TrueGentleman

"Being taken on the Millennium Falcon" is obviously code for "work in Hollywood again", so Rogen had better enjoy The Green Hornet's box office while he can.

Funny, Moore didn't have any problems poking fun at himself in a cameo on The Simpsons. Perhaps he gets annoyed only when he's unceremoniously shut out of the creative process of adapting his works whose fundamental themes are then mangled to the point of unrecognizability, characters are cast inappropriately, and plots are trashed in order to make room for some studio-approved hack's credit on the screenplay's title page.

Hmn. Perhaps I need to take a deep breathe and relax.

Here he is with his wife. He's definitely smiling under The Beard.



Fun fact: Although Moore doesn't seem to have received any colorful nicknames, he did dub Neil Gaiman "Scary Trousers".

And funnily enough, at one time Schwarzenegger had signed on to play Brynner's role in a remake. Perhaps now that he's looking for movie work again, he'll dust off that project.

Smith has the comic chops to deal with the fundamentally ridiculous situation, like Benjamin, but he might be too big a star these days to pull off the "ordinary guy" thing. I'd prefer Will Arnett if the director could get him to play it more or less straight.

Yes, in addition to one hundred-some other "goodfellas".

Say what you will, this is a pretty thorough job of throwing things down the memory hole.

Then again, the parts quoted in other posts are still part of the record, and this thread looks like it will continue under its own momentum for some time.

"Nescit vox missa reverti," as Horace always reminds me. (Of course, I had to look up the translation for that pompous Latin tag - "A word once spoken can never be recalled.")

Done. (Kevin Smith should change his name to "Kevin NSFW Smith" to avoid any confusion.)

Lucas may well be regretting he's so famous that his utterings are instantaneoulsy transmitted to every corner of the blogosphere. Perhaps he and Spielberg should rethink their habit {NSFW - Kevin Smith alert} of inviting smart-alecks to their little get-togethers.

I suppose I should be grateful the censor-filter hasn't been programmed to recognize the slang Anthony Burgess invented for A Clockwork Orange.

Oh, of course, because all right-thinking people know that Emperor Ming the Merciless was not intended to be Fu Manchu in outer space - "Yellow Peril" from another planet, as it were - but instead an embodiment of the evils of chromosal disorders. {Good - I see that the board's filtering software can't screen out scarcasm.}

In all seriousness, NCSoft is clearly using substandard, off-the-shelf censorware to filter the boards if it blocks an obscure slur that coincidentally features prominently in a classic sci-fi character's adventures but can't detect a notoriously offensive if outdated term for Asians.

After Frey's spectacular self-destruction in the legitimate book world, he reinvented himself as a publishing entrepreneur, promising unknown would-be authors a contract and chance for fame and fortune in exchange for the copyright and all other associated intellectual property. It's the most exploitative literary enterprise since the old days of Grub Street and pulp magazines. The goal, as their I Am Number Four project makes clear, is to manufacture potential blockbusters that can be pitched to Hollywood as tentpole franchises a la Twilight or Harry Potter.

Is it a heretofore unknown slur against the citizens of Mongolia, whether Inner or Outer? These boards are introducing me to derogatory terminology I would have never guessed existed and even now doubt.

This is yarbles, I say, great bolshy yarblockoes.

Wait another minute, the censor-filter is bowdlerizing my link to the Wikipedia entry about the planet where Flash Gordon's adventures take place? Honestly, I'm aware the old comic strip was somewhat tinged with racism, but this is ridiculous.

Wait a minute, I can't even mention by name the planet where Flash Gordon's adventures take place? The censor-filter on these boards is overzealous to say the least.

There's more than enough out there in the real world to give cause for concern. Lucas, whose imagination revolves around spaceships going VRROOSH in a vacuum, lasers focused into cylinders, Midichlorians, etc., naturally prefers to worry about, well, cinematic doomsday scenarios. I'm surprised only that he didn't start blaming the planet *****.

Perhaps Lucas could visit NASA's site sometime to check out science without fiction for a change.

In a director's commentary to Alien, Scott suggested that a later sequel (Alien 5 or 6) would revolve around visiting the Space Jockey's home planet and that the crashed ship was the equivalent of an aircraft carrier, except instead of aircraft, the xenomorphs' eggs were the attack vehicles. Then again, O'Bannon's original script had the xenomorphs originating on the crash-planet LV-426 and evolving enough to build monumental architecture (a primitive pyramid/temple), so who knows what direction the ultimate sequel for Alien would take?

The rumors about Scott and Lindelof's script are a considerable departure from the scenarios above, "Alien DNA" notwithstanding.

Or Fox is simply going to repurpose the inventory at Pinewood for Scott's movie the same way Scott and Lindelof are reworking the script. Scott can do as he pleases on this project (Walter Hill is out, and Dan O'Bannon's no longer with us), and the casting is barely underway. Given the diminishing returns on the Alien "franchise", Fox and Scott may have simply come to an understanding that his very expensive science fiction movie would fare better with a wide audience on its own merits instead of trying to go back to the fans' well yet again.

This isn't a case of a film company denying rumors of an announced project to throw fans/spies off the scent. Scott has been officially working on the project for some time but now has clearly stated he wants to do something different with it. For my part, a fresh and unencumbered story wins out over something gratuitously shoehorned into the legacy of a three-decade-year-old movie (to say nothing of three sequels and two crossovers of increasingly poor quality).

The LA Times' Heat Vision blog confirms the scoop:
(Honestly, it's all in Fox's press release.)

Ramdomly approaching strangers to rectify arbitrary matters is, in most cultures (whether real-world or online), not typically considered effective or gracious. The pleasanter tactic, if one is unable to restrain one's corrective impulses, is first to compliment them on their efforts before bringing up, almost reluctantly, the minor flaw in their otherwise praiseworthy work.

A very impressive list you have there, with some of my own favorites. You may also enjoy Daniel Clowes's work (his latest, Wilson, was published earlier this year).