Think back a bit. Try to remember all the Pixar movies that you've seen. Got it? Alright, out of all those movies how many featured a story centered around a female lead? Well, in case you can't figure it out, the answer's a big fat zero. Dawn Taylor at Cinematical blogged about an interesting article written on NPR.org written by Linda Holmes which asked Pixar the difficult and, as Taylor pointed out, unpopular demand, Please make a movie about a girl who is not a princess." The article aptly titled Dear Pixar, From All The Girls With Band-Aids On Their Knees is an open letter to the Pixar people to create a girl-centric movie which doesn't immediately fall into some stereotype. It's a good read and it makes quite a bit of sense to me. I mean, Disney has pretty much got that princess thing covered, do we really need to see more? How about a real girl, like Ellie? Anyway, cheers to Holmes for throwing the gauntlet down.

One of the hallmarks of popular game series Katamari Damacy is its playful and often perverse sense of humor. A Perfect example of this is on display in the recent Japanese trailer for the upcoming PS3 release of Katamari Tribute (due out in the U.S. this fall under the title Katamari Forever).



Western companies take note: This is how you sell games.

Who wouldn't want to see a Marcus Fenix puppet chainsaw a puppet Locust in the commercial for Gears of War 3?

Or how about a future Left 4 Dead 2 TV spot with a bunch of these guys swarming the screen.

So what do you get when you pair visionary pop-theater director Julie Taymor (The Lion King, Frida, Across the Universe) with Bono and the Edge from U2?

Spider-Man! On Broadway!

I remember hearing a while back that a Spider-Man musical was in the works but had no idea that it was this far along.

Julie Taymor has such an amazing knack for crafting vibrant and imaginative visual images. I cant wait to see her take on comic books. As for the music, I'm anxious to see how well Bono and Edge adapt their songwriting skills to Broadway.

Here is a video I found at /Film of the two rock stars discussing the project.


Most popular Broadway musicals eventually find their way to the silver screen. Maybe Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark will sing and dance its way into theaters in coming years.

If you are anything like me then, the whole time line issue/scenario from the Terminator franchise probably baffled you. I'm assuming that there are multiple time lines since that is seemingly the only way to explain things in this universe. How else could John Connor send the man who would be his father back though time. Someone at io9 was crazy enough to sort through all of this. If you view the end of each line as the beginning of the next one, i.e. the ending of a is the beginning of b, it starts to make sense.

Blueberry Garden, the winner of 'best independent game' at the 2009 Independent Games Festival, is now available for purchase for a measly $5. If your computer is nice enough to run this gorgeous title, skip that Whopper and Fries tonight so you can afford it.

I love U2. That being said, when I heard The Edge was one of the guitarists being followed and interviewed for a music/guitar documentary I was sold immediately. Plus, its got Jimmy Page and Jack White in it, as well. I gotta be honest, this trailer's got me hyped. Check out the trailer now, and the film itself on August 14th.

"This above all: to thine own self be true,....." - Polonius (from the play, Hamlet)

