1. Science Fiction novelist and SciFi Scanner columnist John Scalzi pwns Salon.com's Andrew O'Hehir, who argued that Guillermo Del Toro was a bad choice to helm The Hobbit.

2. F is for Foundation in this week's ABC's of SciFi as John Brownlee deconstructs Asimov's magnum opus.

3. The Scanner reviews Speed Racer, and says that not even a goofy monkey can detract from the film's eye-popping, wall-to-wall, high speed action.

4. There is a God, and God is good. Marvel announces a sequel to Iron Man in 2010 and an Avengers movie in 2011.

5. Industry steps on the back of the Shire-folk this week as Iron Man topples The Hobbit in our highly scientific SciFi Power Ranking list.

SciFi Dept. Video: Kevin Maher is used to working alone, but for this mission -- track down the best scifi buddy cop movie ever -- he's going to have to take a partner. Cue dramatic music.

In 1945, Nazis left for the moon. In 2018, they are coming back. So goes the tagline for the only fan-made independent scifi film worth getting excited about, Iron Sky.

From the creators of Star Wreck, the most popular Finnish film of all time (and, according to its producers, the most popular Internet feature film of all time), Iron Sky posits an alternate history where Nazis established a Fourth Reich on the dark side of the Moon. In 2018, with their anti-gravity technology perfected, the Nazis send two young soldiers down to Earth as an advanced party to assassinate President Jenna Bush.

The script is by Johanna Sinisalo, Finland's best-known science fiction writer, and the whole project currently has a budget of $5 million. That's a pretty sizable figure when you consider the movie is being made independently, and when you look at the recently released, spectacular looking teaser trailer.

Continue reading "Not Just Another Space Nazi Movie, Iron Sky Lets Fans Help with the Filmmaking" »

The actors beneath the makeup were not immune to the physical and political trials that time-traveling apes Cornelius, Zira, and Milo face among mankind in Escape From the Planet of the Apes. Kim Hunter, Roddy McDowall and Sal Mineo all suffered needless persecution that marred their Hollywood careers.

Hunter (who had already snared an Oscar for A Streetcar Named Desire back in '51) found herself blacklisted and unable to work during the McCarthy era because of her civil rights activism. In 1962, she testified before the New York Supreme Court with the hope of clearing the names of others similarly trampled on by the era's hysterical hunt for Communists, an experience which surely informed her work in three Apes films as the complex Dr. Zira.

Continue reading "Real Life Persecution Haunted the Stars of Escape From the Planet of the Apes" »

For those of you who miss the good old days when there was some sort of trailer mashup emailed to you every day... get ready for the non-stop barrage of Dark Knight mashups!

We've already seen a few:

• A rather brilliant mashup of the first Dark Knight trailer, with footage from the old Adam West television show.
• A version created entirely out of Legos.
• College Humor called out the similarity between the trailer, and Tim Burton's original movie, with side-by-side comparisons. (To be fair, and so there's no confusion, the footage that represents the Burton Batman is heavily edited with clips from the rest of the movie, but it's still interesting to watch.)

Now, with the Dark Knight's second trailer officially on the net, plucky young editors have taken the past week to cobble together a new batch.

Continue reading "Dark Knight Trailer Mashups Are the Next Big Internet Meme" »

Larry and Andy Wachowski are fans as well as filmmakers; their movies, homages to the genres they love. The Matrix, along with being a mainstream and critical success, is also such a pitch-perfect example of cyberpunk that university professors now teach alongside William Gibson's Neuromancer. V for Vendetta, their much-maligned follow-up, tackled one of Alan Moore's more convoluted graphic novels and managed not to end up like The League of Extraordinary Gentleman. And now there's Speed Racer, an esthetically marvelous and totally preposterous film that reproduces every nuance of Saturday morning Japanimation, and refuses to apologize for an ounce of it.

In a way, Speed Racer is both a natural follow-up to and the antithesis of The Matrix. While the latter revels in the goth darkness, the former is blindingly colorful. Speed Racer is not just based on anime -- it is anime, and neither a more realistic cartoon nor a more caricatured live-action film have you ever seen. Emile Hirsch somehow manages to purse his lips when he's speaking so that Speed's mouth movements are as rigid as the cartoon's; Christina Ricci's coquettish Trixie is played with just the right amount of Betty Boop; Matthew Fox even manages to lose his Lost persona portraying the enigmatic -- and totally badass -- Racer X. (Who else can flip a car going 400 milers per hour and punch another driver in the head at the same time?) And that's what ultimately makes the film so much fun. Cars rip through the screen at breakneck speed through constantly changing, meticulously detailed landscapes, and all you can do is hold on.

