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Posted by Michael Sacco on May 27, 2011 in Cinema, Videogames 
Uncharted is easily one of this generation’s most “cinematic” video game series, so it only makes sense that Hollywood would be jumping to adapt it to the big screen. Director David O. Russell has been attached to the project for a while now, and made waves with fans months ago by communicating his intentions to cast Mark Wahlberg as Nathan Drake and make the film about “a family of art thieves.” It was announced today that Russell left the project due to “creative differences” — differences I can only assume were “people wanted the Uncharted movie to actually be based on Uncharted.” There hasn’t yet been any word on a new director. Read more…
Posted by Michael Sacco on May 22, 2011 in Cinema, Star Wars 
Graphic designer Barn Bocock took iconic brand logos and gave them a Star Wars twist. You can see some of his handiwork above, with inspired edits to the Nike and Puma logos. There are other great pieces on his page, and t-shirts and stickers are (of course) available should you wish to adorn yourself or your property in pop culture versions of already-ubiquitous corporate propaganda. That’s some pretty Dark Side stuff, I think. A Jedi knows not crass commercialism. Read more…
Tags: Star Wars
Posted by Michael Sacco on May 22, 2011 in Cinema, Star Wars 
Star Tours, the venerable Star Wars attraction at Disneyland, recently underwent a big renovation to bring it up to speed for the 21st century. So how does it stack up to the original? “Light years better,” says the L.A. Times. Not only was the ride updated to feature hi-def 3D , but it also has a total of 54 possible storylines, so you’ll likely never have the same ride twice. The physical hardware (the seats, for example) apparently wasn’t updated as much as the visual stuff, but the Times admits it’s a minor quibble amidst the admittedly awesome rest of the ride. You can ride the brand-new Star Tours on June 3rd. Read more…
Tags: Star Tours, Star Wars
Posted by Michael Sacco on May 21, 2011 in Cinema, Comic Books 
You may recall The Dark Knight’s long, involved alternate-reality game, which had followers doing everything from decoding messages hidden in street addresses to taking pictures of themselves in clown makeup to attending fake Harvey Dent campaign events. Even though the film’s release is over a full year away, the marketing campaign for the third film in the trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises, is heating up. Literally. Today, Warner Bros. released a sound clip on the DKR website that, when viewed in a sound editing program, contained the phrase “#thefirerises”. Posting on Twitter with that in your message would add your icon to the page, which eventually filled up, revealing the above photo of Tom Hardy as Bane (click for a high-res version). If that sounds complicated, well, it is! And it’s only going to get more complicated from here. Also, Bane looks pretty imposing, doesn’t he? Read more…
Tags: Batman, The Dark Knight Rises
Posted by Michael Sacco on May 20, 2011 in Animation 
Loyal Venture Bros. fans need not fear — not only is the show returning for another season, but we get a special 15-minute, er, special this July! From the Ladle to the Grave: The Story of Shallow Gravy, which details the rise and fall of the titular band started by Hank, Dermot, and H.E.L.P.e.R., will premiere July 24th on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. 15 minutes isn’t a lot, but hopefully it’s enough to tide you over until the new season. Go Team Venture! Er, Shallow Gravy, rather. Read more…
Tags: Venture Bros.
Posted by Michael Sacco on May 20, 2011 in Comic Books 
Colorist Moose Baumann, responsible for making some of Marvel’s and DC’s most popular heroes leap off the page, is encountering some financial difficulties. His wife incurred some staggering medical bills during her cancer treatments and it’s been an uphill to keep those bills paid on top of normal expenses (you know, like a mortgage). The couple is in danger of losing their home, and Baumann has resorted to selling high-quality prints of his work to make some emergency money. If you’d like to help Moose and his wife out, you can buy one of his prints by emailing him directly at moosebaumann@mediacombb.net. Prints aside, I’m sure he wouldn’t mind a few bucks tossed his way via PayPal either, which is hooked up to that email address. Good luck, Moose! Read more…
Posted by Michael Sacco on May 15, 2011 in Television 
NBC may have passed on picking up the much-maligned Wonder Woman pilot, but that doesn’t mean that they’re done with genre TV for 2011-12. In fact, they picked up two pilots — the first is called Grimm, and it’s about a cop who finds out supernatural creatures are real and has to protect the city from them. The second, Awake, may be of special interest to Harry Potter film fans, as Lucius Malfoy portrayer Jason Isaacs is playing the lead. The plot? Isaac’s character is a cop (yes, again) who lives in two worlds after an automobile accident: one where his wife survived, and one where his son survived. It’s pretty high-concept and Isaacs is a great actor, so with any luck the show will survive.
