Let it never be said that Star Wars toy merchandising has ever come up short when it comes to satisfying us geeks. We've feasted on action figures, dueled lightsabers and sped model land speeders across our kitchens' parquet floors. But in a world of sublime nerddom, there would be so much more: there would be Jabba the Hutt beanbag chairs, Death Star Barbeque Grills, Princess Leia headphones, Darth Vader gumball dispensers. The mind spins in delight just to imagine it, and to know how close we almost came to having it.
This won't be the year of Star Trek XI at all: Paramount has announced that J.J. Abrams' re-imagining of the original Enterprise crew will be delayed from its original Christmas premiere to May 9th, 2009.
The studio's execs claim they're delaying the film because they think Star Trek will make a better summer blockbuster, but I'm not entirely sure. I think the end of the WGA Strike may have given the Lost creator the opportunity to touch up the script a bit and re-write some scenes...something he's wanted to do for awhile.
As both a Star Trek fan and a Sci-Fi blogger, I'm torn by the news. On the one hand, this will give me five more months to pore incessantly over every scrap of rumor from the upcoming film. On the other hand, a delay is disheartening: I'm eager to see what sort of film J.J. Abrams is crafting, and to see whether or not it will live up to the canon that precedes it. Hopefully, the reasons for the hold aren't purely mercenary, and we'll end up with a much better, tighter movie as a result.
The phenomenon is known as pareidolia: the tendency to see humanoid shapes and faces in random patterns. It's why Jesus appears in the scorch marks of your English muffin. It explains the Face on Mars (and the lesser known Smiley Face and Kermit the Frog of Mars), and it describes SciFi Department head Kevin Maher's insistence that he sees Martian yetis tromping through the crimson wastes when he looks into the night sky. But fortunately for our fevered friend, he's not alone--people have been seeing things through their telescopes on the surface of Mars for a very long time.
Science Fiction filmmakers are often presented with the daunting challenge of showing parallel worlds, far-away planets and futuristic dystopias. Movies illustrate these alien settings with everything from brightly-colored tunics to metallic codpieces. But one of the most memorable and iconic methods is the overly-stylized hairdo.
Genre heroes always manage to have great hair--whether they're battling an army of sword-wielding skeletons or flying through the sky chased by a swarm of frog-men. Halloween shops sell everything from Princess Leia style cinnamon bun curls to the black and white fright wig of The Bride of Frankenstein. But which coiff is your favorite?
The trailer for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is finally here, and it confirms what the rumor hounds have been going on about for quite some time: Roswell and extraterrestrials somehow fit into the origins of the titular skull.
You'll have to watch for it, though--there is a one second clip around the 1:25 mark, when a magnetic casket marked "Roswell, New Mexico - 1947 (RSW-001)" snatches the spectacles from around the neck of a thin, Commie, dominatrix-style Cate Blanchett.
If the rest of the trailer is anything to go by—which mostly features Indiana Jones swinging through the warehouse of mysterious wooden crates last seen in Raiders of the Lost Ark—it appears that the alien crash at Roswell ended up in the same place as the Ark of the Covenant.
Groovy. It's a great teaser trailer, Harrison Ford still looks buff and convincing as an older Indy, and better yet, I can slowly deflate myself from the self-loathing I've felt over the last few months, posting about Indiana Jones movies on a Sci-Fi blog.
My friend Mike just got engaged, and my first thought was: What will his wedding cake topper be? This is a burning questions for any engaged Science Fiction fan. Will you go classic and use The Bride of Frankenstein with The Creature? Perhaps you'll dig up your old Star Wars figures and present a cake with Han Solo and Princess Leia. Whatever you choose will say a lot about you as a couple.
For example: Edward Scissorhands and Kim never consummated their love. Chucky and his Bride are killlers. The Smurfs are a little creepy. Shrek and Fiona are simply not retro enough.
For my wedding party my wife and I decided on Zira and Cornelius, from Escape from the Planet of the Apes. We liked that they are equals, they're smart and courageous, and in the third film in the POTA franchise, they find themselves at the beginning of an incredible journey, much like marriage itself. (Of course we hoped our wedding day would not end with us getting gunned down on a boat by Dr. Otto Hasslein.)
How is it that a movie like Starship Troopers will get panned by the critics whereas The Phantom Menace will be deemed "an astonishing achievement in imaginative filmmaking" by none other than Roger Ebert? Fortunately for sci-fi film buffs, there are sites like Sci-Fi Movie Page, a website almost singularly devoted to delivering well-informed reviews of hundreds of films dating all the way back to the fifties.
"Unlike many mainstream critics who look down on the genre, we actually like science fiction," says James O'Ehley, who launched the site in 1997 as a way to teach himself HTML programming. "We are very honest in our reviews and we like to think of them as intelligent."
What drives Sci-Fi Movie Page even further is its dedicated, lively community. It was the community, O'Ehley says, that enabled him to get the site its own dot-com name in 2003. "Until then," he says, "I had to keep moving it from one free hosting service to the next because we kept on exceeding our bandwidth limits, and one service actually shut down the site for 24 hours each time the amount of site visitors exceeded their daily limits. It got annoying as the site was more off-line than on."
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