Eastman spilled the beans to Film School Rejects over the weekend that James Cameron, Zack Snyder, Gore Verbinski and David Fincher have signed on to the long-awaited anthology movie spun out of the long-running comic magazine:

I've got breaking news that Fincher and James Cameron are going to be Co-Executive Producers on the film. Fincher will direct one. Cameron will direct one. Zack Snyder is going to direct one and Gore Verbinski is going to. Mark Osborne and Jack Black from Tenacious D are going to do a comedy segment for the film. Three other directors have agreed but we haven't signed them, but they're equally as jaw-dropping. So we're on cloud nine to be working with such an amazing amount of talent.

That's an amazing collection of talent, but we're worried about the fact that there will be another three directors added to the five listed; just how long is this movie going to be? Or, more depressingly, is each segment going to be incredibly short?

‘Heavy Metal' Adds Cameron, Verbinksi, Snyder as Directors [Film School Rejects]

The Mark: Rob Liefeld's near-mythical movie for Will Smith (First announced in 1997) possibly disappeared due to worries over its similarity to Marvel's Star Brand series (which is, itself, a rip-off of DC's Green Lantern): Smith was to play an average joe who would end up with ultimate power that he didn't want, thanks to a mysterious brand that is magically "transferred" to his body from the corpse of a Confederate soldier. The pitch meeting probably went like this: "Picture this, Will. You have this mark on your hand, right? And you're looking at it, wondering what it is, and then it has this laser blast that comes out of it and blasts through a wall in your apartment." "Can I look at the hole in the wall and say 'Awww hell naw'?" "Sure." "I'll do it!"

Warcop: In 1993, Madonna wanted to star in another movie, and thought that she'd make a good superhero. She asked Spawn creator Todd McFarlane to come up with an idea for her, and Todd - wanting nothing to do with it - gave the idea to Grant Morrison, who came up with a pitch involving a Judge Dredd-esque futuristic space cop who traveled in time back to the present day to catch a particular perp. In one of her last good career moves, Madonna decided against the project, but Grant apparently didn't; the title, at least, is about to be used for one of his new comic books.

Iron Fist: Is this adaptation of Marvel Comics' kung-fu fighter anything more than a hopeful dream for The Phantom Menace's Darth Maul, Ray Park? The stuntman-turned-actor has been talking about the perpetually-upcoming movie version of Danny Rand for more than half a decade now, and the movie has had multiple co-stars, directors and screenwriters attached at various points in its history but seems to be getting no closer to actually being made. This can only be a good thing, because it just increases the likelihood of teaming the character up with (the similarly movie-cursed) Luke Cage to give us the Power Man And Iron Fist movie the world needs to see.

Green Lantern: One of the greatest near-misses in cinema history is the fact that fan outcry halting pre-production of Jack Black's comedy movie version of DC's space cop superhero a few years ago. Hearing Jack talk about what we could've seen in an alternate world is enough reason to be grateful:

I was going to be making all kinds of stuff... I was going to be capturing bad guys with green, giant prophylactics. Some funny stuff.

To everyone who complained loudly enough to stop this movie being made: Thank you.

Spider-Man: I know, I know; you're all thinking "Wait, didn't they make Spider-Man? I'm pretty sure I've seen a Spider-Man movie." But I'm not talking about the Sam Raimi version; I'm talking about Jim Cameron's mooted early '90s version that would had a villain that kissed his girlfriends to death, a personality-less Sandman as afterthought thug, and Peter revealing his secret identity at the end of the movie to a surprisingly unimpressed Mary Jane. There's no doubt that it would've made a cool-looking special-effects bonanza, but it had none of the heart or quirkiness of Raimi's version.

In the sequel, Mia Farrow and Danny Glover would pair off, and so would Alma (the cute dry-cleaning girl) and Mos Def. But poor demented Jack Black is left alone... until he finds a cute dog and becomes attached to it. And then everybody decides to mount a socialist revolution and take over the city hall of Passaic, NJ. They open a restaurant that gives away free food, they refuse to support the Iraq war, and they create more jobs for everyone.

