In the book, if memory serves, it's only one city that starts having an epidemic of blindness. But this trailer makes it sound as though the blindness is striking worldwide. The only thing that worries me about this trailer is the way the music swells hopefully at the end as Julianne Moore makes a stirring speech. As you can tell from the trailer, she's the only one in the quarantine hospital who can still see, and she's standing up to the self-proclaimed "King Of Ward 3."

Friend of io9 James Rocchi saw Blindness at Cannes and gave it a pretty positive review over at Cinematical:

The descent into savagery is depicted with brutal force in Blindness; many viewers will retreat from that fall's hideous strength through questioning smaller moments in the plot and character motivation, and Blindness unfortunately leaves them plenty of room in which to do so. But while Blindness can be faulted for many things, it also has to be respected for its ambition, craft, and effort; Blindness shows us a world of wide-eyed sightlessness, and it does so through a fierce vision that only occasionally loses focus.

[Alliance Films via GetTheBigPicture]

Two things jump out at me about Magneto, as described by reviewers. First, it tweaks Magneto's origin by suggesting that Nazi scientists either created or activated Magneto's powers by experimenting on him in the concentration camp. This could annoy some purists, especially since the first X-Men movie showed Magneto's powers starting to work when he first showed up at the camp and was separated from his parents. Also, early descriptions of the Magneto movie suggested it would show the beginnings of the rift between Magneto and Charles Xavier. I don't think that's in this script.

So the movie starts at the 60th anniversary of Auschwitz, where Ian McKellen's Magneto surveys the metal gate he twisted in the first X-Men movie. Then we flash back to the young Magneto surviving horrific Nazi experiments at the hands of mad scientist Dr. Kleinmein. Then we zip forward to the 1950s.

Meanwhile, Erik Lehnsherr, who will one day be Magneto, has a wife and daughter — until the suspcicions ofa small town lead to their deaths. It's implied that Erik kills everyone in the town as revenge, but we don't really see it. Eventually, Erik decides to hunt down the Nazis who escaped after the war, including Dr. Kleinmein, who is still doing his evil experiments on the bodies of mutants. Magneto meets and befriends Dr. Charles Xavier, and they rescue two mutants who are being imprisoned for experiments — the mutant prisoners sound a bit like Sabretooth and Mystique.

At first Magneto tries to work with the authorities to round up Kleinmein and the other loose Nazis, including CIA agent Owen Graves. But they only get in his way. So in the end, he decides to take the law into his own hands. And in the end, Professor X offers Erik some hope for the future — and then we zap back to the 60th anniversary Auschwitz event, where Senator Kelly is warning that Mutants are the new threat after the Nazis, setting the stage for Magneto's battle with the humans.

[Coventry Telegraph and Sal's Scripts]

Personally, I doubt you could fit the cute sidekick into the noir-inspired world of Chris Nolan's Batman movies? Even Frank Miller, whose Batman: Year One inspired Nolan's vision, has failed to make Robin work in his All-Star Batman And Robin The Boy Wonder comic. The original Batman comic only lasted about a year before Robin turned up in Detective Comics #38, and the comics have been struggling fitfully to return to their lone-hero roots ever since — most notably after killing off Robin in the late 1980s.

What do you think? Would Robin ruin the Bat-movies? Or could Nolan and co. pull it off?

Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you're viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web browser.

[Vulture]

[Deathrace Official Site via IESB]

S.H.I.E.L.D.

What does it stand for? Originally, it stood for Supreme Headquarters, International Espionage, Law-Enforcement Division. In the 1990s, it was changed to Strategic Hazard Intervention, Espionage Logistics Directorate. Then, in the Iron Man movie, it was changed again to Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division. No idea if this final change is cannon or not. Will the comic books start calling it by its new, DHS-inflected name?

Where can you find it? Marvel comic books.

Key members: Nick Fury, Dum Dum Dugan, Gabriel Jones, Tony Stark, Maria Hill, Clay Quartermain

Its mission, as far as we can tell: To protect the world from bad things like Godzilla, terrorists, aliens, giant robots, and communism. In the recent series Civil War, SHIELD had to uphold the Superhero Registration Act and force all heroes to register with the U.S. government. This resulted in a major pissing match between Captain America and S.H.I.E.L.D., and ended in Captain America's death. S.H.I.E.L.D. is randomly associated with the U.N. or the U.S. (People from the U.S. have a hard time figuring out the difference between their country and the rest of the world.)

Any counter-organizations? HYDRA, which is spelled in all caps but is not an acronym. Warren Ellis made fun of S.H.I.E.L.D. with a group called H.A.T.E., which stands for Highest Anti Terrorism Effort.

SD-6

What does it stand for? Section Disparu 6 (French for Disappeared Unit 6)

Where can you find it? Alias TV series

Key members: Sydney Bristow (though she's tricked into it), Jack Bristow, Arvin Sloane, Jean Briault, Edward Poole (played by Roger Moore!)

Its mission, as far as we can tell: Weird spy shit. Digging up semi-mystical objects, retrieving semi-mystical objects from the bad guys, working with the CIA sometimes, killing people who know about SD-6, propagating weird family psychodrama.

Any counter-organizations? K-Directorate (with the wondrous Gina Torres) and FTL.

CONTROL

What does it stand for?

Unknown

Where can you find it?

Get Smart TV series

Key members: Agent 86 (Maxwell Smart), Agent 99, The Chief

Its mission, as far as we can tell: To work with the United States government to protect the nation from bad guys. Usually bad guys with bombs.

