the ice but for some pointers and to figure out if you can make a career out of it why not check out some of our literature?

Okay, okay enough with the skates. I wouldn’t leap into the water at the moment on account of its chill factor but one way you could get some surfing in is by checking it this sweet free free flick by Alex Monteith at The Dowse Gallery in Lower Hutt.

And here’s a quick weekly musical digest to help shape your weekend playlist:

Pete Wentz’s Fall Out Boy graced our shores this week on the back of their latest album drop.
Kiwi band Tahuna Breaks are in town this weekend for their Shadow Lights album release tour and are currently sitting near the top of the NZ album charts.

Ever wondered how animals eat their food? Here’s this weeks viral vid’ – courtesy Mister Epic Mann;

Fowler out.

So many screen adaptations

YA fiction is very popular with movie makers. In more based-on-the-book movie news:

The Maze Runner (book by James Dashner) is currently being cast, but they’ve not done the big leads (Thomas, really) yet.

Daughter of Smoke and Bone (book by Laini Taylor) is going to be a movie! This could take a while to appear on the screen, because they’ve only just announced who’s writing the script.

The Fault in our Stars (book by John Green) is also going to be a movie!! John Green fans will be very happy to hear this. Casting is in the “rumours” phase, so it could be a while before you can buy tickets, but it’s something to look forward to! (Also, how sad will this movie be?)

Delirium (book by Lauren Oliver) is – a little differently – going to be made for TV. I’m not sure if this means series, mini series, or TV movie, but it’s getting a cast, including Daren Kagasoff (from The Secret Life of the American Teenager).

Divergent (book by Veronica Roth) is also being cast, with Kate Winslett, Zoe Kravitz, and Shailene Woodley as Tris. (Shailene Woodley is also in rumours about The Fault in our Stars, busy.) Still no news on the title of the third book in the series (sorry).

On the Jellicoe Road (book by Melina Marchetta) has a script but no cast (we think). Still, this is progress! The author’s blog has occasional news updates, for interested readers. She announced at the end of last year that Saving Francesca is also getting the film treatment. Too much!

It is hard to keep up!

Catching Fire Fashion Extra

We at the teen blog like fiction and fashion, so when you put them together you get a winner. We do love the Catching Fire couture photos that have cropped up recently. Even the chairs are awesome. Finnick looks piratical (<3 the word piratical, any excuse to use it), and we’re not sure whose dress is better, Johanna’s or Katniss’ (which looks like it’s part-weapon). Stuff informs us that Effie is wearing Alexander McQueen. Here’s Perez Hilton on the topic.

Also, make sure you re-read the book while you wait for the first teaser trailer. The movie website (complete with impressive flaming logo) is here.

Movie Adaptation News

Turning novels into movies is the new black, and here are some YA novels that are getting the treatment:

Divergent, by Veronica Roth. It has been announced that the film will be released in March 2014. See here for more. No word on the title of the third book (commonly called Detergent).

The Raven Boys, by Maggie Stiefvater (today is its official publication day – this link here should take you to the first two chapters, courtesy of ew.com). This LA Times article here also says that the author’s book The Scorpio Races is going to become a film also. Maggie must be very happy.

Numbers, by Rachel Ward. The script for this is being written at the moment. Here’s a review of the book, about a girl who can see the date of a person’s death in their eyes.

The Changeover, by Margaret Mahy. Margaret Mahy’s New Zealand classic might get made, with a little help from American backers, according to TVNZ, and Stuff and others.

The Hunger Games are on DVD

Let the games begin! The Hunger Games is released on DVD today, and we’ve got it! Right now, in fact. Reserve your copy (80 cents for one week on a young adult card) and it will wend its way to a reserve shelf at a library branch near you fairly shortly.

The 2 disc set contains extras including:

  • Game Maker: Suzanne Collins and The Hunger Games Phenomenon
  • The World is Watching: Making The Hunger Games
  • Letters From the Rose Garden
  • Controlling the Games
  • A Conversation with Gary Ross and Elvis Mitchell
  • Propaganda Film
  • Marketing Archive

We also have a superdeluxefantastic three disc set (in the general DVD collection, so $4.00 for one week) with extra extras:

  • Stories from the Cornucopia
  • Tribute Video Diaries
  • Biographies
  • Photo Album

Here’s the DVD trailer:

That is all.

A Festival of Films

Have you done the International Film Festival before? If not, then maybe this is the year! There’s a fabulous aray of films, including some cherry picked here:

From Up on Poppy Hill – if you’re a fan of Studio Ghibli then you might like to see their latest on the big screen at the Embassy. To get prepared, you could also do a Studio Ghibli retrospective, including My Neighbour Totoro, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle.

Lore – this is based on one of the stories in The Dark Room by Rachel Seiffert, in which Lore and her brothers and sisters travel 900 kilometres across post-war Germany to safety (they hope) in Hamburg.

I Wish – set in Japan, where Koichi’s family is disrupted by the separation of his parents, and he finds himself at opposite ends of the country to his brother Ryu. Koichi believes there’s magic in the new bullet train service that might reunite them (and so a plan is hatched!).

Farewell, My Queen – the last days of Marie-Antoinette (as opposed to the first days, as in the movie Marie Antoinette with Kirsten Dunst). This is also based on the novel (same name) by Chantal Thomas.

There are many many more! Have a look at the website for more (or come into a library and pick up a brochure).

You can also keep up to date with new DVDs added to the library’s collection with this RSS feed here.