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Posted by Michael Sacco on May 14, 2011 in Cinema, Television 
Netflix actually has a lot of genre stuff available to watch instantly, so you may suffer from what I like to call Netflix Indecision Disorder: the condition that forces you to just aimlessly browse Netflix for two hours instead of actually picking something to watch. Suffer no more, friends! SF Signal concocted this excellent chart that’ll help you find the perfect scifi show or movie to watch on Netflix based on your interests or capricious whims. That reminds me … I need to go watch Alien Nation again. Read more…
Posted by Michael Sacco on May 14, 2011 in Animation, Star Trek 
Not a live-action one, though; don’t get your hopes up for that any time soon. Roberto Orci, half of the Star Trek reboot’s writing team, tweeted last night that he’s been talking with someone about putting together another Star Trek animated series. Details were left out, of course, given the 140-character limit, so we’re not exactly sure who he was talking to about it or whether it was just musing, but you have to admit that with how far TV animation has come, there might be some potential here. Read more…
Tags: Star Trek
Posted by Michael Sacco on May 13, 2011 in Television 
Warehouse 13 is apparently SyFy’s most popular show ever, so it makes sense that they’d want to milk it for all it’s worth. Enter spinoff! Yes, showrunner Jack Kenny announced he’s working with the scripted content-starved channel to create a Warehouse 13 spinoff starring, of all people, H. G. Wells. No, not the author. Well, kind of the author. See, on the show, Wells is actually a woman who let her brother write stories based on her real adventures with crazy inventions in the late 19th century, so the spinoff would focus on said adventures in that time period. Kenny describes it as “steampunky environment.” I worry whenever the term “steampunk” is used by a professional.
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Tags: Warehouse 13
Posted by Michael Sacco on May 13, 2011 in Pulp Fiction 
No, not that kind of song, and not that kind of cover either! We’re talking book covers here. George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire is getting a Japanese translation via Hayakawa Publishing, and a few well-known manga and video game artists have provided covers for the series’ run. Ken Sugawara and Yasushi Suzuki have some of my favorites on here; it’s pretty great to see such a different take on the characters compared to HBO’s recent (very successful) Game of Thrones TV series. Read more…
Tags: A Game of Thrones, Game of Thrones
Posted by Michael Sacco on May 8, 2011 in Dr. Who, Television 
The latest incarnation (literally) of Doctor Who has been its most successful yet, with Matt Smith proving a popular Doctor and his lovely companion Amy Pond acting as his impulsive foil. It looks like their duo (now trio, with husband Rory) may be coming to an end, though — actress Karen Gillan, who plays Amy, has signed on for a role in BBC’s drama We’ll Take Manhattan, and its filming schedule conflicts with Who‘s. Arthur Darville, the man behind Rory, also signed on to play Mephistopheles in Dr. Faustus, which runs throughout the summer and fall. Where does that leave the Doctor and his companion? Well, it’s not the first time he’s picked up a new companion in his travels. But somehow I feel a little more attached to Amy than others we’ve met.
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Tags: Doctor Who, Dr. Who
Posted by Michael Sacco on May 8, 2011 in Cinema 
Three of late the 80s’ pop culture mainstays (Back to the Future, Beetlejuice, and Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure) are being reimagined at Galleries One Nine Eight Eight in Los Angeles in the “3 B” show. Yes, that’s right: a real art show with artists’ renditions of 80s movies. Pieces like the above Beetlejuice-themed painting can be viewed right now at the gallery, and they’re even purchasable for what the gallery owners say are “insanely low prices.” Maybe not as insane as Beetlejuice, but still, that counts for something. Read more…
Tags: Back to the Future, Beetlejuice, Bill and Ted
Posted by Michael Sacco on May 7, 2011 in Fandom 
Leave it to Japan to create an entirely new level of cosplay. Tokyo-based Neurowear has created a set of cat ears that, when worn, allegedly react to your brain waves and act accordingly — if you’re concentrating very hard, the ears will perk up, and will droop back down when you’re mentally at rest. Are they very useful, all things considered? Well, probably not. At they very least they’d add a new level of realism to your catgirl cosplay, though. What do you mean you don’t cosplay as a catgirl? And a more important question: what happens if you put these on a cat?
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Tags: cosplay
Posted by Michael Sacco on May 6, 2011 in Science 
Brooklyn artist Donato Giancola has made his living on illustrating scifi book covers, but the US Postal Service grabbed him for a slightly more grounded task — that is, if you can call what astronauts do “grounded.” He’s the artist for two of the USPS’s new commemorative astronaut stamps, including the one above, featuring Alan Shepard. So what was it like illustrating real space travel, as opposed to works of fiction? It’s all in the details, he says. “When you’re creating art that’s going to be a historical record like these stamps, there’s no room for mistakes.” That kind of work pays off for Giancola, whose work is now in circulation to the tune of millions of stamps nationwide. Read more…
Posted by Michael Sacco on May 6, 2011 in Cinema, Star Wars 
Perhaps it’s a day late to post fun Star Wars stuff, but: did you know Christopher Walken was almost Han Solo? It’s weird to think of it now, of course. So who knows what could’ve happened if Star Wars was made a little … earlier? These mashup pics of classic cinema stars as Star Wars characters delves into it a bit, with appearances from Marilyn Monroe and Peter O’Toole, as well as … William Shatner? You’ll have to see that one yourself. Now we can just try to imagine a strange universe where there Star Wars movies made in the 90s. Maybe ones that took place before the original films. Boggles the mind, doesn’t it? Read more…
Tags: Star Wars
Posted by Michael Sacco on May 1, 2011 in Comic Books 
Well, I mean, he’s always been an alien in the colloquial sense, with the whole “being from another planet” thing, but in the latest issue of Action Comics (specifically #900) Superman renounces his U.S. citizenship. Supes, who grew up as the American boy Clark Kent before taking up the Superman mantle, has historically been an American icon, the ultimate immigrant success story, but this issue (written by Batman Begins scribe David Goyer) sees him get fed up with being viewed as an instrument of U.S. policy. It’s a pretty interesting turn even for Superman, and I suppose at this point Superman really belongs to the world more than just the U.S., but he has always represented the best of our national ideals, like some kind of alien Captain America. Hopefully this’ll turn out better than Straczynski’s mopey small-scale Superman story did.