Any counter-organizations? KAOS, which is a Russian group nominally headquartered in Delaware for tax reasons.

U.N.I.T.

What does it stand for? United Nations Intelligence Taskforce, now shortened to Unified Intelligence Taskforce

Where can you find it? Doctor Who, Torchwood

Key members: the Doctor (in the 1970s), Doctor's former companion Dr. Martha Jones, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, Dr. Elizabeth Shaw

Its mission, as far as we can tell: To protect the planet, and especially England, from alien invaders. They're barely secret at all, and work with the United Nations. Their first great battle was with the Cybermen.

Any counter-organizations? None.

The Dharma Initiative

What does it stand for?Department of Heuristics And Research on Material Applications

Where can you find it? Lost TV series

Key members: Founders Karen and Gerald deGroot, from spooky University of Michigan

Its mission, as far as we can tell: Funded by the mysterious Hanso Corporation, its mission was to be a scientific collective where people could study meteorology, psychology, parapsychology, zoology, electromagnetism, and what is hinted to be utopian socialism (the scariest discipline of all!).

Any counter-organizations? The Others, who gassed them and took over their research stations.

The Syndicate

What does it stand for? Not an acronym, but perhaps a metanym. It's also known as the Elders, the Consortium and the Group.

Where can you find it? X-Files TV series

Key members: The Smoking Man, X, Alex Krycek, William Mulder (Fox's dad), Alvin Kurzweil (no relation to Ray)

Its mission, as far as we can tell: Like an old-fashioned Illuminati-style group, they secretly influence world affairs in government and business. Originally they banded together to fight a group of aliens who wanted to colonize Earth using the black cancer, or black oil. But somehow they are also involved in lots of other ooky-gooey projects to hybridize humans and aliens, as well as create creepy diseases.

Any counter-organizations? The colonizer aliens.

M.I.B.

What does it stand for? Men In Black.

Where can you find it? The Men In Black movies.

Key members: Agent J, Agent K, Agent L

Its mission, as far as we can tell: To deal with alien life on Earth, which sometimes means protecting humans from aliens but mostly seems to mean protecting aliens from each other.

Any counter-organizations? Unknown

Ways Hancock could have sucked considerably less:

#1: Do the cruddy-superhero thing right

The first half of Hancock is a watered down version of the comedy that those trailers promised you: Hancock is a superhero who's fallen into disgrace, thanks to hard-drinking roughneck ways. This is a premise with almost unlimited potential, and yet the movie still manages to flub it. The movie repeats the same joke a dozen times: someone calls Hancock an asshole, and Hancock gets pissed, so the guy calls Hancock an asshole a second time. Hancock scowls and says, "Call me an asshole one... more... time." And the other person says "asshole" one more time. Then Hancock uses his superpowers to fuck this person up in a hilarious way. The joke works once or twice, but then you start to wonder: who would ever knowingly fuck with Hancock? He's bulletproof and has super strength! People know all about him and his superpowers, but they still challenge him. Don't they know how it's going to end up? It's almost as if the scriptwriters think the fact that people don't respect Hancock means they don't fear him. It would have made more sense — and been funnier — for people to trash-talk Hancock and yet be terrified of getting in his way.

#2: Have some supervillains

So Hancock is the world's only superhero, in a world with no supervillains or other oversized threats. Hancock spends his time fighting small-time crooks, who pose no threat to him. Do you like watching a drunk guy swat flies? Then you'll love this.

Why are there no supervillains? It's a problem with superhero movies in general: they want to tell a simple, easily comprehended story in under two hours, so they keep the world-building simple. You can't really have Batroc the Leaper jump into Iron Man, because you'll have to explain who the hell this guy is and why he's jumping around with his silly French accent. Much simpler just to have Iron Man fight a guy who's using Iron Man's own stolen technology. Iron Man vs. Fake Iron Man. It's our world, just with super-armor. Or Hulk vs. Fake Hulk. Hancock takes this weird paradigm to its furthest extreme, and in the process it shows how flexible our modern mythology of superheroes isn't. Plus supervillains = automatically funny. The boasting, the giant gadgets, the Dr. Horribleness.

#3 Explain why exactly Hancock is a superhero anyway.

Hancock is a god among mortals. Shouldn't he be, I don't know, king of the world or something? Instead he's living in two smushed-together trailers and sleeping on a park bench. He's drunk all the time and people hate him because he causes tons of property damage in the course of fighting criminals. And it's never explained why Hancock feels the need to fight small-time hoods. There's a throwaway line late in the movie that says Hancock is a "protector" by nature, with an in-built need to help people. But it's very throwaway. And he could protect people lots of other ways besides foiling liquor-store robberies in L.A. He could be stopping the genocide in Darfur. As anyone who's read Michael Chabon's Kavalier And Clay knows, the crucial question is not, "How does Batman fight crime?" but, "Why does Batman dress up as a bat and fight crime?" In the case of Hancock, we probe his psyche a little bit, and get a vague sense that he's filled with self-loathing because nobody came to get him when he turned up, amnesiac, in a hospital 80 years ago. But it's all pretty thin sauce.