Breaking News: Breaking Dawn Part 1

If you’d love to relive the romance, passion, suspence and drama of Breaking Dawn Part 1, now is your chance! For only 80 cents (if you have a young adult library card)! Which is quite a bargain, really. Reserve your copy now.

Also: have a great weekend!

Some people were at the premiere of ‘The Hunger Games’ and then tweeted out what they thought

Are you getting excited about the prospect of seeing The Hunger Games on the silver screen? We are. It premiered in Los Angeles last night, and now that everyone in the world is on Twitter and we all tweet about everything we do and see, it’s easy to find out what the people that were lucky enough to be there thought of it. The Huffington Post handily collected some tweets in a slideshow, here. By all (of these) accounts, Suzanne Collins will be very pleased with the adaptation.

Oh, and if you need to read the book first to compare them, do so here.

Prepare yourself for the games

The 74th Hunger Games are nearly upon us (attendance is mandatory). In the intervening two (!) weeks, you can familiarise yourself with the politics of Panem: visit the official government webpage. It has really cool landscape navigation (fancy scrolling right instead of down!). You can become a citizen (District 4’s population could do with a boost). Or find out if the trackerjackers are particularly bad this season, or keep up to date with Capitol news. Plus more.

(You can also pre-purchase tickets to the film – the first showing as at one minute past midnight on Thursday the 22nd of March.)

Trailer Tuesday

Tuesday trailers! Like Hollywood but at home via your public library. And only for a few minutes.

Firstly here is some good (?) news – Fraggle Rock is to be turned into a movie! “Get your cares away!” “The trashheap has spoken!” That’s what you will be saying in a few years, probably.

A new trailer is out for for Mission : Impossible – Ghost Protocol, which seems to have action oozing from every pore.

 

The Lorax is a film based on the Dr. Suess book (for children, obviously). Until we saw the trailer we didn’t have much hope for this film here at Teen Blog Laboratories, but it actually seems very funny! And nice to look at. And that’s what you want in a film.

Here’s a new featurette for the Twilight Saga : Breaking Dawn. Talking about the wedding or something?

And finally ParaNorman, about a boy who sees dead things? I am not sure what is going on! It is a teaser trailer.

-~~ T H E    E N D ~~-

Trailer Tuesday

Tuesday already? Man, it feels like the last Trailer Tuesday was only yesterday.

The first trailer is for a game that you either don’t care about or are champing at the bit to play. Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm is the game! It is massively popular. Playing the first Starcraft competitively is a major sport in South Korea, interestingly. ~0Oo~ The More You Know ~oOo~

This game won’t be out until next year sometime.

Here’s a trailer for a film called Chronicle, due out early next year. It looks great! Sort of like Akira, I thought, although a lot of others say it’s like Misfits. I say both!

The trailer now has like 4.5 million views – when I saw it on the weekend it had only a few hundred, so it seems interest is running high. I can not wait to see it!

Don’t forget to watch the second trailer for The Adventures of Tintin. Watch it here in HD and be BLOWN AWAY. Even though it’s not out until just before Christmas here, it has already earnt some very good reviews.

Aaaand did you know that early next year Star Wars 1 : The Phantom Menace is to be re-released early next year in 3D? Each film in the series will be released annually thereafter, in 3D. Not sure if they will be re-edited (maybe get rid of Jar-Jar, or that weird robot waitress in that cafe in the third one, do you remember that? Eeesh) but probably.

~ Le Fin ~

Trailer Tuesday

There’s a new Tintin trailer out and it looks sooo action packed and exciting! Watch the first (more subdued) one here.

This blog is mostly about items in the “Young Adult” area of the library and the trailer below is about a movie called “Young Adult”, just ideal really.

Fans of either dance movies and exploding buses should be entertained by the new Footloose movie. Yes, a bus explodes.

See you next time at the movies!

Trailer Tuesday

Jane Eyre is on at the movies at the moment (good news!). So we thought we would spotlight another classic 19th Century adaptation, this time Wuthering Heights:

This one is directed by Andrea Arnold (notice she likes a square screen), and stars Kaya Scodelario who was in Skins. There have been lots of adaptations of Wuthering Heights, there’s a couple in the young adult collection here.

On a completely different subject, we have: whales. More to the point, whales caught under Arctic ice (true story):

And finally, because it’s topical (or it was a few weeks ago) and also polar, here’s Happy Feet 2!

The Hunger Games Teaser

A one minute Hunger Games teaser trailer was released at the MTV VMAs earlier this week, and this is it:

The forest looks just like I imagined it. Exactly so.

The Hunger Games Motion Poster

The moving poster for The Hunger Games movie has just been released, and it looks pretty cool:

Read More

Trailer Tuesday

The Superbowl – America’s premier lawn bowls championship playoff thing – was yesterday, and during the ads many new film trailers were screened for films that we can not wait to see! (And subsequently stock in the library, of course.)

Here, we’ve embedded some. The first two are superheroes; Captain America and Thor. I suspect they’re leading up to the eventual Avengers film (this won’t make any sense to anyone not familiar with Marvel comics).

 

Pirates of the Caribbean On Stranger Seas, the fourth film in the series based on a theme park ride, has a new trailer. Pirates! Zombies! The usual! No Jack Davenport though! :`(

Here’s one for a film called Super 8 which is maybe about aliens? I’ve not done much research.

Transformers : Dark Side of the Moon has a new trailer! (Hopefully it is better than the last one, frankly.)

Battle LA seems to be a mixture of the last two films, in so far as mass destruction by aliens goes. Which is all the way to the bank!

Cowboys & Aliens. Sure, why not? The title is pretty literal. It is what it says on the label.

The End.

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