Other sites want to take a nugget of information you give a shit about and write 600 words about it: trouble is, that means you have about 550 words too many to have to read. We give you a barrage of news in nuggets that you can digest easily and get on with your day. You're welcome. (Granted, we don't know what goddamn day it is anymore, but that's the sacrifice we make.)
Snoop Dogg has a cameo in a Bollywood musical. No, honest. The film Singh is Kinng opens August 7th in India. I love this bit: "In crimson Punjabi shirt and a turban, Snoop performs the titular musical number alongside star Akshay Kumar in a segment that was lensed in Chicago. The Long Beach, Calif.-based rapper and the Bollywood actor apparently hit it off so well that they went on a 'kingly' shopping spree for the Indian garb seen in the shoot." Nice. And it worked, apparently: the soundtrack's sold 5 million copies in two weeks. I can't find their music video online but here's a sixty second taste of the movie, if you're interested. Note: Snoop does not appear in this clip... Source: Variety.
A thirty minute tape of The Beatles cutting up and also trying to record "I'll Follow the Sun" is going up for auction on Tuesday with an expected final price of between £8,000 and £12,000. Which I think is a very conservative estimate. And if you read up on what the tape has on it, it sounds like a proto-Nuts on the Road, just with more actual talent.
Wow, this sounds like a terrible idea. Marvin the Martian is in development as its own feature. Which is the same sort of brilliant thinking that had a Venom movie in development at New Line, if you get my drift. If this next bit is accurate, you can see just what we have in store: the pitch was developed "as a Christmas story, with Marvin coming to Earth to destroy Christmas but being prevented from doing so when he's trapped in a gift box." Yeah. Source: Variety.
Chortle reports that George Carlin's ashes have been scattered around some of the New York nightclubs where he used to perform. Bravo.
Dark Horse provided a handy recap of all their San Diego announcements. It was too big to go in here so I just slammed it into the Press Release section. You can find it here. You might want to check it out: new Amano, the return of Creepy and Eerie, Neon Genesis Evangelion and more.
Robert Ludlum's game rights have been reacquired by Ludlum Entertainment. Ludlum E. has brought it back in house after the new gestalt-being Activision Blizzard didn't hold onto it. Now they can exclusively "develop, publish and distribute multi-platform games" based on the work of their late namesake. I'm thinking Bourne Kart...who's with me? Anyway, another casualty of this new merger-up is the Ghostbusters game, which is now seeking a new publisher. Source: Variety.
Anti-hypertension medicine (which is for your blood pressure, not for being extremely tense) might help stave off Alzheimer's. Nobody knows why they just have a study saying it seems to work. Any news on this front is good news.
The more-than-likely-cancelled Kelsey Grammer series Back to You hits DVD as "Season 1" on October 14th. Pre-order yours here. I hate to say this, but they should have had Grammer guest star on the show as Fraser and play both parts with no one in the show even acknowledging the fact that they're played by the same actor. Would have been a huge ratings boost. Speaking, of Grammer, he's back in the hospital with chest pains. We hope he gets well soon.
Most sites choose to write up six-hundred words on the announcement that so-and-so has joined the latest Saw movie. Bollocks to that. Here's the news in a nutshell. It might not be the freshest, but honestly, did not knowing this stuff six hours ago negatively impact your well being? That's what we thought. Enjoy.
Capeshooters. See at what point you walk away from this story. It's based on a comic book. It will be produced by Bryan Singer, who will not be doing anything but producing. It's about two guys who decide to become spandex paparazzi, taking pics of superheroes and then find themselves in a bit of a fix when they get pics showing a big time hero is really a big time villain. And...the comic is coming from Rob Liefeld. Yup, that last one's the one that did it, isn't it? At least now we have the CGI technology necessary to make everybody's feet look like Liefeld drew them. Source: Variety.
There's no need to try and keep up with all this crap. We take everybody else's hoohah-filled 500 word nonsense and distill it down to just the important bits for you. Enjoy.
Meet the new Alice in Wonderland: Mia Wasikowska. Tim Burton is doing a live-action/performance capture/digital 3-D version of Alice for Disney. Starts shooting in November. Folks worldwide might not recognize the name: she's an Australian actress. Anyway, can Colleen Atwood please design the costumes, so at least if it goes off the Burton Deep End (like some films), it'll still be nice to look at? Source: Hollywood Reporter.
When you have a problem and no one else can help and if you can't find Derren Brown, you call...
We're getting a new animated Batman. Called Batman: The Brave and the Bold, it's going to try a more light-hearted take on the character, pairing him with other heroes. Of course, this will lead children to want to check out the comics that these characters hail from. And as we all know, those things aren't fit for children to read.
Trying to play catchup here following the results of Zzzax stopping by to ask for a cup of sugar. Anyway, we are here to tell you, in brief, the pop culture developments that you need to know. Because you have better things to do than keep up with this crap. We, naturally, do not. Even though the bits are brief, they add up. So. You know. Get comfortable.
Afro Samurai: Resurrection is a sequel to the series with Sam Jackson returning to voice the lead character and Lucy Liu as his foe. Mark Hamill is in the cast as well, playing what sounds like Lucy Liu's character's Walsingham. The sequel hits Spike TV in January. Source: Variety.
