Sunday, August 28, 2011

Monkeying around with Planet of the Apes

The latest Planet of the Apes movie, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, is still chugging along nicely at the box office, proving to be a surprise hit.

You may remember its original title was Rise of the Apes, but cooler and perhaps hairier heads prevailed at Fox Studios and they put the franchise moniker "Planet of" back in there as it should be.

What you may not know is that in the reboot/rethink process the film went through several possible titles, which are presented here for the first time:

How the Planet of the Apes Got Its Groove Back

Manos: The Hairy Paws of the Planet of the Apes

To Wong Foo, Thanks For the Planet of the Apes

Planet of the Apes vs. Frankenstein and Jesse James

Stop! Or My Ape Will Shoot

Honey, I Shrunk the Planet of the Apes

Planet of the Apes 2: Electric Monkey Boogaloo

Destroy All Monkeys (Planet of the Apes in Japan)

Planet of the Apes: The Banana Hangover

Cowboys & Apes & Aliens

WTF?, Planet of the Apes

Justin Bieber: Never Say Planet of the Apes

Final Destination: The Planet of the 6pes

Tyler Perry’s Madea Straightens Out the Planet of the Apes

Saturday, August 27, 2011

Your Time is Up

Writer/director Andrew Niccol (Gattaca and The Truman Show) has a new scifi film coming up called, In Time.

In the near future, units of time are bought and sold. If you want to buy something, you give them minutes of your life, if you want to live longer you have to work very, very hard for those precious extra minutes.

Here's the international trailer for In Time by way of io9.com.

Friday, August 26, 2011

Droid Safety

Here at the space station, a cute girl with an R2-D2 bike helmet gets our full attention. Now this is an item Uncle George's marketing peeps should have thought of a long time ago....

(This item was originally found at the blog Pop Candy, run by the lovely, talented and geektastic Whitney Matheson.)


Thursday, August 25, 2011

Replaced have I been, Yes!

Well, the Star Wars Saga Blu-Ray release is coming up on us.

Uncle George decided to replace the puppet Yoda in Episode I: It All Goes Into the Shitter From Here with a CGI version to match the digital Yoda in Episodes II and III. io9.com's article on this has a nice pic comparing the muppet with the digi-version.

Now I love, love, love the Stuart Freeborn-created puppet used in The Empire Strikes Back, but boy oh boy, the puppet in Episode I is...just something, ain't it? LOOK AT THAT FUCKING THING! It looks like Yoda's dumb, drunk-n-hopped-up-on-painkillers, "look-alike" cousin.

Adios, fucker.


Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Timeline of the Planet of the Apes

Being into all things monkey, I heartily recommend this article at Rope of Silicon, where blogger Brad Brevet posts a timeline for the original five Planet of the Apes movies.

Before the Saw series became a yearly Halloween "treat" for the last few years, the period of 1970 to 1973 saw the release of a new Apes movie each year. And while the budgets for each successive movie were slashed considerably, they were able to tell some imaginative, thought-provoking, exciting and fun adventure tales that still hold up today. Original Planet of the Apes screenwriter Rod Serling would have been proud.

Stick them to the Game Grid

Here's the lightcycle chase from Tron, as interpreted by rolls of Duck Tape-brand duct tape, from io9.com.

Way awesome.

Monday, August 22, 2011

Of (Giant) Mice and Men

Ever have that dream where you wake up in the "Land of the Giants" and that creepy giant hand they always used is s-l-o-w-l-y moving in to scoop you up.

Maybe it's just me....

Anywoo, "Land of the Giants" was fortunate enough to feature not one but TWO great main title themes from the Maestro of Movie Music himself, John Williams. Here's Season One, and, my fave, Season Two.

LOOK OUT! IT' S MONDAY!

Yup, it's Monday. The start of another work week, or work weak if you prefer.

If you're like me, that's means a grief-filled day. In that spirit, here's an io9.com post about the Five Stages of Grief thru the lens of the Schwarzenegger Conan movies.

If you need a sugar rush to get through today's festivities, here's a fun piece from cracked.com looking at Marvel super-heroes and Hostess Snack Cakes. I particularly like the second item with the Hulk versus the Roller Disco Devils, which are a bunch of dudes in their mid-forties on roller skates, listening to tunes with lyrics like, "Yeah! Yeah! Baby" and "Wo! Wo!"

Sunday, August 14, 2011

Review the Block!

I’ve been re-reading "Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In" by the one and only Joe Bob Briggs. It’s in that spirit that I present the following review. The drive-in will never die!

I took the landspeeder down off blocks, and since it hovered there in the air, I drove it down to the Arclight in Mos Hollywood to catch this little alien invasion flick that was made “across the pond,” as they say, in non-Communist Britain.

It’s called Attack the Block. It’s about these teenagers with funny accents who don’t own Xboxes and don't have much parenting going on, so they go around mugging women for their jewelry.

Then an alien lands smack dab into a car parked on the same street where the Little Thieving Rascals are doing their mugging.

Then the alien critter attacks the lead teenager named Moses.

Then Moses goes all Sammy Sosa on steroids on ET and kills it with a baseball bat.

Then the kids meet up with Nick Frost the neighborhood pot-head, and later the local drug dealer who wants Moses to be his new Number One Guy.

Then MORE aliens fall from the sky, except these are A LOT nastier than the one Moses clubbed.

Then the kids and the woman they mugged have to defend their ghetto block from crazy aliens while staying out of the path of the drug dealer’s bullets.

No breasts (except if you count the female alien, and I don’t). Several excellent beasts with day-glo teeth. Drive-in Academy Award nomination for John Boyega as Moses the Denzel Washington look-alike teen leader. Heads roll. Three quarts human blood. One quart alien blood. One motor vehicle chase with crash. Motorcycle, scooter and bicycle chases with minimal crashes. No kung fu. Samurai sword fu. Baseball bat fu. Kitchen knife fu. Oven fu. Not a lot of plot to slow things down. Excellent tunes from bands I never heard of. Three stars, BNFOS says check it out.

Friday, August 5, 2011

Of Capes and Cowls

The amazing folks at io9.com have some cool first photos from two very anticipated movies.

First up is the dreamy Anne Hathaway in her Catwoman garb from The Dark Knight Rises. From the pic, it looks like the thieving kitty stole the Bat's wheels.

And here is the first look at star Henry Cavill all suited up as Superman in Man of Steel. I like the tone of the image, what with all the sparks, rubble and busted metal, and I like that they're not using the Brandon Routh version of the costume, but, seriously, what is with the textured look to the costume?

Ever since the first Spider-Man movie, does every superhero costume has to have shit, i.e. a printed pattern, all over it? (Or was it Billy Zane's The Phantom that started the trend? But in that movie the Phantom's costume was more or less "tattooed" with tribal art and skulls, things associated with the character, and not just some silly grid pattern.) Are solid colors simply verboten? That aesthetic even carried over into the 2009 Star Trek film reboot, with the little delta symbol plastered all over their uniforms instead of having it simply be a solid color. The new Spider-Man reboot costume looks like it was made primarily from recycled basketballs due to the silly patterns in it.

Christopher Reeve and his classic costume showed you don't need little textured crap all over everything. It showed you need a very talented actor to bring the character to life. The actor makes the costume work, not vice versa.