#4 More Jason Bateman being funny

This movie's MVP is really Jason Bateman from Arrested Development. Actually, Will Smith brings his usual charm to some horrendous material, but Bateman's the actor who really shines in Hancock — even though his character is actually super lame. Bateman's supposed to be the world's greatest PR guy, but all we ever see him do is fail to convince companies to sign on to his incredibly weak charity project, which involves putting an ugly heart logo on their products. The funniest parts of Hancock have to do with Bateman trying to rehabilitate Hancock's image and convince him to play nice. The long sequence of the white guy in a suit trying to "civilize" the scary black guy is a little creepy, but it does yield some actual humor. Bateman convinces Hancock that he should say "Good job" to police officers when he shows up at at a crime scene, because the cops are putting their lives on the line. So Hancock goes around woodenly saying "Good job" to everyone. (First, Hancock has to go to jail so he can show some humility, and make everybody miss him.)

It's just too bad that the funny Bateman moments are outweighed by the dull Bateman-pimping-his-charity moments, and the later Bateman-feeling-sad-about-his-marriage moments (we'll get to that in a sec.)

#5 Make this movie about something

One of the things that's frustrating about Hancock is it's full of metaphors — which aren't examined or explored at all. Like the idea that he's the world's only superpower, and everybody hates him. Do you think they maybe hate him because he's the only superpower? Also, the fact that he's filled with self-loathing because of his amnesia — what's that about? And the idea that superheroes are our "modern mythology," and a god who came to Earth would decide to be a superhero. There's got to be some potential there somewhere. Any one of those ideas, explored in an interesting way, would be way funnier than what we got.

#6 Put back the dirty stuff.

As we mentioned a couple of times, Hancock was gutted to squeak into a PG-13 rating, which is the money sweet spot in Hollywood. Along the way, everything really outrageous got sliced out of the movie. There's no more sex with underage (well, 17-year-old) girls. No more projectile semen ripping holes in the roof of Hancock's trailer. (Although you can still see the holes, in one scene.) I'm guessing a bunch of other crazy comic material got removed at some point, and what's left is sort of sad. Plus, Smith is determined to make Hancock likable even though he's supposed to be an asshole. As a result, Smith seems kind of bewildered. In fact, Hancock seems borderline autistic at times, especially in his interactions with Bateman. Smith is determined to make us love a superpowered drunk quasi-homeless guy with anger issues, so he settles on making him seem sort of childlike and befuddled. Why can't Hancock just be a cock?

#7 Totally rethink the movie's big twist

As you may have heard, Hancock is really two movies smushed together. The first half is a weak comedy, and you've already seen the funniest parts in the trailers. And then the second half is an unbearable melodrama. It happens really suddenly. There's a moment where Hancock suddenly turns into My Super Ex-Girlfriend for a moment, and then it switches gears and becomes a schlocky love story devoid of chemistry. And here's where things get spoilery.

So it turns out that Jason Bateman's wife, played by Charlize Theron, is actually an immortal superbeing like Hancock. And she and Hancock have been quasi-married before, but Hancock lost his memory of their past together. And whenever the two of them are together, they start to become mortal. Which is how the rest of their immortal race died off, by pairing up. Theron's character Mary is trying to hide her super-being status — so she flings Hancock through a wall. Good job, Mary!

#8 Can the love story.

At some point, you realize that we're supposed to care about the relationship between Hancock and Mary, even though there's no chemistry between them and they're talking about gods and immortality and destiny and blah blah blah. The later scenes between them are up there with Hayden and Natalie in the Star Wars prequels. It's fully Lake on Naboo-tiful. And the idea that they become mortal when they're in each other's presence is just kind of ludicrous and annoying, and makes for a horrendously schlocky climax.

#9 Decide what kind of movie you're making.

And here's really the crux of what went wrong with Hancock. Is it a crazy outrageous comedy about a shitty superhero? Then fucking go for it, and show us how crazy you can get. Is it an understated Jason Bateman comedy about a P.R. exec who tries to work with a superhero to improve his image? That actually could have been a great film, if the whole movie was about that. Is it an exploration of why Hancock is such a dick? Or is it a tragic love story of two immortal and nice-looking people who can never be together? (If so, then no thanks.) If Hancock had picked one movie to be, it might have managed to be pretty okay. Instead, it's a mash-up of five really bad movies.

According to Galactica Sitrep, the TV movie has already offered a contract to Dean Stockwell, who plays the atheist cylon Brother Cavill. Other actors that the studio is approaching include Michael Trucco, Aaron Douglas, Grace Park, Michael Hogan and Katee Sackhoff. What do all of those actors, except Katee Sackhoff, have in common? Well, they're all very good-looking people. Oh yeah, and they play cylons. Could we be getting some juicy cylon backstory? (But how can we do that without Tricia Helfer?) Espenson seems to have an interesting handle on the cylon culture, and the fact that the cylons can share memories and traits among different members of the same model. [Galactica Sitrep]

Rogen has been writing the script with Evan Goldberg (Superbad). The movie is based on the radio serial and the later Green Hornet TV series and will have Hornet's Asain manservant Kato. But even Rogen's jokes about getting Kato to say cocksucker fall flat on my ears.

I think perhaps even Rogen may know that this movie is really just an excuse for him and his buddies to get high and run around in superhero outfits:

"To us, it was just this funny notion that, when you say Green Hornet to someone, the first thing they say is, 'Hey, Bruce Lee played Kato in that show.' We really wanted to make this hero-sidekick movie. ... For years we'd really been trying to write a movie that was kind of about a hero and his sidekick. When we heard the Green Hornet movie was up for grabs, we thought that could be the perfect way to do this story, because he is the only hero whose sidekick is more known than he is. We thought it would be a good way to tell this relationship story and just do a big crazy action movie."

