Author: Maurice Mitchell

Pic of the week This week’s geek news is “Spider-Man 4” heavy, which shows I’m more excited about Spider-Man than I’d like to admit. In unrelated news, Paul Ruebens is making a new “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse” stage show which proves his career has ended where it first began. I’m not sure if it’s going to be as funny to see a 57-year-old guy prancing around in short pants. Sony CEO, Howard Stringer, says that the upcoming “Spider-Man 4” sequel will not be in 3D. I hope more studios fight against this trend since, most of the time, it’s nothing more than…

Why anyone would want a sequel to the horrible Will Smith homeless superhero film “Hancock” is beyond me, but the movie made $682 million dollars so someone must care. When news broke that they had solidified Will Smith and Charlize Theron’s involvement in the sequel, everyone was excited. But, now, it looks like the movie is stalled by scheduling issues and I couldn’t be happier. Peter Berg said, “There are so many people involved in that, from Will to his partner James Lassiter to Akiva [Goldsman] to Michael Mann, myself and to get us all in the same room just…

Men watching “Avatar” will be hopelessly frothing at the mouth for James Cameron’s CGI women. In an interview with Playboy magazine, Cameron said that men watching his new movie won’t be able to help themselves from being overcome with licentiousness. “They will have actual lust for a character that consists of pixels of ones and zeros. You’re never going to meet her, and if you did, she’s 10 feet tall and would snap your spine. The point is, 99.9 percent of people aren’t going to meet any of the movie actresses they fall in love with, so it doesn’t matter…

The international poster for the “Iron Man” movie – due May 7, 2010 – was released to Yahoo last week, and it looks awesome, but raises some questions. The idea of shortening the title to the sequel number is bizarre, but I guess they’re hoping the designs are recognizable enough to speak for itself. For those not familiar with the characters, in the Marvel comics Tony Stark’s African-American friend, Jim Rhodes, took on the role of Iron Man occasionally and became a super-hero called “War Machine”. The movie design of the “War machine” armor is darker, angrier and more functional…

Pic of the week: “My Little Slave Pony”The first person to die on the Marvel Comics Theme Park Spider-Man ride will probably get a slew of goofy titled obituaries like “Web-head Kills Local Rider” and “J.J Jameson Was Right: Spider-Man is a Menace”. Actually…those are pretty good, so I’m going to file those for a future post. After watching “The Greatest American Hero” on Hulu I had two thoughts: First, it’s time to remake this series. Concept: A slacker encounters what he thinks may bee aliens and discovers a red leather costume that gives him superpowers. Since his laptop with…

This blog post deals with the most exasperating part of the show “Smallville”: the cardinal rule of “No flights. No tights”. When the show first aired, the producers, Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, felt their target audience wouldn’t be able to accept a hero in a cape and tights. They wanted a hero that young people could relate to, and watching a guy fly around wearing spandex seemed preposterous. More importantly, the rule showed me they recognized that this was not Superman, but they wanted to show how he would become the hero we know. But, nine seasons later, we…

In the past, when trying to watch the adventures of the time-traveling “Doctor Who”, the time difference in Britain and America has been annoying. At one point, BBC was a whole season ahead of “The-Channel-Formerly-Known-As-Sci-Fi”, which made it impossible to get news without a tsunami of spoilers like “Can you believe Doctor Who has a daughter?” The same is true of the final episodes of David Tennant as the tenth Doctor and Russell T. Davies’ as its executive producer and lead writer. According to rave reviews I am forced to evade from “the Guardian” and “The Telegraph” it’s stupendous. While “Doctor…

James Cameron hired a team to create an entire alien language and planetary biology for his movie “Avatar”. This will only be interesting to the type of people who listen DVD commentary, and will be meaningless on-screen. Thankfully, I am one of those people. The last thing we need is another Ang Lee “Hulk”. We dodged a bullet now that John Woo has come out and said he’s not interested in comic book movies. The guy who created a “wrist-mounted flamethrower” to replicate “Pyro’s” superpowers must have spent eight months burning himself to a crisp. I’d market my DIY Wolverine claws, but I only have ten…

An absolutely brilliant take on “The Portait of Dorian Gray” set against a backdrop of cloning. eidolon.net: The Extra by Greg Egan

“The latest report offers a revealing look at why ‘Spider-Man: Turn off The Dark’ will be so expensive—the elaborate staging alone requires at least 40 stage hands to operate the musical’s backstage rigging” – MTV Splashpage about the upcoming Spider-Man musical. This conjurers up images of forty sweaty guys hanging from cables desperately trying to prevent Spider-Man from doing a face plant into the front seats. Image courtesy of MerryWankster

