The other day, sci-fi comic auteur Warren Ellis wrote a foul-mouthed modern-day interpretation of Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. Rule Number Two was the rule that really caught my eye: "Robots do not want to have sex with you."
This is no doubt true, but here's the problem: Without the prospect of some geeky scientist some day being able to mate with a Marilyn Monrobot he built in his lab, the entire robotics industry of many prominent First World nations would grind to a paralyzing halt. I am, of course, referring mostly to Japan.
Consider this video clip as proof: The Japanese have invented a life-like, ultra-sexy robot receptionist. It's a robot skeleton crammed into a real doll; dead-eyed, creepy, and dressed entirely in skin-tight pleather, it seems to have been designed exclusively for salarymen who find seducing flesh-and-blood receptionists with promises of exorbitant raises too cumbersome.
There's a chocolate-consuming philosophy that was introduced by the people at the Reese's Headquarters: There is no wrong way to eat a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. The same cannot be said for viewing movies.
In the last few years it has become fashionable to treat movies as candy bars as they're being made smaller and smaller, and chopped into bite-size formats. I have acquaintances in the industry who talk about the importance of serving the consumer and providing them with new ways to consume entertainment with their busy schedules.
Frack that.
I don't like watching a movie on my computer. I hate to see a feature film serialized into 8-minute segments (with no real rhyme or reason for chapter breaks). I despise the idea of watching anything on my i-Pod. No filmmaker wants their work to be seen on a cell phone. Hell, even the guy who made Dollman Vs. Demonic Toys expected it would be viewed on a TV screen.
No one cares what I think. But thankfully David Lynch is getting some attention with this video that debunks the iPhone as a cinematic experience.
Hayden Christensen's career is marred by one of the lamest performances in all of sci-fi. Star Wars fans already had a hard enough time swallowing the idea that, in his youth, Darth Vader looked like he'd just walked out of a video as a back-up dancer for 'N Sync, but to then watch Christensen stumble through the prequels in some sort of glaze-eyed thorazine shuffle pushed many of us over the edge.
As time goes by, it seems less and less likely that this was really an issue with Christensen, and more a problem with George Lucas as a director. Regardless, I don't know anyone who's going to be happy about the latest gossip: Christensen has been cast as a hacker case in the upcoming Hollywood treatment of William Gibson's cyberpunk-defining novel, Neuromancer.
This project already has a lot of strikes against it. It's been stuck in development hell for almost two decades, it's being directed by the man behind Torque, and, it's based on a book that has a lot of cool ideas which have already been stolen wholesale by other films. For me, it'll all come down to who they get to play Molly Millions, the street samurai.
I kept thinking one of my colleagues at the Scanner would post this new photo from Death Race 3000 but I guess no one cares.
Am I getting too old or does the new version look stupid? (I mean stupid in a bad way. Of course the first movie was stupid, but that was in a good way.) I don't want to muck up the internet with negative thoughts about a movie that hasn't come out yet. But I will say that I prefer the original Death Race 2000; it's the non-thinking-man's Rollerball. It's less pretentious, anyway. Hell, it's a Roger Corman classic through and through.
If you haven't seen the movie, do yourself a favor and check it out. See early Sly Stallone in his warm-up for Rocky. (He took the part under the condition that he could re-write his dialogue.) Mary Wornov is great as always. But not surprisingly the guy who steals the show is David Carridine as Frankenstein.
While The Matrix sequels were largely unwatchable duds, The Animatrix—the Wachowski Brothers' collection of Matrix-inspired anime vignettes—is a gem. Shorts like The Second Renaissance put both the dramatic pacing and ideas of the Matrix's creators to shame. It was a fine effort, and after it was done, I found myself wishing that more directors would take a similar tack with spinning off franchises.
Looks like I'm getting my wish. The consulting producer of Terminator 4 has indicated that an animated tie-in called Termination will be released sometime in 2009, after the film is released. Middleton claims Termination will be done in a sort of pan-cultural Animatrix style, with European animators being invited to contribute along with Japanese anime visionaries.
Let's face it: As deliciously evil as the Imperial Empire is, it's a bit of a sausage fest. Readers of the Star Wars universe's answer to Neil Strauss' The Game will find few stormtrooper floozies at the local Death Star cantina to try their gambits upon.
And it's a shame, really. As numerous sci-fi cos players have shown us over the years, there's almost nothing sexier than a bare-midriffed female stormtrooper. The Empire may well have had the right idea from a tactical perspective by making Jango Fett the cloning template for their stormtrooper army. But from a recruitment perspective, they'd have been better off cloning Angelina Jolie and making the stormtrooper power armor a bikini.
Still, it's not too late. Chinese artist Feng Zhu has put together an incredible gallery of cheesecake Empire recruitment posters that emphasizes the one thing we've known all along: Intergalactic evil is plenty sexy.
• Does a 40 year career of pronouncing your v's as w's deserve recognition? If you think so, help support poor old Walter Koenig get on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
• SF Signal looks at the erotic sci-fi dances of the one, the only, the stupendously buxom Raquel Welch.
• The director of Iron Man wants to do an Avengers. Current ETA seems sometime in the next decade.
• And in other superhero team-up news, the Justice League of America films has been delayed. No surprises there, considering most of the roles are still uncast and the WGA Strike doesn't look set to end anytime soon.
• The Guardian asks: "Why do critics still sneer at sci-fi?" My answer: Because genre fiction tends to be aimed at the lowest common denominator of die-hard fans, and the signal-to-noise ratio is lower.
• Alan Moore eulogizes visionary conspiracy nut Robert Anton Wilson the only way he knows how: by rambling on about magick-with-a-k.
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 ...
