Yearly Archive: 2008

David Tennant Officially Announces Departure from ‘Doctor Who’

  • News
  • October 29, 2008

doctor-who-tenant-5393629David Tennant announced his departure from Doctor Who during the National Television Awards broadcast.

The BBC’s Doctor Who website confirmed the news mintues later complete with a video from the actor.

The website went on to report:

David Tennant first appeared as The Doctor in 2005 and has gone on to star in three series and three Christmas specials as the tenth incarnation of the Time Lord. The BBC has confirmed that David will continue to play The Doctor in the four specials that will make up the 2009 series before a new Doctor takes over for Series 5. Tennant will also star in the Doctor Who Christmas Special titled The Next Doctor this year.

David Tennant comments "I’ve had the most brilliant, bewildering and life changing time working on Doctor Who. I have loved every day of it. It would be very easy to cling on to the TARDIS console forever and I fear that if I don’t take a deep breath and make the decision to move on now, then I simply never will. You would be prising the TARDIS key out of my cold dead hand. This show has been so special to me, I don’t want to outstay my welcome.

"This is all a long way off, of course. I’m not quitting, I’m back in Cardiff in January to film four special episodes which will take Doctor Who all the way through 2009. I’m still the Doctor all next year but when the time finally comes I’ll be honored to hand on the best job in the world to the next lucky git – whoever that may be.

"I’d always thought the time to leave would be in conjunction with Russell T Davies and Julie Gardner who have been such a huge part of it all for me. Steven Moffat is the most brilliant and exciting writer, the only possible successor to Russell and it was sorely tempting to be part of his amazing new plans for the show. I will be there, glued to my TV when his stories begin in 2010.

"I feel very privileged to have been part of this incredible phenomenon, and whilst I’m looking forward to new challenges I know I’ll always be very proud to be the Tenth Doctor."

Russell T. Davies Executive Producer of Doctor Who comments "I’ve been lucky and honored to work with David over the past few years – and it’s not over yet, the Tenth Doctor still has five spectacular hours left! After which, I might drop an anvil on his head. Or maybe a piano. A radioactive piano. But we’re planning the most enormous and spectacular ending, so keep watching!"

Doctor Who returns to our screens on BBC this Christmas. The Next Doctor starring David Tennant, David Morrissey and Dervla Kirwan will be screened on the 25th December on BBC1.

Let the speculation over the next incarnation of the Time Lord continue.
 

Hollywood News & Notes

  • Uncategorized
  • October 29, 2008

american-pie-6069443Universal Studios helped pioneer the direct-to-DVD concept for film franchises with American Pie. The series of videos — American Pie: Band Camp, American Pie: Naked Mile and American Pie: Beta House — has brought them much cash and provided Playboy with many an actress to peel for their pages. Now, Moviehole says the studio is eyeing an actual feature film to pick up the story of the original characters. After all the first film, released in 1999, brought in an eye-popping $235 million. No cast or crew has been signed or announced so speculation can run rampant as to which characters will be brought back as the focal point.  Stifler? Stifler’s Mom? Jim and Michelle? We vote for Nadia, since after all, Shannon Elizabeth could always use the work.

Ian Jeffers has written an original werewolf tale and according to Bloody Disgusting, he has sold it to director Ridley Scott.  Jeffers has previously written Death Sentence and the screen adaptation of the video game Castlevania.

Madagascar 2 director Tom McGrath told Skiewed and Reviewed, “While we never know how well the film will do, I have been kicking around ideas for another film in the series.” He went on say he’d like to see the characters return to their home, the Central Park Zoo, in the third film.

As we mentioned the other day, M. Night Shyamalan is producing three films in his new three-picture deal with Media Rights Capital. Now we hear the first picture will be Devil, written by Brian Nelson (30 Days of Night). John Erick Dowdle (Quarantine) will direct and produce alongside his brother, Drew Dowdle. Devil comes from an original story by Shyamalan. The Unbreakable and Sixth Sense director will produce the film with Sam Mercer under Shyamalan’s new Night Chronicles banner. Night Chronicles was set up by MRC as a financing and production partnership with M. Night to create one genre film per year over three years. Shyamalan will come up with the ideas, select the creative team and oversee the creative direction. He’ll also co-own the film copyrights and retain artistic control.

