Nathan Fillion’s Captain Mal of Firefly beat out William Shatner’s iconic Kirk as best Starship captain in the recent Blockbuster poll. While I am a long time Trek fan, I have to agree; he just did a better job as a captain. Of course, the timing of the poll was no coincidence, since Star Trek 11 hits the big screens today (or tomorrow, depending on where you live). With Quinto doing Spock and Pegg as Scotty, I can’t wait to see how the new one turns out. In the same poll, Star Wars’ Darth Vader made best villain, David Tennant’s Doctor Who was voted hunkiest, and Jeri Ryan’s 7 of 9 won the babe category; good choices all.
Ghost In The Shell 2.0 is not a remake of the Starwars school, but rather an updating of the original masterpiece using modern animation tools and techniques. Scene for scene, it is exactly the same movie… except it looks and sounds better. There is an excellent collection of old and new frames for comparison at Asian Blueray Guide to give you an idea of the differences between the two versions. Expect it out in the US come August or September. If you can’t wait, it will be playing at Annecy, the worlds biggest animation festival. The Festival starts June 8th and runs to the 13th, showing over 500 films from 63 countries, including 10 feature Film Official Selections including Coraline, Monsters vs. Aliens, and Redline. The 2.0 trailer…
By way of SciFi Cool comes word that Fringe has been renewed, as has Heroes. But no news about whether Chuck gets brought back for a third season yet.
The Fan Film The Hunt for Gollum premiered at SciFi London yesterday, and was posted online at the same time (in HD, no less). Besides the movie’s home page, you can find it at Daily Motion, which also hosts the Sci-Fi London TV archives. Author Walter Jon Williams has posted a fun video called Mutant Powers, explaining graphically why you don’t want them. He also found the exploding gummi bears video below. And the first trailer is out for District 9, another thinking-person’s sleeper hit in the making, along with Moon.
It looks like we have an entire summer of great Sci-Fi movies in front of us, but for the moment let’s just look at this month. For this weekend, to open, top of the list is X-Men Origins: Wolverine, another world-class entry from the Marvel Movie House team. Since they brought the film making in-house, the movies just keep getting better and better. Also out this week is Battle for Terra, a 3D animated SF story, and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. Next week, the primary film is Star Trek 11, and the week after that has nothing I have recognized so far (I can’t count the Dan Brown movie since he only wrote one book, over and over). But one more week after that we have two fun flicks, Terminator: Salvation and Night At The Museum: Smithsonian.
Getting ready to step out the door and hit X-Men Origins: Wolverine in an hour or two, which I have been looking forward to for a while. If I was anywhere near Michigan, though, I would be joining Elizabeth Bear, Wil Wheaton, John Scalzi, and over a thousand others at Penguicon 7.0. A three day Con celebrating Linux, free and open source software, and Science Fiction? Had I heard about this a few weeks ago I would have been there; thanks to GeekDad for the heads up!