Sorry Seth, the Green Hornet is a terrible superhero — who wants to watch a movie about a better than average crime-fighter or poor man's Bruce Wayne? Didn't we learn our lesson from Mystery Men? Do we really need/want another bumbling Hancock? Pick something else to parody or keep making moves about weed. That seems to be working. Leave the fat superhero jokes to comedy hacks. I fear this could be the beginning of the end for Rogen.

[Sci-Fi]

Explaining his plans about a possible DVD version of his web short, Whedon told TV Guide:

We're already working on some of the DVD extras, which are going to be the finest in all the land. We're actually going to do, in addition to the commentary, what we refer to as ‘commentary with an exclamation point'! A musical commentary that is a completely original musical, that is all commentary songs, and we're writing that now... We're just piling it on. We're like, we're going to make more fun of the idea of extras than anything else.

And where there's a DVD, there's sequel potential... maybe:

Whether this has any impact on the Internet is unclear to me. It will be something that hasn't been done. And although some people came up with a plan on how to monetize this right away, our first priority was to put this out. We do it for the fans, we do it as an advertisement for itself and for just this culture, this idea of people who are doing something smaller scale but hopefully in such a way they can reach a lot of people. And maybe then it can make us an eleven-ty kadillion dollars. Or maybe it won't.

Dr. Horrible, will be an "internet miniseries event," streaming for free on the show's official site. Part 1 will appear on Tuesday, July 15, and the the second and third parts will appear July 17 and 19. All three parts will disappear on July 20, but Whedon hopes to have all three parts available for downloading soon afterwards.

Exclusive: First Look at Joss Whedon's "Dr. Horrible" [TV Guide]

Director Edgar Wright (Shaun Of The Dead) explained to Piq Magazine that the film will be yet another superhero origins story but different, "because you've seen so many of them and we really tried to figure out a fresh take on that story. So it's definitely a Marvel film but it's got a little twist on it in terms of the way that it plays out."

In the past, Wright has mentioned that the film combines two major characters. My guess is Lang and O'Grady because this way Marvel can feature both the Avengers (which Lang was a member of) and super-spy agency S.H.I.E.L.D. (which O'Grady worked for). Besides who doesn't want to see the creepy guy use his powers for his own dirty little mind, while trying to be a good guy on the side? Plus if Wright goes with the O'Grady story line, maybe we'll get to see him cross wits with old-timey thief the Black Fox. [Piq Magazine via Cinematical]

Written by Hellboy creator Mike Mignola from a story by Mignola and Golden Army director Guillermo Del Toro, the animated six-minute short comes in advance of the movie's July 11th release date. And if you're wondering where the young Hellboy came from, you can always see his origin story.

Hellboy II Animated Comic [Apple.com via /Film]

In a universe stocked with sentient robots and faster than light travel, you'd hope that science would have mastered something as mundane as the human reproductive system, yet the fictive cosmos are littered with unplanned pregnancies, bastard children, and all manner of unpleasant critters bursting from one's internal organs. Is any form of contraception safe in world of science fiction? We looked at seven tried and true methods and started to worry that the future we’ve envisioned is one in which we’re all paying child support.

Socially-Mandated Birth Control
How it works: When the world is on the verge of overpopulation and resources are strained, sometimes a government’s got to put the breaks on reproduction and restrict baby-making to the desirable few. After all, after thousands of years spent clawing to the top of the Darwinian ladder, we can’t have every Tom, Dick, and Beowulf Shaeffer dumping his DNA into the newly limited gene pool. Fortunately, there’s a veritable buffet of methods for de-fertilizing the populace. The body-numbing “ethical birth control pills” of Vonnegut’s Welcome to the Monkey House make sexual contact utterly uninteresting, while Andrew Neiderman’s The Baby Squad opts for the simpler solution of mass sterilization. The women of Sarah Hall’s Daughters of the North are fitted with an outwardly visible IUD, and Brave New World does away with childbirth entirely, making pregnancy the pinnacle of personal disaster and arming women with a birth control utility belt that would make Batman proud.

Why it fails: It turns out that the long arm of the government can only reach so far. In Hall’s book, women occasionally slip off the reservation to join the Carhullan Army, where they’ll take out that contraceptive device post haste. And, despite the looming threat of execution, women in The Baby Squad and Larry Niven’s “Known Space” stories have been known to get pregnant on the sly. Of course, sometimes birth control just plain fails. Even with a lifetime of practice at the Malthusian Drill, Brave New World’s beta Linda still manages to get knocked up, and with nary an abortion tower in sight.

Making it with a Robot
How it works: Assuming you’ve gotten a hold of one of those fully functional models and not one that’s genitally lacking, robots may be the perfect lovers – all that stamina with no messy gametes.

Why it fails: While this might work with entirely abiological specimens, the rules get tricky when your partner’s a Cylon. If you’re a human doing a Cylon, don’t fall in love. If you’re a fellow toaster, then plug away – unless you’re one of the Final Five. Which you might be. On second thought, it’s best just to use a rubber.

Male Birth Control
How it works: As modern researchers are tirelessly working to staunch the flow of sperm, Starfleet has long known the benefits of offering contraceptive injections to men. It reduces the odds of accidents and prevents alien-loving starship captains from leaving little Kirklets across the Alpha Quadrant.

Why it fails: As with its modern female analog, the male contraceptive injection is only good as long as you keep it up. And captains like Ben Sisko are just too busy bringing down evil empires, battling Pah-wraiths, and preserving the timeline to stop by Sick Bay for a hypospray. But not too busy, apparently, to get it on with Kasidy Yates.

