Author: Maurice Mitchell
There’s been a renewed interest in pulp novel heroes from the ’30s and ’40s, and now the studio that’s producing this year’s Green Hornet is planning a movie based on the wildly popular character Doc Savage, the so-called “Man of Bronze.” Created by Lester Dent in 1933, the star of books, radio, a campy 70’s movie and numerous comics, trained since birth to almost superhuman levels of human development. He was a world-class athlete, adventurer, doctor, lawyer and Indian chief traveling the world fighting evil. Sam Raimi, who’s working on a Shadow reboot, was attached to this project at one…
Dolph Lundgren, the German action star from the 80s and star of Masters of the Universe said, “I’m not really interested so much in guys flying from building to building, in funny looking suits. I think it’s more for little kids, and that’s obviously a very CG-driven film, where you can take anybody off the streets and make them a superhero, and that’s what the common man likes, because they can dream about being a superhero.” While he just has sour grapes because his action hero career took a nose dive, he does raise a good point. Most superhero movies do have…
The First Avenger: Captain America (2011) is the key for a whole slew of Marvel movies coming up, including The Avengers, so they’re focused on getting it right. I’m getting a little nervous, because it would be really easy for Joe Johnston to mess up Captain America, especially after the debacle of Wolfman (2010). There are lots of rumors going around about the flick, so we’ll list the highlights: Costume – As is usually the case, Captain America’s superhero costume gets a revision. Here’s how the director, Joe Johnston, describes it, “The costume is a flag, but the way we’re…
My brother and I LOVE the hilariously geeky Galaxy Quest (1999) movie about a bunch of actors from a cult television show (i.e. Star Trek) being kidnapped by aliens to live out their roles in space. To us, it’s the perfect homage to Star Trek and everything about it: from the quirkiness of the show, to the insanity of its fans and everything in between. Which is why it’s no cool that, over ten years later, a couple of replica toys are coming out. The N.S.E.A. Protector Spaceship model looks awesome and would have fit charmingly next to my Star…
[Pic of the week from OddballComics] Stan Lee must have read last week’s TWiG and got scared of becoming irrelevant because he’s teaming up with Archie comics to produce a comic book and television series called “Super Seven” with him playing a major role. The press release says, “It’s the story about seven aliens who find themselves stranded on planet Earth after their spaceship crashes, only to be befriended by none other than Lee himself. Taking them under his care, Lee becomes their leader and enables them to resume their lives as superheroes on earth.” How do aliens “resume their…
Here’s our joint review of GI Joe: Rise of Cobra. The following review takes place in real time… Warning: Contains spoilers if you care. Plot: A group of covert military specialists, code-named G.I. Joe, race to stop an evil weapons dealer, Destro, from unleashing a weapon that threatens to destroy the world. Monkey Migraine: Okay, I hated GI Joe: Rise of Cobra with a passion. Its the essence of what I’ll call a big-budget B-movie. They had a terrible script, a terrible director, and terrible actors, but threw money at it until it worked. Imagine this movie with everything the…
[Pic of the week from The Daily Weird] Sorry, the TWiG is late this week. My son had a high fever, and the dog ate my homework, and my brakes failed as I crashed into the US Open. The above picture is almost as cool as Graham Curson, 36, who married his wife Samantha, 26, while dressed as the Star Wars villain Darth Vader. Who is almost as cool as Ramona who had her father give her away as Darth Vader while she got married at a comic convention. And these are almost as cool as Darth Vader opening the…
The 82nd Academy Award nominations are out and we get a few juicy nominations. Avatar and District 9 have been nominated for best picture, of course, but here’s the shocker: We will now be required to say “the Oscar-Nominated Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.” That’s right, the Michael Bay film is getting a nod for “Best Sound Editing”, which is kind of like getting an award for being the loudest kid in the room. Whether you loved or hated the flick, this just doesn’t sound right. This is right up there with “the Oscar-Nominated Norbit” which was nominated in 2008…
Eugene Wesley “Rod” Roddenberry Jr, the son of the late Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, is producing a reboot of an old 70s television pilot of his father’s, called The Questor Tapes, as a potential series. This goes so far back, I only have a flickering image in the back of my brain, but it’s burned in there none the less: the image of rows and rows of bodies going back as far as the eye can see. Intended as the pilot for a television series in 1974, the movie followed an android who goes searching for his creator, a…
[Pic of the Week by Gizmodo] Apple announced the release of the highly anticipated tablet computer, called “iPad”, and this was a red-letter day for Steve Jobs’ world conquering company in two other ways. This week, 25 years ago (January 24th 1984), the first Apple Macintosh 128K went on sale becoming the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and graphical user interface. For all you Apple Cultists out there, this week (January 30, 1982) Richard Skrenta wrote the first publicly released PC virus, called “Elk Cloner”, on an Apple computer. One day the company will just make…
Movie posters of The Last Airbender (that other Avatar movie) have been released and they look nifty. The film, based on a popular children’s animated television show, follows a young boy named Aang that discovers he has the power to control the four main elements of earth, air, fire and water. He is pursued by the evil “Fire Lord” and “Fire Clan” who wishes to destroy the last “Avatar”. But, we asked ourselves, what are the chances that M. Night Shyamalan will make a good film? So, we set out to scientifically chart his career in hopes of prognosticating how…
This is an unusually nostalgic week here at Geek Twins as we flashback to both the Topp’s Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back stickers and various other toys my brother and I played with in our youth. All we need now is to have a remake of the 80’s cartoon show M.A.S.K. to make my life complete. Cast Will Smith as Matt Trakker, Christian Slater as Stiletto and Hugo Weaving as Miles Mayhem. On with the news. TOSS-UP: You’re forced at gun point to choose one costume to wear to the Source Awards: would it be the Star Wars Tie-Fighter…
Sometime Google Ads (Adsense) scans our posts and has some unintentionally hilarious connections. The best is the one from This Week in Geek 10/30/2009 (which talks about a guy looking for an amputee to complete his Chewbacca costume) which offered an ad for “Amputee Dating”. The best one I’ve found since then is James Cameron Calls Out the Raincoat Brigade for Avatar which proudly offered up an ad for “Trenchcoats – Huge Sale”. Have you spotted any funny ads in our blog? Let us know in the comments!