Everything's fine for a while, until Danny Glover gets a brain tumor that turns him into a raving racist. He freaks out at Jack Black and drives him away, claiming that Polish people tricked African Americans into taking the lowest paid jobs. "It's terrible, frenzied, racism," says Gondry. Things get worse and worse, until a race war is starting. "Segregation is reinstalled."

Mos Def leads the African American community, and Jack Black leads the Polish community. (This is actually where my suspension of disbelief fails.) And Alma leads the Latino community. Everybody gets into a horrible fight.

But then the cute little dog dies, and somehow this convinces everybody to stop their race war. And then everybody realizes that Danny Glover just had a benign brain tumor, which made him turn racist. So everything goes back to normal.

It would definitely be the most demented Gondry film yet. I would probably pay $10 just to see Jack Black playing a zany manic white supremacist. But I might have a lot of elbow room in the theater. At the very least, it sounds more interesting than Cloverfield 2. [MTV Movies]

Like Eternal Sunshine, Be Kind is slipstream: a melding of genres that uses elements from science fiction but doesn't adhere to all the genre's expectations. The sequence where Jack Black decides to sabotage a power plant and winds up magnetized is very scifi, from the tentacles of current bathing Black's floating body to the weird visual effects that follow him around for a while afterwards. Most of the rest of the movie is "realistic," except that it's totally unrealistic. The movie requires just as much suspension of disbelief as the scifi-iest scifi movie.

So you've probably seen the "Sweded" versions of classic movies, like the clips of Ghostbusters and Robocop above. You'll probably be disappointed if you expect the whole movie to be about the wacky fan films which Jack Black and Mos Def make (with the help of an ever-increasing supporting cast). That segment, between Jack Black erasing all the videotapes and the fan-film operation getting shut down, occupies the middle segment of the film. But there's a lot of stuff before and afterwards.

The rest of Be Kind deals with gentrification and the destruction of old urban neighborhoods. The titular Be Kind, Rewind video store is in a condemned building in a crappy neighborhood in Passaic, NJ, which Jack Black describes as a "dump swamp" at one point. The store's only claim to fame is that jazz legend Fats Waller was born in the building, and you won't be particularly shocked when you find out halfway through that it's not even true. The store's owner, Mr. Fletcher (Danny Glover) made up the Fats Waller myth to disguise from Mos Def (and himself) that they're trapped in hell with no way out.

The city wants to tear down the video store (where Glover also lives) and put up ugly condos in a bid to "improve" the neighborhood. As the movie goes on, you meet more and more characters who seem to be barely hanging on economically. The act of "Sweding" the Hollywood movies which Black erased becomes the ultimate empowerment for people who are slowly getting erased from their own neighborhood. It would be super depressing, if the movie didn't keep hammering home the idea that creating (or recreating) your own narratives can save you from being crushed. (I'm a sucker for that idea, so I totally bought into it.)

And then, after about 45 minutes of Black and Def's escalating silliness in "covering" 2001: A Space Odyssey and other random movies, the lawyers show up to put a stop to it. (One of those lawyers is played by Sigourney Weaver, who's already spent a lot of time being impersonated by a random African American guy in the Sweded Ghostbusters.) After all that yay-reclaiming-our-stories stuff, Weaver's character points out that the video store doesn't even own its tapes: the movies still belong to the studios, and Be Kind Rewind is just leasing them out, to rent them out in turn to other people.

I sort of expected the movie to turn into the battle over whether Black and Def should be allowed to create their own fan-films for profit. (That's what the trailer left me expecting, anyway.) But the fight is over really quickly, and nobody even utters the phrase "Transformative work." Larry Lessig should not see this movie, it'll just upset him. Within a couple minutes after Weaver and the other stooge show up, a steamroller is destroying all of the awesome tapes Mos Def and Jack Black have made.