There was a particulary strange batch of news this week, but for some reason Star Trek won out. Go figure. In the comments you can agree or disagree. The New Clash of the Titans trailer makes me want to run into the street bellowing “O Fortuna”, while swinging a light saber. But, what made the original a classic? It wasn’t a compelling story or Harry Hamlin with his shirt off, it was Ray Harryhausen’s amazing stop-motion creatures. Without those, the film will be about as worthless as a Bill Cosby mask at a Twilight convention. ODDSMAKERS: What are the odds that Liam…

There’s an online campaign by the “nothing-better-to-do” crowd for Warner Bros to release a DVD of Bryan Singer’s original two hour and forty-five minute edit of “Superman Returns”. So-called “director’s cuts” can be fun. For example, the 2006 Richard Donner director’s cut of Superman II is well worth the time since the original was seriously flawed. But, I don’t think a director’s cut of Superman Returns would make much difference. In the case of Donner, the studio re-edited the films without their involvement. But, Bryan Singer wasn’t pressured by the studios to make the cuts. In an interview in 2006…

Our love of fan-films ranges from the clunky to the brilliant, and Doctor Who: Alternate Empire is a fascinating entry into the field. The show is set up as a mash-up between Doctor Who and Star Wars. The Doctor finds himself fighting a group of aliens trying to conquer Taris IV from the Star Wars Universe. The writing is top-notch and the acting is very well-done, but, the editing is bizarre with characters sometimes talking and then pausing while the cut changes. The special effects are adequate, but not spectacular. Hopefully as the series continues we’ll see the Doctor wielding…

We can’t think of a scarier quote than the one below for the franchise. “Harry Potter is a bit of a role model for us, absolutely.” – Producer Lauren Shuler Donner said of the upcoming film “X-Men: First Class”

Those are the words that greeted us when we tried to log in to Geocities today. The now famous web hosting service that ushered in a whole world of websites, some good, most horrible, has shut down. Created by David Bohnett and John Rezner in late 1994, the service became unavailable on October 27, 2009. The site allowed millions of people to create web pages with no knowledge or interest in HTML or web design sense. Back when the BLINK command was essential, and you could download millions of different colored bars and buttons, using them all on one page. …

Tomorrow, the reboot of the classic 80’s mini-series “V” will begin on ABC (87pm central). We have a lot of fond memories of this show. One especially vivid one was the heated discussion of whether the alien baby would be human or alien (it as twins so they were both right). We have high hopes for the show. Having watched the clips and first nine minutes it seems suitably creepy and has an ominous tone. While original creator Kenneth Johnson may be hoping to make a low-budget movie some day, we’re hoping that he stays out of it and this succeeds…

How many times can we talk about Star Wars and Star Trek in the same week? Well. Every week, but still, it’s pretty cool. In the comments you can agree or disagree. The Firefly Serenity ship model, which costs $2,495, is way too expensive for the average geek. However, it would look great next to a hundred dollar lightsaber. The Planet Hulk story line of 2006, which chronicled the expulsion of hulk from Earth and his subsequent rise to power on the planet Sakaar, chronicles the most significant change to the character since the Grey Hulk. “Planet Hulk”, the next…

Babylon 5 was an amazing show and, while it’s long gone, this video (set to BNL – One Week) sums up everything we loved about the show with all it’s bizarre twists and turns. For all of you people who loved babylon 5, well this is the clip for you, the entire 5 years of babylon 5 done in song!thats right, 2:28 min long and approx 130 cuts this clip was a labor of love between John McCaffrey and lance jackson for a season that gave us much joy. so im putting this up here for everyone to enjoy! Song…

How much do you trust Roland Emmerich? The answer to that question will tell you whether you’ll like his up-coming adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. Originally a collection of short stories about an organization trying to rebuild after the collapse of the “Galactic Empire”. Roland says that the challenge will be to find a common thread to tell the story. “There’s not one character going through, so Bob Rodat came to me and … He said, ‘We have to consolidate the characters.’ And that’s what we did, and that’s what’s worked really, really well in the context. And I…

Here’s this week top stories and opinions. In the comments you can agree or disagree. Join in the conversation! The new Laptop Steering Wheel Desk from “Mobile Office” is guaranteed to cause an accident since someone out there is going to decide to use it to eat and work on their laptop while driving. The “Burger King Windows 7 whopper”, which is five inches tall and boasts seven meat patties is a brilliant marketing campaign since everyone and their mother is talking about how unhealthy it is. ODDSMAKERS: Morgan Spurlock will make a sequel to “SuperSize Me” called “Windows 7…

