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Posted on 02.28.15 by Widge @ 1:30 am
Comments on this: none yet. Add your own.  Leonard Nimoy--actor, director, writer, poet, musician, and elder stateman of the sci-fi geek community for his role as Mr. Spock--died yesterday at age 83. Chances are if you read this site, this is not news to you...since social media has been awash with memorials. And rightly so. An irreplaceable loss to culture, pop or otherwise. Rox pointed out that bits of Leigh's interview with him from DragonCon 2009 has been posted on YouTube. So for a look back at the man in one of his elements, here you go: Categorized as: Stuff You Need to Know
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Posted on 07.01.14 by Wolven @ 5:50 pm
Comments on this: none yet. Add your own.  In the words of Wednesday, "All is well, and all is well, and all shall be well." But I don't know, maybe you just didn't hear me when I said that Bryan Fuller is working on the American Gods production team. The Hollywood Reporter has it that Bryan Fuller (Hannibal, Pushing Daisies, 1313 Mockingbird Lane, Dead Like Me) is working with the network Starz on the adaptation of The Neil's sprawling and lush roadtrip through the American mythscape--the resonant and divisive opus that is American Gods. Categorized as: Stuff You Need to Know
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Posted on 12.18.13 by Wolven @ 5:39 am
Comments on this: 2 so far. Add your own.  So, as Tor.com had it, "Joseph Gordon-Levitt to direct and star in Sandman movie, possibly the first in a multi-film franchise." Granted, JGL clarified later on that he was only on board (for the moment) as a producer. David S. Goyer is, of course, also attached to produce. As long-time followers of the Sandman film adaptation debacle will recall: this film has been stuck in development hell for over a decade and a half--and thankfully so. The most recently discussed draft had capes and superhero-esque origins and all kinds of foolishness. So thankfully, this iteration looks basically exactly like I said it would need to look, in order to get me interested: it looks like they've erased literally all of the film script work done on it, to this point, and started over from scratch. And I'm okay with that. Categorized as: Stuff You Need to Know
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Posted on 12.16.13 by Widge @ 8:55 am
Comments on this: none yet. Add your own.  Peter O'Toole died over the weekend, apparently after a long illness. He was 81 years old. I understand he was in damn near everything--and was working right up to the end, it seems--and I know he's best known for playing the title character in Lawrence of Arabia. But for me, I had the most fun with O'Toole in two roles. One was Alan Swann in My Favorite Year from 1982. It's criminally underviewed but has him playing a hard-drinking swashbuckling actor ("I'm not an actor, I'm a movie star!") trying to be kept under control by Mark Linn-Baker. Think of it as a predecessor to Get Him to the Greek. Categorized as: Stuff You Need to Know
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Posted on 10.10.13 by Rob Levy @ 12:06 pm
Comments on this: none yet. Add your own.  For the last few months there have been persistent rumors of a "major" discovery of missing Doctor Who episodes. These rumors went into overdrive over the weekend thanks to articles in The Mirror and The Radio Times claiming that an announcement was imminent. It appears as though the Beeb wanted to keep this thing under wraps for a while longer, but the cat is out of the bag now and they had to act. Thus we arrive at today, a time when all of the classic Doctor Who fans are waiting like a groom at the altar for a bride they know is probably beautiful...but they'd like to see for themselves. Categorized as: Stuff You Need to Know
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Posted on 07.22.13 by Widge @ 1:13 pm
Comments on this: 2 so far. Add your own. Very quickly, because some of us have lives...the high points from this past weekend. The stuff you actually do need to know. More fallout, I'm certain, is coming. Sort of like winter. But the fallout won't take several books. Count on it. 
Categorized as: Stuff You Need to Know
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Posted on 06.21.13 by Widge @ 10:21 pm
Comments on this: none yet. Add your own.  James Gandolfini died this week of a heart attack at the way too young age of 51. Thespia found this clip for us, coming up after the jump. You have to love it when a tough guy actor doesn't have a problem subverting his own image. Categorized as: Stuff You Need to Know
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Posted on 05.08.13 by Widge @ 5:14 am
Comments on this: 2 so far. Add your own.  Kids, this is a scenario where I'm not going to tell you to ask your parents. I'm just going to flat out tell you myself. There once was a time when you couldn't make any damn thing you wanted show up in a movie using a computer. You used to have to use practical FX...exclusively. And so when you wanted something that shouldn't ordinarily move around on its own--say, a skeleton with a sword or a Gorgon--you would need to take a model of said thing, take a picture, move it, then take another picture and so on with excruciatingly slowness. Eventually, you could piece together all the pictures with their very, very slight changes and play them at speed...and you get the illusion of movement. Stop motion. The granddaddy of visual effects and the King of Stop Motion was Ray Harryhausen. From 1949 to 1981, if you dug a genre film that used stop motion...there was a pretty good chance Harryhausen was the man behind it. Exhibit A comes after the jump. Categorized as: Stuff You Need to Know
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Posted on 04.14.13 by Widge @ 6:50 am
Comments on this: none yet. Add your own.  One of the craziest men on the planet has left the planet. Jonathan Winters died of natural causes this past Thursday at age 87. He had an amazing, ridiculous run of comedy. And influenced pretty much anyone worth knowing about. I was trying desperately to find my favorite Winters appearance ever: when he showed up with Robin Williams on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson back in 1991. The Carson folks have actually posted the first part of it here. But it was the very end that slayed me. Carson had lost control of the show and was desperately trying to end the show as there was no more time. Robin leans over to Jonathan, who is dressed like a Civil War Union Army general and is now pretending to be the oldest Civil War veteran still alive--and Robin says, "General?" (This is all from my terrible memory, so it's heavily paraphrased.) Categorized as: Stuff You Need to Know
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Posted on 04.08.13 by Widge @ 4:11 pm
Comments on this: none yet. Add your own.  Annette Funicello--Mousketeer Prime and notorious beach partier--has died at age 70. According to the Disney mothership, Annette (because if there was ever a lady who it was okay to call by her first name, it was her) "died peacefully from complications due to multiple sclerosis, a disease she battled for over 25 years." You can have any tribute you like. But for us, we would like to think that she has simply jamaica ska'd into the sunset to the great Beach Party in the Sky, like in the video after the jump. Categorized as: Stuff You Need to Know
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