Category Archives: Top Fives

Film, Sci Fi, Top Fives

Top Five Go-To Sci-Fi/Fantasy Actors/Actresses

Science fiction and fantasy in TV and movies are always going to have your mainstay actors or actress who connect with the story and the fans and constantly get gigs in those genres. Sure, sometimes they get typecast, but many are just so damn good at that one spot, it doesn’t matter. Let’s get started on the Top Five “Go-To” SF/Fantasy Actors and Actresses:

Sigourney Weaver –  Weaver was James Cameron’s first pick for the Dr. Augustine character in Avatar,  years after they made Alien together back in ’79. It doesn’t stop there: she’s also been in other greats like Ghostbusters and Galaxy Quest. Hell, add the voice work she’s done on other sci-fi shows and movies like Wall-E and Futurama, and you can’t deny that she’s still the reigning queen of sci-fi.

Sam Rockwell– Full disclosure time: Sam Rockwell was kinda the reason I came up with this after he basically admitted he was playing Bill Paxton’s character in Aliens for the aforementioned Galaxy Quest. That aside, he’s been in Moon, Iron Man 2, The Green Mile, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and even a head thug in the live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie from ’90. He’s also in the upcoming Cowboys and Aliens movie, so it’s not like he’s shying away from the sci-fi anytime soon.


Keith David – Most geeks will remember him as a go-to for John Carpenter flicks, playing the irritable Childs in The Thing or beating the crap out of Roddy Piper in They Live, but if you look deep in his IMDB file, you’ll see that he has been ridiculously prolific in both genres, especially in voice work. I mean, he’s he voice of Goliath from Gargoyles, the cat in Coraline,  and numerous characters from DC/Marvel animated movies and shows. Go down the video game path, and he’s the voice of The Arbiter from the Halo series, Cpt. Anderson in the Mass Effect series, and his voice is even in the first Fallout game. he’s textbook “go-to” if you want a commanding voice for a character.


Tricia Helfer – Oh, Number Six. She’s definitely done other things since BSG, but since she made her big break on the seminal Syfy show, she hasn’t stopped making moves in the genre. Like Keith David, she’s done voice work for Halo, Mass Effect, and comic book-based media, but she’s also jumped on as the voice of Kerrigan for Starcraft 2. Hey, if you’re gonna need someone to play a sci-fi femme fatale, she’s the one getting a lot of calls now.


Jeff Goldblum – Oh c’mon, you knew this was coming. While he’s doing the genre stuff as much now, Goldblum was seriously owning it from ’78”s Invasion of the Body Snatchers to ’97”s The Lost World: Jurassic Park. He’s been an entomological freakshow and an alien-beating hacker. All Hail Goldblum.

Honorable Mentions

Joe Morton
Chiwitel Ejiofor
Peter Mensah
Kurt Russell
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Bill Paxton
Sam Neill
Milla Jovovich
Michael Dorn
Hugh Jackman
Claudia Black

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Comics, Top Fives

Top Five Characters that Should be in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Reading a new interview from Alan Moore always reminds me of one of his greats: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I’m sure most will only remember the godawful  Sean Connery movie, but the comic portrayed Victorian literary characters in a great steampunk English backdrop against a Cavorite-hunting Professor Moriarty and the War of the Worlds itself. Moore is still writing the series, with the next part of  Vol. 3 -Century being released sometime in 2011. With that in mind, I started wondering what other characters made throughout the century would fit in this illustrious and highly dysfunctional super-heroic team?


Dr. Victor Frankenstein: Every team needs a Henry Pym, and having one of fiction’s most famous mad scientists on the team would definitely help. I can even see him as a sort of forensic scientist that can aid the team in figuring out how to properly dissect a shoggoth when they land on English soils. You know he can also bring some bruisers to the fight, provided you give him a lab, a graveyard, and a slaughterhouse.

Lara Croft: Now before anyone freaks out, think about it. She has all the fighting and shooting skills that the current team’s adventurer, Alan Quatermain, has and then some. Seeing that Moore is taking references from TV shows for Century, I don’t see why it would be much of a stretch to take one of the more famous video game references (besides licensing issues, of course) and put her on the team. She’s also British to boot.

The Doctor: While some might call this choice a bit overpowered, bringing one of British sci-fi’s largest exports over could make for an interesting team member if done right.I mean, think about it: the Doctor as written by Alan Moore? you know the Time Lord is going to end up pretty twisted.