Sony has officially announced the Spider-Man franchise will be directed by former music video director Marc Webb. Let’s take at the legacy of Sam Raimi’s directorial masterpiece: the Spider-Man trilogy. A self-confessed Spider-Man fan, when Raimi took the director’s chair he was just transitioning from the world of independent film to big Hollywood. He still had the style and grace of his early days, but had a few dramatic flicks under his belt with The Quick and the Dead (1995 ) and A Simple Plan (1998) to persuade the suits he could make a big budget action film. From the very…
Pic of the Week by Funnyjunk.comNow that’s a movie I’d like to see. The Nav’i are in outer space because they’re too scared to be on the same planet as Chuck Norris. On with the news. I was excited about The-Network-Formerly-Known-as-SciFi’s Battlestar Galactica spin-off, Caprica, until producer Ronald Moore said, “It’s setting out to tell a very different story… It’s planet-based, instead of space-based, it’s not action-adventure, it’s much more centered on two families than a military environment. We wanted it to be much more about contemporary society and problems that are coming up on a social front as well…
For some reason, one of our most popular posts to date is “TV Movie The Phantom Images Released”, so here’s an update: It’s dead. Syfy made a big splash about the upcoming mini-series based on Lee Falk’s purple-suited comic character “The Phantom” last year with a sneak peek and then quietly snuck off hoping no one would remember it. Imdb says the film is in post-production with a Canadian air date of December 20th of last year. Ryan Carnes, who plays the hero, Chris Moore, lists this film as his last project. This is not surprising considering everyone hated the goofy…
The news just broke Monday morning on Deadline.com and was confirmed by Sony in a press release that afternoon: Spider-Man 4 will not be a sequel, but a reboot of the franchise without Sam Raimi, Tobey Maguire or any other member of the current franchise. Apparently, Raimi said he couldn’t maintain creative integrity and meet the release date. Sam raised with a pair of twos and Sony called his bluff, deciding just to drop the whole thing and start fresh. They already have an early script by James Vanderbilt that focuses on “a teenager grappling with both contemporary human problems and amazing super-human crises.” Sony is…
[Pic of the Week by Tronguy.net]The amazing thing about the above picture is not that we have a big fat guy dressed in a white spandex bodysuit, but that there is a big fat guy dressed in a white spandex bodysuit who’s proud of it. Jay Maynard actually does personal appearances all over the world. You have to love that kind of self-confidence. On with the news.I’m going to make up a term I’m calling the “Titanic Effect” which describes the power that tween and teenage girls have on popular culture. It was this singular affect that pushed Titanic to…
AVH: Alien vs. Hunter (2007) is a masterpiece of poor film making with boring characters, lazy special effects and a pedestrian plot ripped off from a mediocre film, but still manages to be worth watching. William Katt, famous for his role in the 80s hit Greatest American Hero, stars as a washed up writer in a small California town who leads a ragtag band of whiners from one place after another getting decimated by the “Alien” and the “Hunter”. The motivations of the characters are so obscure that when one character kisses Katt on the forehead she goes into an…
Tron Legacy, the sequel to the 1982 film Tron, is being released in December and anyone born in the last 10 years probably has no idea why. Looking at it from 2010, the film looks cheesy, boring and ugly. So, to help put the film in context, I’ll give a brief overview of why Tron is one of the best science-fiction films ever made. The movie follows Kevin Flynn, a video game programmer played by Jeff Bridges, who is abducted to a surreal “world” inside computers where programs are people fighting in games. He joins “Tron”, a security program played…
Being rich means never having to say “I’m bald.” Last year James Cameron said, “[Avatar] makes ‘Titanic’ look like a picnic,” and it seems he was right. Avatar, which cost $430 million to finance, has already made over $1 billion in three weeks. Along with Sherlock Holmes, it led to a record breaking weekend and is nominated for four 2010 Golden Globe awards, including “Best Director” and “Best Motion Picture.” He still has a ways to go before eclipsing “Titanic’s” $1.8 billion, eight Golden Globe nominations and three Oscars, but it’s still an amazing achievement. Personally, I hope he wins so he can…