The above quote states what I believe to be the overall moral message of Sam Raimi's, "Drag Me To Hell". Here we have a character, a young woman, who has ambivalent feelings towards herself and where she comes from. Christine's a good person, but feels she has to appease other people, her boss, boyfriend, etc, rather than herself in order to be happy and get ahead in life. This behavior is, ultimately, her downfall. Christine feels the pressure one day and goes against her moral barometer, she denies a sick woman an extension on her mortgage, she "shames" the old lady, and it is this reason she must now suffer a curse. A very deadly curse. In three days time, a demon will come to take her soul and body to hell where she'll suffer for an eternity. The main focus of the film is, of course, her trying to rid herself of this curse by any means necessary. Will she succeed? Go and see it to find out!
I am in no way an avid fan of the horror genre like some, I think most of them suck, but I did enjoy this one. You might even say that I enjoyed it more than the directors previous horror films, "Evil Dead", "Evil Dead 2", and "Army of Darkness". One of the successes of this movie is that I actually sympathized and cared about the main character, Christine. And for a film to have any real impact it's important to feel for a character in crisis. Plus, like all of the Sam Raimi movies I've seen over the years, it was very entertaining. I can't deny this. It's loud, very crude, cringe worthy in some parts, obnoxious, and there are a lot of boo scares. You know? Boo scares? They're very popular nowadays.
However, in a horror film, personally, for me, boo scares aren't enough to make a film truly frightening. Something more is required.
This film, basically, just screams in your face in order to try and scare you, but I was never spooked. I personally prefer, and this is rare to find in most modern horror cinema, something a little more creepy, something with a little more subtly that builds up to a truly horrifying experience. This is one flaw I've found in all the Raimi horror movies. There's a lot of shock, but no fear.
Maybe I'm asking for too much though. Sam Raimi is the man behind the hugely successful "Spiderman" franchise, and he's been in the game a long time, so it's safe to say he's got a lot of pull in what projects he chooses to participate in and how they're executed. Apparently Raimi had a different vision of how this movie should be and went forward with that vision. He didn't want the same things I did. I respect that. He's being true to himself as a storyteller and filmmaker, I guess. Polonius would be proud.

Microsoft may have a big problem on their hands. It's been speculated that Microsoft recently revealed motion control device Project Natal may not perform properly with dark complected gamers.

According to bitmob.com, "When game consultant and former Newsweek writer N'Gai Croal gave Paradise a test drive, the game had trouble reading his steering actions. The footwork (gas and brakes) worked fine, but Croal couldn't steer his car at all."

Surely Project Natal was tested on people of all colors right? Umm...Yeah. I hope so.

Before you run off to tell Spike Lee or the ACLU you might want to take a look at this...



Looked like it was working alright for those gents. I'm still in awe that Natal works as well as it does now in it's pre-alpha stage regardless of how light or dark the folks that were lucky enough to play are.

On a personal note, I have felt the icy sting of video game hardware racism. When the Nintendo DSi launched Wario Ware Snapped! was the first title I downloaded from the DSi Store. I'm a big fan of the Wario Ware series and was excited to play the newest instalment that's main "hook" was that the game is played only using the Nintendo DSi's built-in camera. I was crushed when I discovered that the game wouldn't register my face. Apparently I'm so pale that I was blending in with the background!

Somebody get my lawyer...

I was always under the impression that Spike Jonze's dispute with Universal over his initial cut of Where the Wild Things Are stemmed from its lack of marketability. Universal passed because they thought the movie would be too scary for children. This is of course speculation, because, in fact, I thought it may be a bit too frightening for the little ones and this seemed the only reason Universal would pass on such a fan favorite. But apparently I was wrong. Kids love the trailer as can be seen in a recently discovered video on Vimeo. Who would have known? It's not like it was a children's book before.**end sarcasm.

Trailer Reaction from We Love You So on Vimeo.

This is the strange new trailer for the new Werner Herzog movie Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. That's right, I said Werner Herzog, the man who directed Encounters at the End of the World is directing this seemingly strange movie, which doesn't have a U.S. release date set just yet. This trailer seems so mysterious and I've a hunch may not be very revealing about what the actual movie may be like. Still, some of Nick Cage's deliveries in the trailer seem very comedic if not downright bizarre. But, I guess we'll have to wait to find out. It's not scheduled for its initial Belgium release until December of this year.

I recently stumbled upon a compelling article on the subject of Japanese mini-series Paranoia Agent (2004) that totally blew my case.

Writer Ben Hamamoto proposes that the show created by celebrated filmmaker Satoshi Kon (Perfect Blue, Tokyo Godfathers, Paprika) "is a surreal and epic exploration of what it means to be Japanese, (in that way similar to Haruki Murakami’s “Wind-up Bird Chronicle”). It makes a case that the culture of kawaii (cute) was birthed by the atomic bomb and functions as a mask for Japan’s World War II atrocities."

Fascinating stuff. Read the whole article here and then go watch Paranoia Agent.