Nick Haflinger: Now this character isn’t known to many sci-fi fans, but he was the hacker protagonist in the novel The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner.  The book was published in 1975, way before the cyberpunk genre blew up. This book started the use of the word “worm” as a self-replicating computer program. Although his tools are pretty outdated now, as he used public telephones to make new identities, developing him into a reverse anachronistic character for a League in the ’60s and ’70s is a good idea. He could use computer/programming concepts that wouldn’t exist yet, and serve as a bridge between dystopian characters like Winston Smith from older stories like 1984 (covered in another League story, Black Dossier) and the crazed hackers  that had yet to come out  from writers like William Gibson or Neal Stephenson.

Hannibal Lecter: An excellently cultured serial killer, Lecter’s medical and psychiatric knowledge is of great use to a team when trying to hunt other psychopaths down. If the fact that in Hannibal Rising a young Lecter is given kick-ass kenjutsu skills is added , this plus his intense way of messing with people’s minds would make him a great anti-hero on par with Midnighter from the Authority. Imagine it: He gets in the bad guys’ heads, makes them slip up once, and then slices them up in preparation for a wonderful dinner.

Honorable Mentions

The Shadow

Tyler Durden

Patrick Bateman

Buffy Summers

 

With that in mind, I started wondering what other characters made throughout the century would fit in this illustrious and highly dysfunctional super-heroic team?

Hannibal Lecter:

Thomas Harris’ excellently cultured serial killer is the first on my list for one reason alone: with his medical and psychological knowledge, he could go toe-to-toe with an hero like The Midnighter from (now defunct ) Wildstorm’s The Authority. Imagine it: He could size up an opponent just like he sized up Clarice Starling, Dr. Chilton, and (Red Dragon’s character), and once they’re all thoroughly mind-fucked, he slices them in two with the katana he kept from Hannibal Rising.

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Film, Top Fives

Top Fives Movies That Need A Sequel

Most people complain about the ridiculous measure of remakes and reboots modern movies in the last decade, but they always overlook another of the classic annoyances: the sequel. There have been hundreds of movies that have had sub-par or downright god-awful ones that some people go so far as to forget they exist (I’m looking at you, Matrix sequel denialists). However, there are some that you watch and you hope that someday, someone with a last name  not Lucas will come and continue the story. Continue reading →

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Culture, Top Fives

Top Fives Racial Stereotypes by Special Guest Kali Baker-Johnson

I’ll admit that when I came up with the idea for this Top Five, I thought this was going to piss off people. But then I remembered that there are enough people who loved Dave Chappelle and South Park to know how to take a joke, and went with it anyway. To my luck, I also have someone who is willing to take the hit and get all the hate e-mail (actually, I’ll still get them, but at least I know I wasn’t the one that they’re meant for). without further ado, here is my friend, Kali Baker-Johnson who is a part of the A Room Full of Monkeys blog . Big warning: this post has lots of profanity and, of course, racial slurs: Continue reading →

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Top Fives

Top Five Animated Shows

After making the last entry one on a band that only exist via illustrations and animated music videos, it only seems right to go on that same path and find a Top Five from it. So, I have arrived to a spot to give you my

Top Five Animated Shows

Cowboy Bebop – I knew the moment that I was going to start this list, I was going to include one anime series in the list. And every time I think of the pinnacle of what that medium can do,  Shinichirō Watanabe‘s masterpiece always comes first to mind. The show made legendary characters out of relatively stock ones, and the artistic style was just so crisp and smooth you couldn’t help but follow the ragtag crew of the Bebop as they went from bounty to bounty. Watanabe’s love for fusion, in this case for jazz and sci-fi (although his samurai/hip-hop one wasn’t so bad either), really set the mood for the show. It also doesn’t help that it was composed by the legendary Yoko Kanno, either. Continue reading →

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Film, Top Fives

Top Five Guilty Pleasure Movies

Normally I run the entire show for my T5s, taking in suggestions and going through it myself. This time, however, called for an expert in the matter, someone far better than myself. Enter my friend, Chris “Toph” Puglia. Mr. Toph has towers of DVDs taller than him filled with movies of very questionable caliber, which I  have criticized him for in the past. A week ago I called on him to give me his kingly advice on this from the throne he has now made with his movies. Without further ado: I give you Toph (Big warning: this article is heavily laden with profanity and one borderline use of a racial slur):

When Jesus asked me to do a guest blog entry on my Top 5 Guilty Pleasure Movies, I was excited. Declaring me the “King of Guilty Pleasure Movies”, I wasn’t sure whether to be honored or offended. I’ll freely admit that I like a lot of movies most people would consider BAD. I like to think that it’s because I can see the good in movies while ignoring the bad. Or I just have horrible taste in movies, I’m not sure which. Continue reading →

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