Amazon and Hasbro are doing something kinda cool: for every "Hasbro Hot Summer Toy Event item" you buy through Amazon now through August 2nd, Hasbro will donate a toy to Toys for Tots. I try not to look at new toys these days. The results are just too depressing. Bloody LazerTag is unrecognizable.And you can ride a dinosaur. Granted, it's not as cool as this badboy, but still. Remember when Stretch Monster was the cutting edge of toytech? Man, I miss drinking at times like these. Anyway, to check out the Amazon/Hasbro offer, go here.
Ben 10's live action made-for-TV movie based on the animated series at Cartoon Network was directed by Alex Winter. Yes, Bill from Bill & Ted. Well, he's also getting to helm the second TV movie which will be based on the second animated series. He's apparently been busy since Freaked, which was the last time I had seen his name come up. Good for him.
At the Movies will keep on keeping on, but without Ebert and Roeper. Roeper has exited the show and Ebert hasn't renewed his contract because the network wants to "take the show in another direction." What directional choices there are for a show that's reviewing movies, I have no idea. Knowing Disney and ABC, they're probably wanting to turn it into an Entertainment Tonight clone hosted by some of the kids from High School Musical. Crap. I didn't mean to give them ideas. Mea culpa. Source: Variety.
Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab is releasing a limited edition chapbook of The Neil's "Snow, Glass, Apples" and a perfume oil scent based on the same. They're US$50 a shot--but there's not a lot of shots. It's a limited edition run of 1000. 250 get sold at San Diego, and the rest go on sale the 30th at their website. This is all to benefit the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, which is a Good Thing. The chapbook also features artwork by Julie Dillon--who I had honestly never heard of before. But God Damn, I love her stuff. Having read the story and heard the audio play, I can't wait to see what she does with the story. (That's a snippet of her cover up there--check out the full thing at the CBLDF site.) And if you don't own a copy of the audio play, you really should.
The Dark Knight has blown up. $67 million dollar opening day. That's in unadjusted dollars, but I don't know if anything could beat that from the past. This video is accurate, especially about the Christmas part. Hollywood execs have dreams about their films opening to huge ridiculous box office but they never quite make it there. That's why you scratch your head and say, "$30 million? Sounds good to me..." This is one of the few cases where it actually met the wildest, wet dream expectations of Warner Brothers.
The free online mini-musical Dr. Horrible has been released and gone viral this week, proving that fans of Joss Whedon will get behind anything where they don't actually have to go to the cinema and support an existing franchise. But, hey, J!nx has Dr. Horrible shirts and you can wear them around the house.
Fox Home Video has the third season of How I Met Your Mother hitting October 7th. Also, The Complete Series Stash Box of That 70s Show hits October 14th. Thirty-two discs, plus collectible packaging, a keepsake yearbook, the finale script, and from what I can tell, no additional goodies on the discs.
Okay, so Audible just did a bit called "Dueling Narrators" where they put audiobook readers of the same work up against each other in a kind of Iron Reader sort of deal. The much beloved Jim Dale beat out Tim Curry for reading Peter Pan...but Christopher Hurt beat out Uncle Ray reading Uncle Ray's own Fahrenheit 451? Holy shit. This I have got to hear now.
So how do you roll out a multi-platform zombie project? You get in bed with Devil's Due on a graphic novel called Chopper Zombie, about a motorcycle builder killed for his superfuel who comes back from the dead to provide beatdowns to the corporation who had him killed. Then you produce a movie based on the comic. Then you launch the book at Comic-Con next week where you've got a "custom zombie chopper" created by the folks from Monster Garage. This is all because you are Thom Beers, the producer of the show. Again, not a bad strategy if you ask me. One of the films I saw early on that shaped me was Demons, in which our hero rides a motorcycle through a cinema infested with zombie-esque demons while he lops off their heads with a katana blade to the melodious strains of "Fast as a Shark." So I've always had a fondness for the crotch rockets when it comes to anti-zombie work. Official site is live here.
Well, this is interesting. Apparently there's enough people that don't like paying with a credit card online that Amazon has started up something new called "Bill Me Later." The Amazon Associates Blog didn't list a lot of info but if you clickthrough you see that it's pretty much what you would expect: you enter some info, you get billed for your Amazon purchase (it must be from Amazon and not another seller through Amazon) and you can either pay in full or pay over time (with finance charges, of course). The one thing they do have that looks interesting is $10 off of $50 when you use the code BMLSAVES at checkout. That's good through the 21st. So if there was something over $50 that you wanted to snag from Amazon, um, be our guest. And let us know how you like the new service. (That being said--if you're going to get something using this service, do us a favor and use it responsibly. We like getting kickbacks, sure, but we also like happy not drowning in debt readers. Remember: credit and caffeine...overdose on neither.)
Hed PE and Dr. Acula are playing here tomorrow night. I mean in Atlanta. Not at my desk. Don't know that I'll leave the Cave for it, but Hed PE is what would happen if The Urge and Fishbone got into a fight with construction equipment. Very cool. Dr. Acula's music isn't really my bag, but they get points when you consider that "All of their songs are named after books in R.L. Stine's GOOSEBUMPS series." How is that not endearing?
The late Mitch Hedberg has a third album coming out from Comedy Central Records: Do You Believe in Gosh? hits on September 9th. It's forty minutes of new material plus three prank calls from Crank Yankers. It was apparently a work in progress for Hedberg at the time of his death. Not available for pre-order yet. I'll try and keep you posted.