[Pic of the week by Springfield Punks via Gizmodo] It was kind of weird writing the date as 010110. In hex color code it’s, basically, black. In binary it’s 22, and the 22nd letter of the alphabet is V. Coincidentally, we talk about a black guy named Laurence Fishbourne and the TV show V. I tried to find some kind of news using the number 22, to round it out, but couldn’t come up with anything. Next year the date will be 01/01/11 (00010111 is 23 in binary) and I’ll bet people go all “woo-woo” about what it portends. Speaking of…
Avatar (2009) is a flawed, but gorgeous film with heart that revolutionizes cinema as we know it. When my wife and I went to see the movies last Friday we ordered our tickets online, dropped our son at the babysitter and raced to the local Harkins cinema. We were convinced we were going to be in the front row, because everyone knows you don’t go to a big movie less than an hour before show time. At T minus 45 minutes we nervously ventured into the theater…to find it virtually empty. Later, we found out the reason the place was…
While I hate to talk about movies that aren’t even filming, it’s interesting to watch the Thor (2011) movie come together. So, here’s what we have so far: Chris Hemsworth is the “Mighty Thor”, and I’m presuming is bulking up to 300 levels of machismo (“This is Asgaaaard!”). Rene Russo is signed on to play Frigga, step-mother of Thor and wife of Odin. Sir Anthony Hopkins is almost a given as the powerful Asgardian king Odin, although I think he’ll do a lot of hunching and whispering. Samuel Jackson has a cameo as Nick Fury, which makes sense since this…
The Internet is full of lists of sexy babes in science-fiction, but who has time to go through them all and find the best ones? Apparently we do. Since we’re not above the desire to generate traffic, we now present a list of the 21 best lists of women in science-fiction. We’ve tried to rate them based on content and, of course, picture quality. Some of these lists had ratings and some were just unordered lists. For the ones that didn’t use ratings, we just figured they saved the best for last. 21 – A Pakistan News’ “Sexiest Sci-Fi Women”…
[Pic of the Week from HotTopic] Yes, the pic above is real. As much as I hate Snuggies (make that Snuggies for dogs specifically) the above image borders on the psychopathic. I like how the model is trying desperately to make it look cool by sporting metro-sexual hair and an erring. Sorry man. You’re still wearing a Snuggie. This is what you get when you put Snuggies and Underoos in Jeff Goldblum’s teleporter. On to the news. It’s kind of a slow week really… With the upcoming remake of Clash of the Titans I’m getting nostalgic for stop-motion, which is…
His MoMA Don’t Dance and his Daddy Don’t Rock N’ Roll We’ve been a fan of Tim Burton since “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure” and always enjoy his quirky view of the world. My personal guilty pleasure is to see all the bizarre, yet beautiful, sketches he does for his movies and see how closely he was able to capture them on-screen. I even liked “Planet of the Apes” for the ornate sketches he did on the costumes. So, it’s with joy that I found out about his new exhibit “Tim Burton” at the “Museum of Modern Art”. The show features over 700…
Pic of the Week from movie-moron.com Again, we present our opinions on this weeks’ top news. Bryan Singer, the director of the only good X-Men movies, has signed on to do “X-Men: First Class” and has ordered an entirely new script. The film, a prequel to the previous X-Men fims, will now focus on the relationship between Professor X (Charles Xavier) and Magneto (Erik Lehnsherr) and the development of the school for mutants. This film will now restore my faith in the franchise and finally remove the taste of bile that still lingers from seeing Hugh Jackman’s naked butt. [/Film] TOSS-UP: If you…
The first trailer for “Iron Man 2” is online and geeks everywhere are rejoicing. The Internet almost collapsed under the collective weight of all the announcements and reviews of the trailer last night declaring it “so kewl”. One rule about trailers I follow is that good movies have trailers that focus on the plot, while bad movies have trailers with lots of shiny, pointy things. “Watchmen” is probably the best example of this. This trailer is almost entirely plot driven with some dancing hotties thrown in to keep the menfolk interested. Here’s the official synopsis: “Paramount Pictures and Marvel Entertainment present…
Last year, DC announced that they were merging the Milestone Dakotaverse into the world of Superman. This is sad. Milestone truly lived up to it’s name in comic book history as the first attempt – make that only attempt – to create a truly diversified comic book world made up of complex characters. In 1993, during the heyday of independent comic book companies, a group of African-American artists and writers set out to create a series that would redefine minorities in comic books. While it was published by DC, the comics were completely independent. I fondly remember reading the first…