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.
Kevin Maher has a mission: Track down the best scifi buddy cop movie ever. To find the answer, he must look past the usual suspects like Robocop and Real Men and dig into the gritty underworld of The Hidden.
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Tom Cruise had to dodge them in Minority Report. Tom Selleck had to catch them in Runaway. In the scifi future, robot spiders are a part of everyday life and they're a problem. Now, thanks to a military contract, the creatures are going to be a part of our lives; hopefully, they'll lead us down a better path.
Defense giant BAE Systems has signed a $38 million agreement with the U.S.
Army to create a series of tiny electronic spiders, insects and snakes
that will become the eyes and ears of soldiers on the battlefield. Some will be able to detect the presence of chemical, biological or radioactive weapons.
Let's pause for a moment to take stock of the recent news surrounding the cumbersomly titled Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins. Christian Bale is playing grown-up John Connor. Great, perfect casting. There's no Arnold. Fine, he's clearly busy with other things. It's directed my McG. Unfortunate, but then, no one would have pegged Jon Favreau to deliver one of the best superhero movies ever. Rapper Common has just been cast as a freedom fighter working with John Connor. Well, guess he's gotta do something now that Justice League: Mortal has been shelved. It's going to be rated PG-13.
Okay, let's stop right there. A Terminator movie cannot be PG-13. Here's why: It's about robots decimating the human race. For pete's sake, the new film is set during the big, bloody Terminator versus humans battle that we've only seen glimpses of in the previous films. If any entry in the franchise was begging for a "hard R," it's this one. Also, the R-rated T2 is one of the most profitable, critically acclaimed, and beloved science fiction films in history. As with Die Hard, there's a tonal precendent for keeping the R rating. (And we all saw what happened when they stripped John McClane of his foul mouth.)
The series of novels and short stories that would become the Foundation series, Isaac Asimov's magnum opus spanning 50 millennia of human civilization, had an innocuous and humble start. As Asimov told it, the idea came to him when flipping through Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire during a cab ride to the offices of editor John W. Campbell of Astounding Magazine. Asimov -- still green behind the ears as a young sci-fi writer -- thought the tale of an intergalactic civilization's decline into the dark ages would make a great quick pitch... an intriguing enough idea to secure him a few months work. Little could Asimov have guessed that a simple pitch for a short story would keep him with more work than he knew how to complete for the next half a century.
A series as pantagruelian as Foundation is hard to summarize (the universe in which Foundation
takes place is collected into no less than 25 different books) but the
gist is this:
• Ain't It Cool News has a questionably gruesome image of Harvey Dent as Two-Face in the upcoming The Dark Knight which gets veracity from Warner Bros' rapid-fire cease-and-desists over the image. The mouth's a bit much, but I like it.
If Hancock does succeed, it'll join a select few who have managed to nail a notoriously difficult genre. Here are a handful of films that cracked the superhero comedy code.
AMC announced today that acclaimed film actors Jim Caviezel (The Passion of the Christ, The Thin Red Line) and Ian McKellen (Lord of the Rings, The Da Vinci Code) have signed on for the network's reinterpretation of the highly influential 1960s cult classic, The Prisoner.
So summer is upon us and blockbuster season is well and truly here. Wanted has proven to have the goods though it's not really SciFi enough to include here, Wall-E has finally arrived, and all signs are that Hancock will be the summer's first outright flop - a big budget spectacle that absolutely nobody is talking about, opening to mediocre reviews against two vastly superior films. Sorry, Will, you've got another Wild Wild West on your hands. If Hancock ends up bleeding cash will studio suits re-think director Peter Berg's big budget adaptation of Dune? Time will tell ...