Living in a World Without Men
How it works: Maybe all the men died off one day in a mysterious and bloody event. Maybe women have gone off and formed their own society without thinking to take a few Y chromosomes along. Maybe a whole species is kept female to control their breeding. Whatever the reason, the absence of sperm would seem to take pregnancy off the menu.

Why it fails: Even in the face of gendercide, men are not so easy to fell. There are bound to be a few hiding out in secret labs, in orbit, or dangling in straitjackets from the ceiling, ready to impregnate the first female who pounces. Or, as in Jurassic Park, the absence of males may prompt a handful of females to tiptoe across the gender line. And maybe men aren't a necessary component after all; the women of all-female utopia Herland opt for parthenogenesis, making themselves pregnant without the benefit of a partner.

Being Male
How it works: Thomas Beatie aside, it’s unlikely that a man is going to find himself pregnant at the gonads of another human being. Even exclusively male societies, like that in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Ethan of Athos, tend to rely on external gestation devices rather than construct a male womb.

Why it fails: While human fetuses find the male body hostile, other species may not be so discerning. From the Octavia Butler’s Tlic to Ridley Scott’s chestbursters to that Alien in Red vs. Blue, there are plenty of extraterrestrials perfectly happy to place their embryos in our bodies, regardless of a uterus.

Abstinence
How it works: We all learned it in school: the only surefire way to avoid pregnancy is abstinence. Or sodomy.

Why it fails: As Deanna Troi and Shmi Skywalker will tell you, keeping your knees shut doesn’t exactly guarantee a baby-free existence. When those microscopic or incorporeal beings want something from you, be it a Force-balancing messiah or a chance at fleshy life, they aren’t going to wait around for a little thing like sexual intercourse.

Death
How it works: In olden times, death generally put a damper on one’s ability to become a new parent. But with today’s medical advances, it’s best to dispose of every last shred of genetic material – ova, sperm, and any gestating alien life forms.

Why it fails: Giving birth to an Alien queen was just the sort of thing Ellen Ripley was trying to avoid when she jumped into a vat of boiling lead. Little did she know that, in the hands of Joss Whedon and a handful of ethically-challenged scientists, even death is no match for the miracles of the reproductive process.

Rich and interesting on many levels, Wall-E can be enjoyed merely as light fun if you don't squint too hard. Wall-E is a trash compactor robot, absolutely cute as a button and beautifully animated by the Pixar geniuses, who was left on Earth after the planet has become so toxic that humans can no longer survive on it. He and his many robo-companions are part of "project cleanup," spearheaded by the corporate oligarchs at the Buy n Large corporation. While robots scour the Earth, humans will live in vacation-liner luxury on a BnL ship near a lovely purple nebula.

Unfortunately, as we discover later, things have gone a bit wrong. The humans are now on year 700 of their space vacation, and Wall-E lives an eccentric, lonely existence on a planet covered in graceful, skyscraper-high spirals of garbage he's built. He spends his days with a little cockroach pal, compacting trash and collecting intriguing bits of trash and watching dance routines from Hello, Dolly! on a souped-up VCR.

He's jolted out of his "clean up garbage" programming directive when Eve arrives on Earth — she's a probe dispatched by the human ship every few years to check to see if the planet has begun to grow plants again. Once there are plants, the humans will return for "recolonization." A sleek little iPod-looking creature, Eve becomes Wall-E's first friend in centuries. They are slowly coming to like each other when she discovers a plant and her own programming directive kicks in. She powers down, becoming an inert container whose whole purpose in life is to deliver the plant back to the ship an initiate recolonization. Desperately in love and wanting to remain with Eve, Wall-E follows her back to the human ship (by clinging to the outside of her rocket in an amazing "floating through the galaxy" sequence).

Through Wall-E's eyes, we see what humanity has become. Low gravity in space over many generations and centuries of time has turned humans into boneless blobs who scoot around on antigrav chairs, constantly eat and drink BnL fast food products, and are waited on hand and foot by robots. They're all constantly plugged into the net, doing everything in virtual reality and obeying every command to "consume" that's piped over the BnL ship's loudspeakers. It's a consumerist dystopia, and the only sympathetic characters in it are the rebellious robots who help Wall-E and Eve overcome crazy obstacles to lock the ship into recolonization mode so they can return to Earth and live happily ever after.

The love between Wall-E and Eve is quite touching — they risk their lives for each other, and in the process prevent the HAL-like robot Auto from retaining permanent control of the cruise ship. Taken as fairy tale symbols, Wall-E and his robot pals represent a hopeful future generation, while the fat, consumption-controlled humans are an older generation whose wasteful ways cannot be sustained.

One of the terrifically interesting subtexts of Wall-E is that our hero robot has survived over 700 years by recycling. By gathering up pieces of useful garbage and storing it in his garbage truck home, Wall-E always manages to have spare parts that he can use to repair himself. And the film itself is a kind of masterpiece of recycling: cobbled beautifully together from the plots and styles of 1960s and 70s films, as well as the silent comedy of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Director Stanton deliberately created a visual style that recalls the lens flarey look of 70s scifi like Silent Running or the Planet of the Apes movies.

And Auto, the out-of-control autopilot program that runs the BnL ship, is a glowing red eye deliberately intended to recall 2001 (there are other 2001 moments too, where the roly-poly humans try to walk on two legs and the 2001 infamous "apes using tools" Strauss music plays). The brand-plastered interior of the BnL ship also recalls 2001, which aside from an AI-run-amok movie was also a meditation on the corporate-controlled future.