Twentieth Century Fox has announced its sequel will be titled Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakuel opening Christmas Day 2009.  Fox has also moved the kid/family movie Tooth Fairy to Thanksgiving 2009 release. Chris Columbus other movie, Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, based on Rick Riordan’s books, has been kicked back a year to July 2, 2010.   Another kid’s series, Beverly Cleary’s Ramona, will become a feature film, to be released March 19, 2010.

Sir Roger Moore has been added to the voice cast of Gnome & Troll: The Forest Trial. The animated feature is coming from Swedish film company White Shark and is set to debut in 2009. The film is a sequel to this year’s Gnome & Troll The Secret Chamber.   Moore will play King Leif, with Peter Stormare to voice Ogar Mini.

Director Rob Cohen confirmed for Collider that xXx 3 is being developed with an eye towards being ready summer 2010. "Yes, they’re doing it with me and producer Joe Roth”, he said. “We made the deal recently, it’s named xXx: The Return of Xander Cage. We met the writers yesterday and we’re trying to get into production by late spring, to have it out for the summer of 2010." Diesel will first be seen in the summer 2009 sequel to the Fast and Furious.

Producer Gale Anne Hurd confirmed for Moviehole that her recent comment about trying to reboot the Alien Nation franchise was more than wishful thinking. “I dropped Hurd a line to see whether she’s actually pitched the film or whether it’s just something she bought up in conversation,” Moviehole wrote, “with no plans to actually convince someone with money to bankroll it. “The good news is? Hurd has indeed talked to the powers-that-be about doing the film but, in her words, there’s ‘no traction yet’. The 20th-Century Fox film spawned a beloved weekly series which aired on Fox in the 1980s.
 

‘Villains’ Target Theaters

  • News
  • October 29, 2008

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Universal has picked up the movie rights to the upcoming Viper Comics graphic novel Villains. Universal reportedly paid a mid-six-figure sum for the rights, which could prove profitable if the lesser-known property enjoys the same super-hero buzz that other films in the genre have yielded. Sean Bailey produces via his Idealogy banner, and Matt Jennison and Brent Strickland are set to write the screenplay. Jennison and Strickland are also working on the stalled Wonder Woman for Warner Brothers and Joel Silver.

Villains, not to be confused with the current Heroes volume on NBC, is a four issue mini-series by Adam Cogan and Ryan Cody. Villains focuses on Nick Corrigan, "an aimless 20-something who discovers that his aging neighbor used to be the notorious supervillain known as ‘Hardliner,’ now retired and living in hiding for the past few decades. Rather than turn him in to the authorities, Nick decides to blackmail him in exchange for lessons in the fine art of career super-crime. But the old pro is about to teach his student some lessons he’ll never forget."

The original series was originally published by Viper Comics in 2006. A second mini-series is set for this fall, which should provide solid source material if Villains does well enough at the box office to warrant a sequel.

How do you guys feel about Villains heading to film? Psyched? Meh? Think there’s other super-villains that should get their big screen licks in first? Personally, I’d love to see The Hood first.

‘Torso’ Grows Legs

  • News
  • October 29, 2008

3652-1-9925674Bill Mechanic, the former chairman of 20th Century Fox and now founder of independent production company Pandemonium, told Collider that the long planned adaptation of Brian Michael Bendis’ Torso is heading into production soon.

"Torso is moving right towards the starting gate," Mechanic tells the site. "We’ve got a screenplay and we’re waiting for Paramount to decide when to make it."

He also confirms what many have heard: David Fincher will direct the feature.

"I’m hoping we’re shooting in March or April … [so] it should be [Fincher’s next project]," says Mechanic.

And while he has a ton of faith in the project, he does admit that there will be departures from the source material, much in the way that the movie Fight Club broke off from the novel.

"Torso the movie, which may not be called Torso the movie at the end of the day … makes the book better reading because it doesn’t follow [the book] literally," Mechanic says.

Though he’s known today for revitalizing The Avengers, killing all the mutants in House of M and making Skrulls a threat again in Secret Invasion, Brian Bendis’ roots as a comics creator go back to his days at Caliber Comics. He published a string of noir crime comics with Caliber, including Fire (1993), A.K.A. Goldfish (1994) and Flaxen (1995). His most known early works are Jinx (1996), which is the namesake of his Web site JinxWorld, and the comic in question, Torso (1998). It may be hard to believe with top artists Leinil Yu and others illustrating his work, but Bendis actually illustrated a large part of his early work, including Torso. Bendis also co-wrote the novel alongside Marc Andreyko (DC’s Manhunter).