I won't spoil what happens after that, but suffice to say the movie has a long coda (probably another half an hour or so) in which it proves, once and for all, that creativity can bring everybody together, and that the stories we create ourselves are better than the ones other people provide for us. And better, for that matter, than the "truth." (It all ties back into that myth about Fats Waller being born in the crappy video store.) It's a super uplifting ending, even as you're left with no doubt that all these people are royally fucked.

That's the other reason I want to claim Be Kind as a type of science fiction: not only does it have a science fictional McGuffin, and "Swede" several scifi movies, but it's also all about the power of invention. Both in the sense of making shit up, and in the sense of cobbling together solutions out of technology. It's not quite as great, or as clever, as Eternal Sunshine. But it's a worthy successor anyway.

• The Starship Exeter: This Star Trek fan-made series comes from the heart of Austin, Texas, and looks like it was filmed alongside the original series. From the sets all the way down to the smallest props, its got the looks. The acting can be slightly hammy at times, but whoever said Shatner wasn't pure pork?
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• Time Distortion: If you can manage to build a replica of the TARDIS, then you've done 95% of the work required to make a Doctor Who fanfilm, mostly because the special effects budget for the BBC back in the day was probably about ten bucks. For the whole season. Kevin Hiley and buddy Jonathan Miles made an audio version of this story when they were both 13 years old, and 13 years later, they made a live-action version that captures the cheese, camp, and charm of the original Doctor Who.
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• Troops: 1977's Hardware Wars was the first-ever fan film that poked fun at the Star Wars universe but this one takes the cake as far as making something new out of something old. It's Cops with Stormtroopers, what more do you need to know? Oh, and it's hilarious. It helped spawn other Star Wars-themed comedy fanfilms like Trooper Clerks and Pink Five.
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• Batman: Dead End: While the Star Wars and Star Trek universes normally receive the most attention from aspiring fanfilmers, Batman has had some pretty decent entries as well. The best of the bunch is this 2003 short film that wowed director Kevin Smith and artist Alex Ross. It inspired other Batman fanfilms like Grayson, about an adult Robin trying to find out who killed Batman (excellent) and World's Finest, where Batman teams up with Superman.
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• Indiana Jones: The Adaptation: This is probably one of the most inspiring stories of labor, love, and fandom. Three twelve-year-old buddies saw Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981, and starting making a shot-for-shot remake with a camcorder. It took them seven years to finish it, and it premiered in Texas on the big screen in 2003. Producer Scott Rudin bought the rights to their story, and art house comic book favorite Dan Clowes is writing it.

• The Wachowskis' Speed Racer movie backgrounds will be all greenscreen like 300, says star Emile Hirsch. All except for Chim Chim the monkey, which is real. And presumably flung its poop at the pristine green walls. [Empire]
• Dave "Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" Eggers collaborated with director Spike Jonze on the script to Where The Wild Things Are, Jonze's next movie. Wild Things will mix live puppeteering and computer animation. [Hollywood Reporter]
• The Mist took ninth place in the holiday weekend box office, behind more obvious holiday movies Enchanted, This Christmas, Bee Movie and Fred Claus. But Beowulf, American Gangster and Hitman also blew The Mist away.

• Jack Black is bummed that he didn't get to star in a Green Lantern movie. Black was set to star in a comedy, involving an ordinary schlub who joins the corps of space cops with wishing rings. He would have attacked his enemies with green boxing gloves, cages... and condoms. Suddenly, the upcoming Justice League movie (which includes Green Lantern) doesn't sound so bad. [MTV Movies Blog]
• But Black's getting his revenge, by creating a fake trailer for Robocop. It's one of the viral videos posted on the Web site for Be Kind Rewind, his January 2008 film about a guy who erases a video store's stock and decides to remake every movie himself. [Slashfilm]
• When Michelle Forbes return to play Admiral Cain one last time, she chased the other Battlestar actors around the set demanding if they knew who the final Cylon was. And she got nothing. Come to think of it, maybe Cain's the last Cylon? [TV Guide]
• The fans are all right. Southwest Airlines' Spirit in-flight magazine randomly decided to feature an article about fan-fiction. Want to see a version of Heroes where the physics actually makes sense? Leave it to the fans. [Spirit]