Remember, R.I.P.D., the film that Ryan Reynolds chose to do instead of the Deadpool film? Well, while it will probably be your standard, run of the mill buddy-cop-ghost-action-flick-based-on-a-comic flick, at least the cast’s shaping up pretty well.

True, Zach Galifianakis ended up dropping out of the part of Bo, the grizzled old gunslinger, but they ended up with replacing him with Jeff Bridges. (And if you’re looking for a grizzled old gunslinger, Jeff Bridges is pretty much the gold standard these days.)  And now it looks like they’ve got a decent villain too, as Variety is reporting that Kevin Bacon is in final negotiations for the part.

Well, actually Variety didn’t mention what part Bacon was considering, but Coming Soon is reporting that he’ll play the villain. It’s not the only (other) big name supposedly joining the cast: Jodie Foster’s rumored to be playing the part of “Proctor,” whoever the hell that is.

If you haven’t read the series (and we’re kind of betting you haven’t), it follows Nick Cruz (Reynolds), a recently deceased cop who’s forced to work for the afterlife’s police department, the “Rest In Peace Division,” as he tries to track down his killer and find his way to heaven. Here’s hoping he gets to kill Kevin Bacon a couple times along the way.

[Variety via Coming Soon]

Next Media, the Taiwanese news agency that’s animated the Superhero version of the Conan/Leno feud and Snooki drowning in a hot tub of champagne is back with their interpretation of The Dark Knight Rises trailer. And man, we do not know what’s going on in it.

From what we can tell, Wayne Manor’s foreclosed, forcing Batman to retire and become a Wal-Mart bat-greeter and get bodyslammed by a milk-drinking Bane.  Oh, then some stuff from Christopher Nolan’s films Momento and Inception happens. As for the whole Catwoman whipping Batman on a bed while Robin watches…well, that seems pretty self-explanatory.

One weird thing about the video that no one’s pointed out so far, is Batman’s Wal-Mart suit emblem. Take a look:

That sure looks like the Space Ghost’s chest emblem, doesn’t it? It’s almost like Taiwan used a CGI version of the classic Hanna-Barbara hero for their Batman…or mistakenly thought Space Ghost was just another Batman costume. Which makes as much sense as anything else in this video.

Check out the whole thing after the jump:

Read the rest of this entry »

Desperately want to tase someone until they lose control of their bowels, but too lazy to get within a couple feet of them? Or ever thought “Hey, I sure like tasing people, but wish I could also knock them over with the force of a shotgun blast to the chest?”

Well, that’s the idea behind Metal Storm’s new MAUL taser shotgun.Yep, it’s a 12-gauge shotgun that fires up to five “TASER eXtended Range Electronic Projectile Cartridges” or “XREPs,” which is a very fancy way of saying it can shoots self-contained TASERs into people 100 feet away.

Metal Storm’s brochure describes the shells as using “Neuro Muscular Incapacitation” to “temporarily overide the command and control systems of the body to impair muscular control,” which is a really fancy way of saying targets fall on the ground and crap themselves. The shotgun’s designed to be used on it’s own or slung under a combat rifle like a regular shotgun.

So, to sum up, the only thing cooler than a TASER is five TASERS… that you can shoot directly into people’s faces.

[Metal Storm via WIRED]

If there’s one thing that DC won’t be authorizing anytime soon, it’s a first-person-shooter where Batman shoots the Joker in the face…despite how awesome that would be. Luckily the upcoming game Gotham City Imposters gives us the next best thing: gangs of insane civilians dressed like Batman and The Joker blasting away at each other throughout Gotham.

The game’s developer, Monolith Productions, has released a new CGI trailer which presumably shows the start of the game… and also how horrible it must be to live in a city where people just start gunning each other down the moment the batsignal goes off.

It’s also worth noting that the character designs have changed a bit from the gameplay trailer released in June. If the new trailer is the final version, then it looks like Megan, the Joker girl, has lost her skirt and will just be killing people in her panties. Which is just one more reason to play the game.

Check out the new trailer (and the old one for comparison) after the jump! Read the rest of this entry »

While it’s one of the most well-regarded science fiction films of the 70s, chances are you’ve never heard of Colossus: The Forbin Project. It certainly wasn’t a blockbuster hit, but it was a pretty well-written little sci-fi flick, which is why Ron Howard was reportedly to be directing a remake of it for Universal several years ago starring Will Smith. But after that, the project somehow got dropped and nothing was heard of it for years.

But now it looks like the project might be back on track as Variety’s reporting that Universal has hired writer Blake Masters (Law & Order: LA) to do a new draft of the script. There’s no word if Ron Howard is still on the project, but it’s possible since it will be produced by Howard’s business partner Brian Grazer.

The original film (and novel) follows Dr. Charles Forbin as he creates the supercomputer Colossus to control all of America’s nuclear weapons. After Colossus senses that Russia has created a similar computer, the two computers demand to be linked together (never a good idea), they grow even smarter and threaten the world if they’re interfered with, just as you’d expect. Slowly, Colossus gains control of the world as Forbin and other scientists try to stop it.

There’s no word on whether the remake will be set in during the cold war or will be updated to the present day. Frankly, we’re not sure putting it in the present day works, since putting nuclear weapons under the control of a super computer seems pretty ridiculous idea in an era where everyone’s had over 25 years to watch War Games.

[Variety via /Film]

Ever since astronomers have been able to detect other planets across the galaxy, they’ve been looking for other planets that could support Earth-style life. (Not just because of the scientific ramifications of possibly finding extraterrestrial life…Earth-like planets are just way less boring.) So far they’ve found a couple possible candidates with exciting names like Gliese 4581 g, GJ 1214 b and HD 28185. And now they’ve found one more, 55 Cancri f, which is probably the least like Earth of the Earth-like planets found so far.