Torso is a historical fiction limited series published by Image Comics. The story focuses on the "Torso Murderer," an actual serial killer in the 1930’s who left behind only the torsos of his victims, making them very difficult to identify for police without DNA testing. The investigator on the case and protagonist of Torso is Eliot Ness, Cleveland Chief of police and one-time head of the Untouchables, the police task force that enforced Prohibition and went after crime lord Al Capone.

Though no official casting has been made, Mechanic did tell Collider that "a lot of things being written [online] about [the film] are probably true." Jake Gyllenhaal and Matt Damon are the two actors long rumored for Torso, so perhaps they’ll be the guys to star in the feature.

Review: ‘The Night of Your Life’ by Jessie Reklaw

  • Uncategorized
  • October 29, 2008

The Night of Your Life
By Jessie Reklaw
Dark Horse, September 2008, $15.95

For the last thirteen years, Jessie Reklaw has been turning dreams – mostly those of strangers – into comics, on his website and in a growing number of alternative weeklies nationwide. (Not to derail my own train of thought, but are there any non-alternative weeklies, to which those “alternative weeklies” are the actual alternative?)

Each comic is a four panel grid, two over two: distilling a dream to its essential elements and telling however much of a story there is to tell. The stories are all bizarre and strange – they’re all dreams, after all – but, boiled down to four panels, they also have a lot of similarities. There’s a reason people call it “dream logic;” that’s the way the human mind organizes itself, so the same kind of transitions and imagery come up in many different people’s dreams.

[[[The Night of Your Life]]] collects about two hundred and forty of those “[[[Slow Wave]]]” strips, in black and white. The strips are printed one to the page – large enough to be clear and readable, but only slightly larger than on the web, so they don’t look blown up in the book. The strips are divided into ten parts, each part named for the first line of text in the first cartoon in that part…but the strips don’t otherwise seem to be organized. It’s clearly not by theme or imagery, and the strips aren’t dated, so there’s no way to tell if they’re in chronological order.

(more…)

Webcomics You Should Be Reading: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

  • Uncategorized
  • October 29, 2008

saturday-morning-breakfast-cereal-4567673I recommended this comic to a friend of mine. She wrote back that her office’s content filter blocked it as "tasteless and offensive."

This is an entirely accurate statement about Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. What they fail to mention, however, is that it’s also hilarious.

SMBC is a daily single-panel comic, in the vein of an R-rated The Far Side. The humor is primarily based on taking the punchline in a completely different direction than expected. It’s not suitable for kids. (Or adults who want any claim to maturity, for that matter.) It’s also not suitable for people who are sensitive about sex, death, religion, fetishes, cheesecake, herpes, dolphins, politics, or your mom.

There’s a SMBC store, though it’s currently closed for renovations and expected to reopen in November.

Notable moments:

Drama: Nope. Black comedy, maybe. Not the slightest hint of drama.

Humor: Imagine Gary Larson’s sense of humor melded with Kevin Smith’s potty mouth and you’ll pretty much have Zach Weiner. As noted, what lesser cartoonists would use as the entire joke, he uses as a set-up to something unexpected and much more disturbing.

Continuity: None. There’s a "random" strip button on the site, and it’s one of the few comics where that’s actually a worthwhile idea.

Art: Reasonable; it gets the job done. All the people look pretty much alike, and Weiner probably won’t be winning any awards, but he’s conscious enough of his own skill that you never find yourself missing a joke because you can’t figure out what that blue thing is.

Archive: Six years, about 1325 single-panel or two-panel strips. (Don’t let that scare you, though: There is absolutely no need for an archive trawl. You can read as many or as few strips as you want.)

Updates: Daily, consistently.

Risk/Reward: Reading too many of these in a row may make you realize you’re a horrible person. (There’s no ongoing storyline, so there’s no risk should the comic suddenly cut off.)
 

3 More ‘Star Trek’ Pics Beam Down

  • News
  • October 29, 2008

Three more stills from Star Trek have appeared in the United Kingdom’s Empire magazine.  The current issue, now on sale, has a cover story on the making of the film.  Since not everyone stateside can easily find the magazine, we present the images for your viewing pleasure.