Continue reading "Speed Racer Review - Anime Comes to Life at 400 MPH" »

• io9 looks at the largest mega-sentients in scifi.

• Zack Synder has posted the second video journal for Watchmen.

• Just a reminder that the Star Wars: Clone Wars two-minute trailer will be simultaneously aired tonight on the Cartoon Network, TNT, TBS, CNN and Boomerang.

• A chronological listing of all the Season Four Battlestar Galactica episodes.

• A gigaton of new Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull pics have been released to scrutinize for scifi minutiae. Hard to believe that in only a couple weeks, we'll know for sure if it even has an alien in it.

• SF Signal hosts another Mind Meld, this time asking about famous scifi stories Hollywood should film.

Continue reading "Daily Scan: 05.09.08 - The Secret Life of Stormtroopers; What SciFi Stories Hollywood Should Film" »

Black Book Magazine just reported that Josh Schwartz, creator of The O.C., Gossip Girl and Chuck is working on an X-Men prequel.

Schwartz said of the project: "I'm very well aware that I'll be bludgeoned by purists, but I love its mythology...It's not like I'm adding new characters like Toaster Head, or anything like that." He went on to take a shot at The Incredible Hulk saying, "The Hulk looks like it's going to be terrible. And why does he look like he's fighting against the monster from Cloverfield?" Black Book later issued a correction to their story, saying that some of the quotations were "erroneously reported." Perhaps an attempt on Schwartz's part to make peace with Marvel after that crack about Hulk? You wouldn't like Marvel when it's angry, Mr. Schwartz.

Continue reading "The 411 on Gossip Girl Creator's X-Men Prequel" »

Most geeks are spittle-flinging happy that Pan's Labyrinth director, Guillermo del Toro, has signed on to helm The Hobbit (and its ill-defined and almost certainly ill-advised extra-canonical sequel, which I henceforth dub The Hobbit 2: Electric Bilboloo), but most geeks are also not Salon.com film writer Andrew O'Hehir. O'Hehir describes himself as a fan of the Peter Jackson-directed Lord of the Rings series, and most del Toro films (Mimic rightfully excluded), but thinks the pairing of Jackson as producer and del Toro as director is bad news. O'Hehir's objections are A) del Toro is on record as loathing all things hobbitty, and B) del Toro will be wasting the prime of his career carrying water for Jackson on a project Jackson should do himself.

Is O'Hehir right? Hell, no. And here's why:

Peter Jackson Isn't a Better Choice
Anyone who suffered through the Star Wars prequel trilogy -- or Godfather III -- will understand when I suggest that it's not always wise for a director to return to his old stomping grounds. Jackson left Middle Earth as a hero to geeks and film investors, and on such a creative high note, he essentially slacked through King Kong and no one gave him any crap for it. That being the case, what's the upside for him to re-direct in Middle Earth? If he does it perfectly and sticks the dismount, it's still not fresh. If he screws it up, the fan response will make the Phantom Menace backlash look like a group hug.

Continue reading "Is Guillermo del Toro the Right Man for The Hobbit?" »

• Bertie Wooster as a early adopter post-humanist? Throw in an Asimovian Jeeves while you're at it.

• Shadow Unit: "It's a series "no one had ever seen. It would share DNA with 'Criminal Minds,' with 'The X-Files' and 'Millennium,' with 'Man from U.N.C.L.E.' and the old paramedic show 'Emergency" to name but a few.

• Some pretty heady spoilers for the ninth episode of Battlestar Galactica.

• Cyclops will apparently appear in the upcoming Wolverine movie.

• This bodes ill: Matthew McConaughey is top of the list to play Captain America.

• Was Mick Jagger in the running to play a droog in Clockwork Orange?

• Ten years later, Time Out looks at The Matrix.

Continue reading "Daily Scan: 05.08.08 - Catch Shadow Unit Online; Cyclops Joins Wolverine" »

Think it was neat seeing Jeff Goldblum dissolve stuff with his saliva? Wait until you see Isabella Rossellini, one of the most beautiful film stars of all time, take a crack at a gigantic plate of spaghetti.

In her entrancing new short film series, Green Porno, she costumes herself as a housefly, a spider and many other ugly bugs in order to demonstrate how they have sex. Enacting both male and female roles (where they apply), Rossellini proves herself to be a timeless sex symbol even when saddled with cumbersome gear like compound eyes, spinnerets, and mantis-claws. I hope Tobey Maguire is paying attention; she could surely teach shy Peter Parker a thing or two about how male spiders are supposed to conduct themselves in the boudoir.

To see how Isabella Rossellini Fulfills Her Girlhood Dream With Green Porno, click here.