I think the key to understanding what Wall-E is really about, however, means recalling the plot of Charlie Chaplin's little-guy-caught-in-the-gears movie Modern Times. Like the Little Tramp in that film, Wall-E is a kind-hearted outcast whose entire life is devoted to work and who can only communicate through gestures and strange sounds (Modern Times was a silent movie filmed during the sound era, so it's full of noises but none of the characters speak). The one time anyone talks in Modern Times is when a Big Brother-esque face orders workers around from a screen over the factory floor where the Little Tramp works.

In a similar vein, Wall-E incorporates live action into the otherwise animated film when an authority figure (the president of BnL) speaks in old video files from 700 years ago. The only other live action moments are dance sequences from Hello, Dolly!, another film about the romances of little people escaping from work. The point of Modern Times (and Hello, Dolly! to a certain extent) is that love can rescue us from the horrors of labor — or what Wall-E and Eve call their "directives." The Little Tramp finds his Gamine, and they sing and dance their way into a sweet, romantic future. Dolly helps shop clerks find love. And in Wall-E, the love between two robots doesn't just erase the horror of work — it also has the potential to erase the horror of the polluting output of labor that has turned Earth into a pile of industrial waste surrounded by a layer of space junk.

The problem in with this "love conquers pollution" scenario from Wall-E is the humans. Though their ship brings them back to recolonize Earth, none of them can walk and their skeletons have evaporated. They literally can't live on Earth. And they have no idea how to grow food — the captain of the ship promises his crew farms where they'll grow "pizza plants." They've lived their lives in a giant vacation mall, eating "cupcakes in a cup." How can they possibly rebuild an entire ecosystem?

And besides, there's a more sinister backstory to what's left of the human race that takes place mostly off-screen. In flashbacks to the live-action video of the BnL president, we see him explain in a panicked voice that "operation cleanup" has failed, and the Earth is so toxic nobody can survive. So the vacationers should just "stay away." In other words, everybody on Earth is dead except for those who could afford to take what is billed as "an executive class cruise" on the BnL ship. What's left of the human race are the pale, mindless lumps descended from the richest people on the planet 700 years ago. Nobody else survived.

It's a grim idea indeed, unless you consider that the robots who return to Earth with the humans are going to be just fine. They're solar-powered, can navigate the trash piles easily with wheels and antigrav, and they don't need to worry about toxic air because they don't breathe oxygen. They've even formed a community of sorts and are likely to live happily ever after as the humans slowly waste away without the comforts of the Auto-run ship.

To return to the point I began with, the robots have managed to reprogram themselves to be autonomous, and to care for one another. It's even likely that over time they might be able to mend the Earth by keeping it clean. The robots, after all, have no need to create more waste. In fact, they'll have to reuse it to survive. The humans, however, have only become more deeply programmed over the years. They've returned to Earth less capable of taking care of it than when they left.

Ultimately, the question you should ask yourself while watching Wall-E is what this kid-friendly parable is teaching its impressionable watchers (and I include myself in that number). Is our most hopeful vision for the future that we will die out and a more rational, loving species will take over the planet for us? Or do we see ourselves in those robots, utterly transformed by an unimaginable future into creatures that we would no longer recognize as human — and yet carrying on the very best of human impulses in a way we never could?

Battlestar Galactica
Even though Quiznos is the official sponsor of lesbianism on BSG, which is kind of gross, nobody could watch Six and D'Anna in bed with Baltar without wanting to kick old sweaty-pants out and see our two lovely cylons get busy.

The Man Who Folded Himself, by David Gerrold
Gerrold is the author of the "Trouble with Tribbles" episode of Star Trek, and later he quit ST: TNG in a huff because the show runners had promised him repeatedly that they'd do a gay character but never came through. Instead we got that lame "planet of one gender" episode where the outcasts were people who wanted to make it with an opposite-gendered person. Lame! Anyway, Gerrold wrote this great novel in the early 1970s about a guy who travels though time and eventually meets so many of his alternate selves that they have an orgy. Funny and zippy, this book might make you say, "Hmm . . . is it really gay love if it's with myself?"

Ammonite, by Nicola Griffith
Planet of tough lesbians, packed with cool fight scenes and tribal war and desperate journeys and parthenogenesis. It's every girl's dream.

Liquid Sky A weird 1980s New Wave movie set in Los Angeles, this tale of bisexual artist/fashion models making the club scene is surreal and bizarro and sexy as hell. An androgynous lovely discovers she's being followed by aliens in a tiny spaceship who want to eat people during orgasm. Which for some reason pleases our hero, so she goes around having sex with lots of boys and girls just to watch them disappear when they come. Weird and pretty, this movie is a 10 on the "make you queer" scale.

Zerophilia
A bit of a mess script-wise, Zerophilia nevertheless wins for sheer plucky cuteness. A mutant discovers that he possesses the strange "Z chromosome" which allows him to switch genders when he has an orgasm. But then he's stuck as that gender until he can have sex with another Z. Or something. The point is there are a lot of cute people having gender-bendy sex and doing lots of running around and being pouty-grumpy about their gender-transcending natures. Even though the plot has gaping holes, it will still make you wish you could switch from an innie to an outie once in a while — and then go back again.

Socket
Gay boys get addicted to electricity, and install sockets in their arms so they can plug into each other better. No really, it's hot.