 

Review: ‘Captain Action’ #1

I know way too much about comics. Far more than is healthy. But there are, understandably, a few characters here and there that I either know very little about, either because I never really came across them or I did but found them terribly uninteresting and so dismissed them, soon forgetting what I had learned.

[[[Captain Action]]] happens to be such a character. I remembered he first appeared in the 1960s, wore a costume that resembled a futuristic police officer’s with a chest symbol that reminded me to recycle, and was based on an action figure. And that was it. I remembered nothing else. So when I was asked to review the first issue of the new Captain Action series, on sale today, I thought “Perfect. I can truly look at this as a first-time fan and objectively judge if this would be interesting to someone who has no previous knowledge of the character.”

I read it and found it to be a strange mix of too much information at once and not enough.

We begin with a [[[Superman]]]-like character called Savior. His narration explains who he is and reveals that he secretly blew up a place called A.C.T.I.O.N. Directorate. On page two, we find out that half of what we just read is a lie. This is not Savior, but a person disguised as Savior. This is our hero, Captain Action, who crashes into a statue of his father and proceeds to unleash a massive information dump on the readers in a very awkward monologue.

Apparently, there was once a hero called Captain Action (the original guy from the 1960s). The shape-shifter we’ve just met is his son, the new Captain Action, who has the ability to look like other people and copy their abilities, but only for a short time. Exactly how long he can disguise himself and how long afterward he has to wait before he mimics someone again is not made clear.

The new Captain Action wanted nothing to do with the life of a super-hero, despite his powers, but now feels forced to act since his father was killed by a group of super-heroes that an organization called A.C.T.I.O.N. had “created” to defend the Earth. What “created” means is not fully explained. The new Captain Action informs us that these heroes, Savior included, were somehow turned into sleeper agents, thus why they went rogue later. Exactly how they became sleeper agents is not explained, though a group called Red Crawl is blamed. Apparently, Red Crawl was defeated long ago and everyone believed they were dead, except for the original Captain Action. Now they’re back and causing trouble.

(more…)

Who is the Iron Patriot?

  • News
  • October 29, 2008

Marvle this morning released a teaser for a new event in the Marvel Universe.  No creators, timing or content was released with the teaser. We’re going to guess that it maybe a part of the 2009 Dark Reign event spinning out of the end of Secret Invasion.  It does not resemble the future Iron Men seen in last week’s New Warriors.  Any guesses?

Marvel ‘Irons’ Out ‘Avengers’ Trio

  • News
  • October 29, 2008

iron-man-tony-stark-hi-res-2617258While Tony Stark is drunk on booze, Robert Downey Jr. is drunk on Tony Stark. Marvel has announced that the actor will once again don the superheroic lush’s iron clad boots for Iron Man 2, Iron Man 3 and The Avengers. While it was widely assumed that RDJ would return, this is the first official word from Marvel Studios themselves. It’s also the first casting decision made for The Avengers, insuring that at least some continuity will carry over in the Marvel movie-verse.

Additionally, Jon Favreau and Don Cheadle have also made deals with Marvel. Favreau is officially announced as the director for Iron Man 2 and will serve as executive producer on The Avengers. Favreau had publicly declared his hopes to direct The Avengers, but conceded that it was an unlikely scenario given the close proximity to working on Iron Man 2.

Cheadle, meanwhile, has officially dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s to play Jim "Rhodey" Rhodes for Iron Man 2. Marvel notes that "Cheadle is also signed on to perform the same role in The Avengers and subsequent installments of the Iron Man franchise." It’s almost a sure thing that War Machine will pop up in Iron Man 2 so that he can team up with Stark and the other heroes in The Avengers. Cheadle’s official casting is sure to crush some spirits that were hoping for a last minute Terrence Howard revival.

Interestingly enough, Favreau is the only one of the three not officially signed for Iron Man 3. Months ago, Marvel was reportedly set to drop the director from Iron Man 2 due to financial disagreements. That, as it later turned out, was Terrence Howard’s downfall instead. Still, it appears that the studio is keeping Favreau’s involvement at a slight arm’s length in case the money problems pop up once again.

Either way, it’s exciting to have some official movement on Iron Man 2 and The Avengers. The next few years should be pretty solid for comic book fans. (more…)

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