In our first review of SyFy channel movies it’s important to establish that we love bad movies, thanks to long nights with MST3K. That said, there’s good bad, and bad-bad. This movie is bad-bad. The film is so bad, the writerdirector Jack Perez changed his name to the pseudonym Ace Hannah for this film. “Mega shark vs Giant Octopus” is a surprisingly boring disaster film from the Schlockbuster team of The Asylum. Considering the movie revolves around the promise of a giant shark AND a giant octopus fighting, the movie itself is very small and dull. The movie starts with…

Here’s this week top stories and opinions. In the comments you can agree or disagree. Join in the conversation! While “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” was good for a laugh, the upcoming “Little Women and Werewolves” pushes a good idea over the edge into stupidity and the trend is destroying classic literature. ODDSMAKERS: “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Frankenstein” will be made within twelve months Transformers 3 is set to open in 2011, and if Michael Bay makes good on his veiled threats and kicks Megan Fox out of the franchise, it could only make them better. The…

Back in July 7th 2009, the 16-year old “Sci-Fi channel” rebranded itself with the goofy name “SyFy”. While the Internet buzzed with comments like “Sounds like the name of a water bottling company,” and “Sounds like some kind of mop, blender, or gossip magazine,”. They said in their press releases that the reason was “If you ask people their default perceptions of Sci Fi, they list space, aliens and the future,” Bonnie Hammer, the former president of Sci Fi who became the president of NBC Universal Cable Entertainment and Universal Cable Productions “That didn’t capture the full landscape of fantasy…

While we hate to talk about movies in development we thought we’d share some news on the ‘Venom’ Movie since this is a classic example of all-concept but no-point. They green-light a Venom movie after the success of Spider-Man 4 (go figure) and spend the next few years trying to figure out what to do with it. Finally, they hit on the idea of making him a hero which did nothing to help the character in the comics and led them to make another character to replace him: Carnage. Yes, Venom became such a nice-guy they had to make a…

Here’s this week top stories and opinions. In the comments you can agree or disagree. Join in the conversation! The Joker Blogs are getting a lot of attention for it’s spot on impression of Heath Ledger’s Joker being interviewed by Dr. Quinzel. But, this time next year there will be a bunch of imitaters in the spirit of YTMND looking to cash in on the idea. OVERUNDER: There will be 95 blogs based around the same theme this time next year The new Doctor Who logo, two new series (K-9, and cartoon) and new doctor are all disturbing signs. The Doctor…

They wanted to make a comic movie so badly… 10. Hulk (2003): It’s a simple idea. Scientist gets blasted with gamma rays and turns into a gigantic, super strong monster when he’s angry. How hard is that to mess up? Director Ang Lee succeeded with spectacular results. He turned the simple origin into a confusing tangle of pseudo-science involving nanotechnology and bioengineering, gave Bruce Banner the most convoluted childhood in movie history, and had the Hulk fighting a giant poodle. The special effects were awesome, but Lee manages to almost ruin that by having most of the Hulk’s appearances occur…

Nicholas Cage, who was signed on to play the main villain, Chudnofsky in Green Hornet has decided to step out of the role saying the character was too one-dimensional. He said he “wasn’t interested in just being just a straight-up bad guy who was killing people willy-nilly.” Despite trying to add some more dimension to the character he added “I had to have some humanity and to try to give it something where you could understand why the character was the way he was but I don’t think there was enough time to develop it.” The film, starring Seth Rogen…

I decided to rename the “Sci-Fi Snippets” feature to something else since it’s not very descriptive. Put your suggestions in the comments if you like. We present this week’s Sci-Fi news and opinions. True or False? Now that Sci-Fi wire SCI FI Wire has proven without a shadow of a doubt that “Flash Forward” and “Lost” are nothing alike, and it definitely makes the show more original. ODDSMAKERS: Percentage of readers that won’t click on the attached link. The make-up and voice effects for Freddy Krueger are vastly different from the original, making him look and sound like an actual…

What the world needs now is Oz…more Oz For some reason Todd McFarlane feels like we need yet another version of “The Wizard of Oz”. Surprisingly enough, he has a “dark” take on the veritable fable based on his ‘The Twisted Land Of Oz'(NSFW) toy line. He feels that with the 70th anniversary of the 1930’s film the time is right to destroy more childhood memories. “I’ve always been a believer that the reason remakes don’t work is that they stay too true to the source material.” McFarlane said, “Hopefully we’ll have a new script in the next month or…

From the “Aint-it-Cool…kinda” file comes word of a full-scale replica of the Daleks made entirely out of matchsticks. Brian Croucher, 66, spent over two years making the replica because of the best of all reasons: His wife said he couldn’t do it. “I did a Dalek because my wife Hazel bet me to do it as a challenge. Because I had made the five foot motor launch I wanted to make something bigger with more detail.” Using special modeling matchsticks (didn’t even know they existed) he tirelessly worked on it in his living room for two hours a day. Besides…