Did you know that in 1969, Salvador Dali did a series of illustrations for that surreal classic, Alice in Wonderland? It is true, and the book itself is not cheap; the second video tells you how to identify it, so you don’t waste your $30K to $60K (depending on where you find a copy). The final video segment is from the 1933 version of Alice, with W.C. Fields and quite a few other folks you should have no problem recognizing.
Tad William’s classic fantasy Tailchaser’s Song is going to be made into an animated feature, and what encouraged me that they might stay true to the feel of the book is the animation production house, IDA. If International Digital Artists doesn’t ring any bells for you, they are the team that put together Cat Sh*t One, based on the manga of the same name. That is a brutally realistic combat animation starring special forces bunnies; unfortunately, all the legal copies of the trailer for that animation I could find include advertisements of one type or another, but I think you will be impressed by the quality of work once you get to the trailer itself. Thanks to Crunchyroll for the heads up on this one!
I am not a big horror fan, but this story was never really horror at its core. And depending on how true to the book they stay (remember Who Goes There by John W Campbell?) this second re-release of 1951’s The Thing could be quite enjoyable. Most folks today tend to remember the 1982 John Carpenter remake, which was better done than most. What both movie versions had in common with the best Hitchcock thrillers or modern Japanese horror is that neither film showed you any blood and gore; the scary bits were all off screen, but they were implied so well that your imagination ran away with you filling in all the details. Of course, this meant you would be imaging the scene in the way that would be most terrifying TO YOU, so while no two people ever watched the same movie, every one who saw it found it one of the scariest things they had ever seen. It is rare when a film captures the essence of a book, but having the audience visualize the missing bits like that brought the movie experience a lot closer to the process the human brain goes through while reading, and trust me when I say this is a technique more films should make use of. It remains to be seen how well this latest incarnation of the story is done, but this is one of the true classics of science fiction.
According to the folks at Deadline, it looks like Fox has picked up the option to turn Issac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel into a movie. Considering what they did with the Will Smith version of Asimov’s I, Robot I don’t expect this one will be very close to the book either. Still, I will be in the theater when it hits the big screen, if only to see how close they came. Hopefully they will at least let the robot be one of the good guys this time. I should mention that I enjoyed their version of I, Robot, it just wasn’t very close to the book.
I just watched this at Sci-Fi Mafia, who got it from Empire Online, and it gave me a serious smile and a bit of a tear. They asked each of the primary actors in Harry Potter to sum up their 10 year experience of making the movies in one word. This was the result. You will also find a tasty Alan Rickman quote about it all at Sci-Fi Mafia, and some more cast videos at Empire Online, so be sure to stop by.
This trailer for Robert J. Sawyer’s book The Terminal Experiment is a little hard for me to follow (since I don’t speak Hungarian), but is quite nicely done. This one appears to be publisher created, although without a translation I am just guessing, but some quite excellent book trailers have been created by fans.