During the promotion for his new film, Zack & Miri Make a Porno, Kevin Smith began talking up a science fiction comedy he had in mind.  In fact, he was riffing for reporters about how it was going to be dark and different for him as a filmmaker.

This morning The Hollywood Reporter runs the story that Smith will do this as his next project after Red State, which he will shoot next spring. He anticipates the film to run in the $45-50 million budget range. The trade says the new feature “will reference other sci-fi movies and revolves around a father-son relationship.”

Smith will produce with View Askew partner Scott Mosier and The Weinstein Company is the most likely studio to handle the project. The trade reports Harvey and Bob Weinstein have already read a draft of the film’s script.

"The moment someone steps out of the spaceship, it’s going to cost a little more," Smith said of the budget, his largest ever.

"All the relationships in the flicks I’ve done have been done before, have been either a guy falling for a girl or two dudes hanging out in a ‘bromantic’ comedy," he said. "I wanted to explore a father and son."
 

This week: three books with very little in common. Oh, they’re all recently published – on paper, and in English, even! – but that’s about it. So you won’t be bothered by my heavy-handed attempts to link everything together this time….

B.Ichi, Vol. 1
By Atsushi Ohkubo
Yen Press, October 2008, $10.99

In the nation of Japon, in the city of Toykyo, in the busy Chinjuku section – are your ribs sore from all of the nudging yet? mine were – an impressionable and unworldly young man named Shotaro is looking for his good deed of the day. You see, in this alternate world – you did get that it’s an alternate world, didn’t you? Because the alternative is that the translator was just really, really bad at spelling – there are “dokeshi,” who use more of their brains than the rest of us, to unleash superpowers, but they also each have a condition that governs those powers.

(OK, just for the record. The “people only use 10% of their brains” idea? Bunk. Utter bunk. It’s not true now, and it never was true – it was misreporting from an era when scientists studying the brain only knew what 10% of it did. But, even then, they knew it was all being used for something – they’d just only figured out part of it. But some people are so gullible they’d drown if they looked up during a rainstorm…)

Anyway, back to Shotaro. His power is that he gets the abilities of animals by chewing on their bones. (In the ever-lovin’ Animal Man vein, as if birds needed “superpowers” to fly, rather than wings, light bones, and strong muscles.) His condition is that he has to do a good deed a day. And his disposition is that intense sunnyness seen only in manga protagonists who have no clue about the actual rules of their world. (more…)

Fans of FUNmation’s anime Witchblade series can download the first episodes from Apple’s iTunes store for free through October 26.  The other episodes retail for $1.99 each or $38.99 for the entire season.

Witchblade, of course, is the star character from Top Cow and headed for a feature film after also having been seen as a live-action television character. In Japan, Gonzo Digitmation introduced an anime version complete with new host for the mystical artifact. The young girl, Masane, starred in a 24-episode run in 2006. Animation writer Yasuko Kobayashi crafted an entirely different story and host for a series of Manga, also from Gonzo.

Witchblade: Takeru began its run in March 2006 in Champion Red from publisher Akita Shoten with art by Kazyuasa Sumita.

Witchblade AnimeTokuma Shoten and Uno Majoto, Witchblade anime veterans, also produced Witchblade Lost Generation: Midori no Shōjo, beginning in August 2006. The host, Yuri Miyazono, has inherited the artifact from Takeru Ibaraki.