- I’ve always wanted to be like Peter Pan and the Lost Boys or Robinson Crusoe and live in a tree house. I was never quite as elaborate in my dreams as the Wilkinson Residence, but I’m not opposed to it.
- Ursula K. Le Guin has declared war on the Authors Guild for agreeing to “settle” with Google after they and their Google Book Project illegally scanned millions of books. Le Guin has resigned from the organization in a very public way. Careful, or she’ll send the dragons to burn down Google’s Mountain View California campus.
- CollegeHumor.com has some mockups of what video games would be titled if they were named after what you said most while playing them. My favorite is Grand Theft Auto, which would be renamed Shoot Those Hookers.
- George Lucas is working on a CGI feature film at Skywalker Ranch, and it’s a musical about fairies. Typing that made me a little ill. There’s no title for the piece but Kevin Munroe is directing, and his cred for animated films is TMNT (a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies)
- Nightscape is billed as a thriller/horror movie about three high schoolers discovering they have paranormal powers, but none of that is on display in this quietly creepy trailer that just went up. How is it that little kids walking around quietly can give you the shivers so easily?
- Zelda Rubenstein, the diminutive actress who played the psychic in Poltergeist has passed away at the age of 76. With more than 50 credits to her name, from voicing Atrocia Frankenstone on The Flintstone Comedy Hour, to guest spots on Caroline in the City, she was also a noted AIDS activist and little people advocate. Our condolences go out to her friends and family.
- NASA has a fancy new space suit for astronauts to wear to the moon, assuming we can ever afford to go back there. The new suit has a 150 hour life, computer telemetry links, and added flexibility.
- Supernatural is spawning a web spinoff called Ghostfacers, to premiere on TheWB.com in a run of ten three-minute webisodes. If Ghostfacers sound familiar, they appeared in season one and season three of Supernatural, largely for Dean to mock mercilessly.
- On the face of it Spartacus: Blood and Sand appeared to anemic numbers on Friday night, but it was actually record-breaking for Starz as a network. Nobody seems to have any idea what a magic number is for the show to make money at this point, but hopefully CGI blood spatters aren’t expensive, otherwise they’re screwed.
- Multiple outlets are linking Sam Worthington to a film called Dracula: Year Zero, about how Vlad the Impaler became Count Dracula. There’s a lot of swirl that this is going to get fast tracked for sometime in 2011.
- I couldn’t begin to tell you who scores most movies. If it weren’t for the Family Guy spoofs, I’d have no idea who created the iconic Star Wars music. So when Howard Shore was mentioned as having been signed for Twilight: Eclipse, I shrugged. It didn’t ring a bell, but it should have since he scored The Lord of the Rings, and has an Oscar on his shelf. Yeah, I still won’t see it.
- In Wisconsin prisons, Dungeons & Dragons is considered gang-related activity and is banned for the safety of other prisoners. No, this isn’t a clueless warden making a sweeping ruling about something he knows nothing about, although it started that way. After the prisoners sued, a judge agreed, evidently unaware that “orcs breaching the castle walls” did not mean a jailbreak was imminent.
- Considering there doesn’t appear to be any hurry to pick a cast for The Hobbit, it’s not surprising that it looks like at least 2012 before Bilbo makes his way from the Shire to the silver screen. It’s a long walk barefoot to get to Hollywood.
- When it comes to Dune-the book and Dune-the-movie, I liked both, but they remained disconnected in my mind. But we can finally know precisely how Frank Herbert felt about the film, thanks to these publicity interviews from 1983. It turns out, he liked it. He really, really liked it.
- And to finish on a fun, trippy note, the new featurette for Alice In Wonderland, titled “Strange World” is out, and rather than focusing on a single character like last week’s Mad Hatter, we get to see the characters integrated into their wild surroundings.
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I will always remember Zelda Rubenstein, Tangina. “This house is clean…”