There’s just something about “Star Wars” that brings out the geek in people. When I recently attended an advanced screening of “Star Wars: The Clone Wars,” I kept seeing a blue light flashing out of the corner of my eye. Turning to look, I was surprised to see the source – a $119 light saber (available from Toys R Us. It was so cool I had to check it out). But the biggest surprise was yet to come. The person wielding the “toy” was a man, probably in his mid-40s, dressed as Obi-Wan Kenobi. Ah, yes, I was with my people.
David Hughes is a master at describing the “thrill of victory and the agony of defeat” that is the Hollywood movie mill. It takes a certain amount of skill to discuss a blockbuster that might have been in a way that leaves you wanting to find a way to buy the rights, get funding and shoot the damned thing yourself. The reality is people with a lot more experience, money and even enthusiasm have tried… and, in some cases, are still trying. Hughes, who also wrote Tales From Development Hell: Movie Making The Hard Way, does a masterful job of getting you right in the middle of all the fuss in his recently updated and re-released book The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made from Titan Books. 
When David Lynch’s quirky and often surreal “Twin Peaks” ended after just two seasons in 1991, I didn’t think anything could take its place. But I was wrong. In 1993, Chris Carter unleashed “The X-Files” upon the world. It was the answer to my, and million of others’, prayers. Inspired by the 1970s TV series “The Night Stalker,” Carter placed two very different FBI agents at the center of his creation: Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) is a believer in little green men and things that live under the stairs, because he had witnessed the abduction of his younger sister Samantha by aliens; Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) is a skeptic and a woman of science. In the stand-alone episodes, they took on fat, flesh and brain-eating humans, vampires, firestarters, parasitic twins, mutant children, serial killers, and much, much more. In the interconnected stories – these provided the show with its mythology – they confronted government conspiracies and cover-ups, orchestrated and overseen by the Cigarette Smoking Man, the Well-Manicured Man, and Alex Krycek. They were assisted in their search for truth by FBI Assistant Director Walter Skinner, Deep Throat, the Lone Gunmen, and Mr. X. 
A quick search on the Internet Movie Database shows that Jules Verne’s “Journey to the Center of the Earth” has been adapted for the screen (big and small) at least 10 times. There’s even a Filipino version! By Hollywood standards, this must not seem like overkill, because guess what? If you go to your local cinema, you can see the 11th version. But wait. The news gets better. If you’re lucky enough yours is one of the 954 cinemas showing it in 3-D. (The remaining 1,857 are not.)
Here’s a shocker: Jack O’Neill dies in the first few minutes of “Stargate: Continuum”. Now wait a minute, before you Stargate fans get all mad at me, let me say this: “Continuum” is a time travel story, so yes, Jack O’Neill dying, as well as Teal’C and Vala vanishing into thin air in a cloud of black smoke, is no cause for concern. If we’ve learned one thing about the Stargate universe, it’s that death is not absolute. Heck, it wasn’t absolute even when the episode of the week didn’t involve time travel, so why should it be even close when the entire episode hinges on the team time traveling back into the past to set things right? (And anyways, Jack shows back up as his bewildered, Homer-loving self at the 30-minute mark anyhow. Well, okay, maybe not quite his old self, but close enough.)
My enthusiasm for Alex Proyas’ “Knowing” didn’t exactly leap up there after seeing this first trailer for his upcoming movie “Knowing”, starring Nicolas Cage as a teacher who discovers that predictions made 50 years ago are coming true; worst, the predictions eventually run out, then what happens? The trailer is good, the kind of slick stuff Hollywood does well, and it certainly doesn’t showcase the brilliance that Alex Proyas showcased in “The Crow” and “Dark City”. Having said that, I’m still holding out hope that he’ll one day return to such greatness, and maybe “Knowing” is a step in the right direction. I don’t see it in the trailer, alas, but who knows, Cage never does good trailers, so that may be it…
Wow, what a CGI fest. I knew that Simon Hunter’s “The Mutant Chronicles” was going to be heavy on the CGI, but I have to admit, I didn’t think it would be THIS heavy with CGI. I don’t think they ever went outside a warehouse to shoot this thing. Mind you, not that that is necessarily a bad thing; they didn’t go outside for “Sin City”, either, and that turned out pretty good. Likewise with Zack Snyder’s “300″. But man, the CGI I’m seeing for “The Mutant Chronicles” seems to be struggling to not look completely cheesy. I guess we’ll have to see what the final product looks like.
Yahoo! Movies is currently hosting an exclusive two-minute clip from “The X-Files: I Want to Believe” (seriously, just typing that subtitle makes me feel dumber), which they say is the opening scene from the movie. It doesn’t actually look like an opening scene — it has a bunch of FBI agents, led by Billy Connolly (playing a psychic) going up and down a frozen ice patch, while the scene is intercut with a woman is being stalked at her house, apparently at another time and place. Or something. Eh, who knows, Chris Carter and company are so desperate to hide every shred of info about their precious movie in the hopes of making it uber secret and thus more “in demand”, it borders on being desperate.
It’s the end of the world in Alex Proyas’ latest, “Knowing”, and only Nicolas Cage and his ability to run really fast through crowds of confused people can save us all! And oh yeah, along the way he drags Rose Byrne to help out with all the legwork. Or at least, that’s what it seems like in these first images from Proyas’ disaster movie “Knowing”, posted over at USA Today as part of their apocalyptic movie article.
Apparently there were a whole lot of geeks in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania who knew that Michael Bay and crew were filming “Transformers 2″ over in their little city, and they were out and about in force with digital cameras snapping way. God, I love my fellow movie geeks. As a result of all the snapping, pictures from TF2’s PA sets (said to be the opening sequence in the movie) have popped up all over the Internet. Unfortunately none of those geeks with digital cameras sent any pics my way, but I ain’t hatin’. Head on below to get your feel of TF2 set pics.