Runaways, by Brian K. Vaughan and Joss Whedon
In this comic book about a team of teen superheroes, Karolina is a lesbian alien with superpowers thrust into an unwanted, arranged betrothal to Xavin the Skrull. When Xavin falls in love with Karolina, he uses his shape-shifter powers to turn into a cute girl. Yay for shape-shifty, tranny lesbian love! OMG srsly awesome as ponies no joke.

Fledgling, by Octavia Butler
This tale of a polyamorous, bisexual mutant/vampire re-discovering her powers after a catastrophic accident is pretty much the most awesome bit of erotic non-erotica ever written. Sadly, Butler died before she was able to write the sequels to this book. Still, just reading about the sexy relationships our heroine creates will make you wonder if maybe going both ways is the right way.

The Man Who Fell To Earth
In this crazy-ass David Bowie flick, there are no queer scenes at all. But Bowie, as an alien who comes to Earth seeking a way to bring water back to his parched planet, manages to make straight sex look somehow queer. He tries to raise a bunch of money by selling alien technology, and then spend that money building a ship that will take him home. Sadly, his plans are derailed and he falls into a life of debauched 1970s sex and alcohol with a lady friend who is only marginally more feminine than Bowie. Which is awesome, thanks.

Enemy Mine
Maybe it's just man-love, or maybe it's kinda gay, but the very intense both that develops between genderless alien Louis Gossett Jr. and macho dude Dennis Quaid on an alien world is definitely full of sparks. Especially when Gossett gets pregnant and Quaid has to protect him and the baby. This movie makes it seem cool for men to "marry" each other, even if they aren't into each other THAT way.

Hey, Happy
A Canadian prairie boy triggers the apocalypse with his lust, and somehow decides that sleeping with 2,000 guys will fix things? I'm confused by the plot, but amused by the boppy surrealism of this sweet homage to apocalyptic teen lust.

Torchwood
This all-bisexual, all-the-time spinoff of Doctor Who has basically been two seasons of the immortal Captain Jack (briefly the Doctor's companion) leading the secret alien-tracking group Torchwood into sex romps in Wales. Queer sex romps. With aliens, or sometimes cross-temporal beings. Come for the sex, try to ignore the awful plotlines, and stay for the sex. It will not only turn you a little queer, it will make you want to go to Cardiff. Which is really perverted.

Orlando
Scaldingly hot Tilda Swinton plays the title character in this adaptation of the time-traveling, gender-bending novel by Virginia Woolfe. Orlando starts out a snotty boy during Queen Elizabeth's reign, mistreats his lady lovers horribly, and grows into a misogynist prick in the 18th Century. Then, abruptly, he turns into a woman. Who has to deal with misogyny, sexual awakening, and war throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Swinton plays boy half and girl half with sexy aplomb, and will definitely tempt you into a little tranny-chasing.

Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula Le Guin
This is Le Guin's classic gender-bender, homo-sorta novel of the late 1960s. A lone emissary comes to study the society on a planet where nobody has a gender. They go into "kemmer" or heat once in a while and take on gendered characteristics in order to mate. When the emissary gets stuck on a dangerous mission with one of the natives, who suddenly goes from seemingly male into a kemmering female, our hero has to confront his confused feelings about gender and sex. More sociological than sexy, the book will definitely force you to question your assumptions about gender, even if it doesn't turn you queer.

Mysterious Skin, by Scott Heim (also a great movie)
Two boys grow up together in a small Kansas town — only one becomes gay, and the other becomes convinced he's been abducted by aliens. It turns out their two stories are inextricably linked, and only when they finally meet as adults to they figure out the secret of the aliens. The book is haunting and delightful, and the movie version (with Joseph Gordon Levitt) is superb. You can't look at Levitt's broody face and not want to feel a little man-on-man with him for just a nanosecond.

In the first comic of the series, young hero Mitsu's father dies. Unable to live without his father's meager income, Mitsu takes over his father's old job: washing the windows of the orbital so that the rich can have lovely views of Earth below. Of course, washing windows in space is even more dangerous than washing them on Earthly skyscrapers. The art in the comic book is amazing: There are incredible vistas, amazing giant tech, and then lonely little people inhabiting these vast spaces. You can see the entire first book here. I can't wait to see the movie.

Dosei Mansion manga gets live action film [Anime News Network]

The film will be directed by relative newcomer Bruno Merle, whose 2007 movie Héros was a thriller about a small-time comedian who kidnaps a famous singer. Given that he's already explored the psychology of a desperate loser, Merle might be the person who can do justice to Silverberg's story of a guy who relied on his telepathy to slide by his whole life — and who is now watching his one great ability misfire and fail. What I loved best about Dying Inside was the way Silverberg managed to convey the pettiness of telepathy. His protagonist David Selig uses his amazing powers mostly to figure out who might take him home for a one-night stand. No saving the world. Just small-time stuff.

Silverberg told Locus magazine that the movie will be Gallicized, with Selig turned into a French expat in New York.

Dying Inside [via Amazon]

In the footage shown, a guy gets hit in the face with a trowel and buried in the snow. Then Billy Connolly's psychic priest finds him buried. And that's when Mulder and Scully get involved. Scully tells Mulder, "This isn't my life any more." He walks away from her and mutters, "I'm trying to ignore you." Mulder also insists he's still looking for his long-lost sister Samantha, and doesn't believe she's dead.

