Rumor has it that Patrick Warburton will be back in more live action episodes of The Tick, this time to be run on Amazon’s streaming video service. That is according to Topless Robot, who got it from People Magazine, and then it was confirmed by Comic Book Resources. Also back (courtesy of the interest he generated at the tail end of Guardians of the Galaxy) is Howard the Duck, in the form of the Howard the Duck Omnibus. Basically they compiled all 33 episodes of the Howard The Duck comic series, and every other story he was in from a range of Marvel properties. The blurbs Marvel shows after the credits have been running for a while being what they are, the first thing that came to my mind when I saw him was the Master of Quack Fu was going to be starring in a new Howard the Duck movie. I have found absolutely nothing indicating that is going to happen, but the thought does kind of make me smile.
Earlier today the Hollywood Reporter announced a date has finally been set for the X-Men spinoff Deadpool, with a target date of 12Feb16. The main rumor is Ryan Reynolds will reprise the Wade Wilson roll he had in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and I do believe that is him in the leaked test footage included here. Because scheduling is everything to large projects that all need to draw on the same resources, the Fantastic Four reboot moves to 7Aug15, and Assassin’s Creed, which previously held that date, gets pushed back almost a year, to some time in 2016.
There is a brand new version of Gentoo Linux as a live DVD with multiple desktops and a ton of free software available. Gentoo Linux 20140826 features a collection of powerful updated software packages including Firefox 31.0, LibreOffice 4.2.5, GIMP 2.8.10, Blender 2.71, Amarok 2.8.0, Chromium 37.0.2062.35 and more. The desktops include KDE 4.13.3, GNOME 3.12.2, Xfce 4.10, Fluxbox 1.3.5, LXQt desktop 0.7.0, and i3 desktop 2.8. Plus, being a Live Disc, you don’t even have to risk your computer installation to run it. Just download the appropriate *.ISO file for your system and burn it to disc as an image, and you are ready to play with it. To use it, make sure your BIOS recognizes the CD/DVD hardware in your computer as a boot drive that it checks before the hard drive (that is the default on most computers made in the last 10 years or so). Then just drop the optical disc into your CD/DVD drive and power cycle your computer. When it wakes back up, it will be running an amazing collection of software on an OS you have not seen before; go play and explore! When you are done, shut down Gentoo, eject the disc, and reboot again. Your original system OS, be it Windows, Mac, or other, will be running just fine, without even any new files stored to your hard drive, pristine and unchanged. Live Discs are a great way to try new software and OS’s risk free on the hardware you own without having to worry about losing what you already had working. In a lot of cases, it is the software you never even knew to look for that ends up being the most worthwhile, and then you can check for instances of it built to run on the base system you have.
I am definitely looking forward to this one coming out… Go Marvel! Big Hero 6 will be hitting theaters in November.
Disney’s Big Hero 6 already has me laughing and cheering, and the movie won’t be out for months yet. I have commented on it previously from the perspective of the Marvel property it comes from, a graphic novel/manga of the first order with a lot of links to Japans Pop Culture. And that’s without even going into the whole Pixar/Miyazaki/Disney animation connection. As a single example, did you see Totoro in Toy Story 2, and recognize that high-quality animation universe crossover?
The new Terry Gilliam sci-fi film The Zero Theorem gets released on line tomorrow. It is the story of a computer hacker who is assigned by god to discover the meaning of life, if any, and report back so he can understand it himself. As near as I can tell, this is the perfect companion piece to Brazil, another twisted Terry Gilliam project. When we hit the actual weekend we have a number of interesting films in the theaters, starting with Sin City: A Dame to Kill For. If you saw the first movie in this series, I don’t have to tell you about it; if you didn’t, nothing I can say will make sense until you experience it for yourself. A documentary coming out this week I want to see is To Be Takei, all about the man who should have been Captain Sulu decades ago. There are a few more new films this week worth mentioning, but the one I like is the romantic fantasy If I Stay. When you take them all together, it looks like this is the week with the most new and interesting movies so far this year. I can’t wait to see that record broken.