Well, in truth, they didn’t just find it, as the presence of 55 Cancri f was first calculated in 2005 based observations of its binary stars. But now, researchers at the California Institute of Technology have been able to accurately measure the orbit of 55 Cancri f and have announced that it’s definitely a candidate to support liquid water. It also definitely falls into the “habitable zone” where a planet could support Earth-like life (although it only stays in that zone for 74 percent of its year).

It’s believed that 55 Cancri f is a gaseous planet, mainly because of its large, Neptune-like size, which is 3.9 times as big as Earth. What also sets this planet apart from other exo-Earths is that 55 Cancri is a binary star system boasting an orange dwarf star and a red dwarf star. It’s believed that both stars are visible during the day, while the night features the red dwarf in the sky for half the year, then nothing but stars for the other half.

So if you’re looking for a planet with beautiful sci-fi-movie-style double sunsets, 55 Cancri f is the planet for you.

[Technology Review]

Don’t you hate it when you lose something important? Or to be more specific, hundreds of things over 40 years and then you forget they ever existed after you sent them into space? Well, that’s what NASA did and why they’re trying try to track down trees grown from seeds that traveled into space back in the early 70′s and were then scattered across the country.

The seeds were launched in to space in January 1971 as part of the payload of Apollo 14. Stuart Roosa, who piloted the command module, was a former U.S. Forest Service smoke jumper and brought 400 to 500 seeds from five different kinds of trees: Sycamore, Sweetgum, Redwood, Douglas Fir and Loblolly Pine. Unfortunately, the seeds got mixed together during decontamination and NASA figured they were no longer viable. Afterwards, they were given to the Forest Service, who dispersed them across the country without writing down where they went to. Most were given out for bicentennial plantings in 1975 and 1976.

NASA had completely forgotten about the trees until 1996, when an Indiana third grade class wrote NASA about a tree at a local Girl Scout camp which had a sign saying that it was a “moon tree.” NASA initially said they’d never heard of such a thing and even contacted Apollo mission personnel who also didn’t remember the dang things. Eventually Dave Williams, curator at NASA’s National Space Science Data Center in Greenbelt, MD (where the above-pictured moon tree is) tracked down a newspaper article that mentioned some of the plantings.

Now, NASA’s trying to track down as many of the trees as possible and so far, Williams has found and documented 79 of ‘em. Anyone who has a lead on where one may have ended up can email him at dave.williams@nasa.gov. (Just don’t email to report a weird-looking tree you once saw. Moon trees are completely normal trees…they’ve just been to the Moon.)

[USA Today]

With all the press that superheroes get, it’s sometimes easy to forget that there are other types of comic books like “romance” or the ever-popular “American-G.I.s-blow-the-hell-out-of-Nazis” genre. Well, it looks like we might finally get another film in that last genre (apart the from Captain America: The First Avenger), as Twitch Films is reporting that Guy Ritchie has signed back onto the adaptation of the classic DC war comic Sgt. Rock.

Now, Hollywood’s been trying to put together a film version of everyone’s favorite cigar-chomping sergeant since way back in the 80′s. Back then, John Milius (Conan: The Barbarian, Red Dawn) and David Peoples (Blade Runner, Ladyhawke) both wrote scripts and the film was planned to be an Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle. (In those versions, Sgt. Rock was changed from “Frank Rock” to German-American “Karl Rocklen” to better fit Arnie’s Austrian accent.)

Ritchie signed onto the latest version, written by John Cox (Boot Camp), back in 2009, only to leave the project shortly thereafter. He was replaced by director Francis Lawrence (I Am Legend), who reportedly wanted to change the setting from WWII Europe to a war set in the future. But if Ritchie has signed on, we may be back to getting the classic Nazi-killing flick Sgt. Rock deserves.

[Twitch Film]

The live-action, US adaptation of the Anime classic Akira has been a long, winding road of bad decisions. Ignoring the first bad decision of even thinking of making it, filmmakers The Hughes Brothers first considered giving Zac Efron the part of gang leader Kaneda, then they put the whole thing in “New Manhattan,” replaced the film’s laser gun with a TEC-9 and changed Testuo’s name to Travis. Then they offered that same teen gang leader part to 46-year old Keanu Reeves. Luckily, Reeves turned it down, which was a little unexpected considering his track record of not turning down horrible, horrible movies.

But luckily, it looks the movie’s finally reached the end of the road.

Comic artist Chris Weston has spent the last year working as a production artist on the film and recently posted on his blog about the film ending production. Although he can’t reveal much about what he did on the film because of non-disclosure agreements, he can say that the first thing he was asked to do was redesign Kaneda’s bike, which is easily the most iconic thing about the original film:

So the version I created was a bit meatier and nastier: the tyres were bigger, the engine was bigger, some of the casing was stripped off to expose the workings beneath. Kaneda was in a motorcycle gang that used these vehicles as weapons, so we gave it a more beaten-up look, dirtier, a few dents and scratches here and there.

In silhouette you’d have no problem recognising it as the Akira Bike, but the lighting would reveal a whole new level of texture and detail.

There was a short discussion about making it black, but I did my bit to keep it red, albeit a darker, bergundy hue. I believe BMW in Munich had begun production of a working model, but I can’t vouch for that.

To my mind, that’s the best evidence that the filmmakers had no idea what they were doing. After all, why shell out the money to make a version of a classic film if you’re going to just change the one thing that people remember about the original?

[Chris Weston's Blog via Cinemablend]