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Posted by Michael Sacco on May 1, 2011 in Cinema 
So maybe Corellia isn’t as nice a place as the Hundred Acre Wood, but that doesn’t stop Wookiee the Chew from having grand adventures Chrisolo Robin. This Winnie the Pooh-style Star Wars woodcut comes from James Hance, who also has a book coming out — The House at Chew Corner — with art that’s just as adorable as the above. It’s like the earlier and latter years of my childhood put into a blender. In a good way. And yes, they made Eeyore into an AT-AT. Read more…
Tags: Star Wars
Posted by Michael Sacco on Apr 30, 2011 in Cinema 
No, for real this time! Summit, the studio behind tween film behemoth Twilight, is set to distribute the film adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s much-loved sci-fi novel Ender’s Game. Genre fans might worry a bit about the film’s director, X-Men Origins: Wolverine‘s Gavin Hood, but he’s also made some pretty good dramas, so a novel like Ender might actually be a pretty good fit. To assuage other fears, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, two of the dudes behind TV’s Fringe and the Star Trek reboot, are co-producing. Could it be a dynamite combination? Maybe, if this project gets off the ground. Wolfgang Peterson’s 2008 attempt didn’t. Read more…
Posted by Michael Sacco on Apr 30, 2011 in Cinema, Comic Books 
We’ve known that the upcoming Green Lantern movie is going full-blown crazy in its display of alien Lanterns, as evidenced by its recent WonderCon footage, but the latest poster really exhibits the almost Lucasian variety of alien life. Just offhand, you’ve got yourself a Boodikka, Stel, Abin Sur, Kilowog, Tomar Re, Sinestro, and that looks like R’amey Holl with the butterfly wings. And that isn’t even all of them in this poster! Being a Green Lantern must be like living in the Mos Eisley Cantina every day, you know? Let’s hope all these neat races get their due in the film, which comes out in about a month and a half. Read more…
Tags: Green Lantern
Posted by Michael Sacco on Apr 29, 2011 in Comic Books 
Zack Snyder’s upcoming Superman film, The Man of Steel, is already featuring one familiar villain by way of Michael Shannon’s General Zod, but it looks like another one is waiting in the wings: Variety reports that German actress Antje Traue will be playing Kryptonian brawler Faora. The man-hating martial artist had a number of appearances in Superman canon, including stints in classic Action Comics (where a stymied Superman was forced to flee their first encounter) and even showed up on Smallville, so it’ll be interesting to see how they tie her into the movie’s web of villainy along with Zod. Read more…
Tags: Superman
Posted by Michael Sacco on Apr 24, 2011 in Videogames 
Happy Easter! This turret Easter egg comes to you from Markt022002’s Flickr page. Portal 2 has been (no pun intended) a huge success in the few days since its release; what better game to celebrate Easter with? “Still Alive,” indeed. Now if only I could use some of those portals to get to my aunt’s house for holiday dinner (and then back home again before my uncle starts talking to me about venture capitalism). Read more…
Tags: Portal, Portal 2
Posted by Michael Sacco on Apr 23, 2011 in Cinema 
So it’s not just me, then? Even George Takei thinks whitewashing the cast of Akira for the planned US live-action remake is a bad idea? That’s what he tells The Advocate in a recent interview, saying that the film is destined to flop just like The Last Airbender did if it ignores the importance of Japanese culture and history in the story and use all white actors. Takei, a longtime human rights advocate, is probably right; not only would closely following the original film’s Asian characters show respect for the property, it would also do what an all-American cast couldn’t — attract the original film’s fans along with the summer popcorn crowd. Read more…
Tags: Akira
Posted by Michael Sacco on Apr 23, 2011 in Cinema 
Well, specifically, Ian Holm is back as Bilbo in The Hobbit. Not for the whole movie, of course! That’s Martin Freeman’s job. But old-Bilbo will be there for bookend sequences, apparently reading his book to Frodo as a way of introducing/closing the story. Peter Jackson was happy to confirm this recently, a move that I’m sure will delight fans of the original trilogy. Heck, I’m all for it, so long as there are no weird, jarring mean-face Bilbo scenes to serve as reminders of what Peter Jackson used to do before Lord of the Rings. Read more…
Tags: Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit
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