Also, Spotnitz told the crowd that "shippers will be happy" with the movie, presumably meaning there'll be some Mulder/Scully lovings. And some of your questions will be answered, said writer/director Chris Carter. Finally, Mulder actor David Duchovny said he and Scully actor Gillian Anderson had some conflicts over how they were playing their characters, which "keeps it interesting."

[Defamer X-Files News and Sci Fi Wire]

Consider Get Smart alongside the summer's other goofy Jewish spy flick: Don't Mess with the Zohan. Like Smart, Zohan is a Jewish intelligence agent on a series of wacky adventures. The difference is that Zohan comes from the contemporary world: He's an Israeli ninja, fleeing contemporary political intrigue. He's openly Jewish, makes hummos jizz jokes, and basically takes the whole wacky Jewboy thing to its extreme. It works because we exist in a world where Israelis are, in fact, super-ninjas of the intelligence community. This is contemporary Jewish humor: It acknowledges that Jews can be tough, but that they might in fact aspire to be something else. You know, like hairdressers.

But the original Get Smart comes from a time when Jewish identity, and Jewish humor, were tickled by a very different set of issues in the West. It was an era when Jews in the U.S. were still struggling to be seen as anything other than mouth-breathing nerds or commie spies. Maxwell Smart is a Jew from that era: He's a total dork who struggles to be a super-agent. In fact, he's not even openly a Jew, though every Jew who watched that show knew what was up. (Jewish pranksters Mel Brooks and Buck Henry created the show, and a ton of Jewish guys worked on it as writers.) What's jarring about the movie remake is how little the writers tried to update the humor.

The new Get Smart film's references to nudniks, and Alan Arkin's hilarious hand-wavey schtick, seem retro because they are still the covert Jewish jokes of the 1960s. They are straight from an era when Hollywood Jews were closety about their ethnic backgrounds. Despite the fact that the Get Smart TV show featured a robot named Hymie and was packed with Yiddish references, you can bet that most of its audience had no idea they were giggling at Jewish humor. To update Get Smart for a new generation, the writers needed to make all that old-school covert Jewishness into something hilariously overt, or just get rid of it.

The anachronistic Jewish humor of Get Smart is indicative of the film's entire problem, which is that it can't decide whether to be a futuristic spy satire, or to pay homage to a bygone era. It strikes an awkward balance, incorporating a post-feminist Agent 99 (who is Maxwell Smart's boss this time around) and a black Agent (Dwayne Johnson, who turns out to be the bad guy, so much like a schwartze, nu?). And then are the two nerds, including Oka, who are supposed to represent the iPod generation but unfortunately figure very little into the plot. Basically we're left with a temporally-challenged satire.

Get Smart also tries unsuccessfully to update the Cold War scenario with KAOS vs. CONTROL. There are a ton of funny places they could have gone with this. KAOS could have evolved into the Russian mafia, or could have joined up with those cartoonish "terrorists" from Iron Man. And CONTROL could have been absorbed into the Department of Homeland Security. Whatever — I'm not asking you to give me a writing job in Hollywood, I'm just saying there are a lot of funny ways they could have updated the Cold War humor and they didn't. It was still basically KGB vs. CIA, and the premise fell as flat as a Shelley Berman routine would today.

I'm not saying the movie wasn't fun — it was, especially for a person like me who grew up with a family that worshiped Mel Brooks, Sid Caesar, Lenny Bruce and Groucho Marx. Will it work for a generation that loves Sarah Silverman, the Beastie Boys and Adam Sandler? Probably not — but it missed by this much.

Turns out that when the police officer's son, Leto, has an attack he turns into a beast that feeds on human flesh. And he's like a werewolf: if Leto bites you, you too become cursed with the same fate. Unfortunately for the dad, he can't kill his son, so he spends his days in the Amatu montain range killing off those his son turns. If the film-makers go down the path they've set out with this awesome concept art, then that is one scary looking beast.
[Twitch]

Follow the links to awesome galleries.

Stan Winston Studio

Robots

Scary Monsters

Friendly Creatures

Gooftastic

Scott said:

To popularize Blade Runner, I wanted to make it into a real comic strip; Hampton [Fancher] was always showing me comics, and we talked about it a lot. Little Orphan Annie is dark - Daddy Warbucks is so sinister - it’s like Silence Of the Lambs! It’s full of terrible things and bodies locked in cupboards… I would look at these drawings, particularly the grey comic strips - [Batman and Superman] were so well done in those days. When we were making Blade Runner, it was always in the back of my mind that we were making a comic strip. You could put Batman in rooms or scenes from the film and it would work… I think Blade Runner is a pretty sophisticated comic strip.

OK, I know Scott is hard at work on a new movie version of Brave New World, but would it be too much to ask for him to do a dark, scary, Silence of the Lambs-esque version of Little Orphan Annie? You know, post-apocalyptic orphans in a corporate future? I would way rather watch that than The Road.

Ridley Scott Compares Blade Runner to Little Orphan Annie [Darth Mojo]

While some of the essay is a bit of a stretch, author Tim Mitchell does raise a number of interesting points for genre hounds. He explains why it's significant that the Mimic movies are located in an urban environment (vs. the deserts of Tarantula and Them!), and he has a lot of terrific observations about how the Mimic movies express fears about transgenic animals and crops. And, of course, how they express fears about other things too:

In “Mimic 2,” Remi cannot find a boyfriend who understands her but nevertheless cannot shake the sexual designs of a male Judas Breed insect — a suitor that Remi understands better than her human suitors because of her background in entomology.

Check it out.

Pictures of Insect Men [via PopPolitics]