In a bizarre lawsuit filing, Global Findability says it's already patented something called "Integrated Information Processing System For Geospatial Media." And the lawsuit claims that Knowing includes (and therefore sells) "geospatial object entity code", or "geocode" for short. In other words — those GPS coordinates for future disasters, embedded in the 1950s scrap of paper? It's a real thing. Explains Global Findability:

Upon information and belief, defendants Summit and Escape, LLC, have made, used, offered to sell, and/or sold, and continues to make use, offer to sell, and/or sell, the Film, within this Judicial District, including, without limitation, the Geocode® product that infringes Global Findability's Patents.

Actually, judging from the patent itself, they've just patented a method of scheduling filming of particular events by location and time, and embedding location and time data in the recording afterwards. But it's kind of a confusing patent, to be honest.

Apparently Global Findability is not a totally fly-by-night operation, filing frivolous patents and lawsuits for fun. According to the Hollywood Reporter, its board includes tech mover-and-shaker Peter Morville, and it's represented by attorney Federick Samuels, who used to work for the Trademark And Patent Office.

So does this mean that Global Findability knows where the next deadly hurricane or plane crash will hit? And they're holding out on us? [Lawsuit Filing via THREsq]

Talking during an interview to promote Knowing, Cage expressed a rethink about violence in film:

At this point in my life I have made a series of movies with a hieroglyphic of my face and a gun. I had a serious look at a couple of movies, one that I pulled out [of], because I felt, at this point, I didn't want to kill a person on camera... I was trying to think about ways I could entertain you, hopefully give you some sort of escape, which I think in this day and age is very important, without having to resort to gratuitous violence. Science fiction is a way that I can go into the abstract, go into the imagination, and audiences are still willing to go along for the ride.

Does this mean that Cage sees science fiction as a gateway drug to take audiences into indulgently abstract movies? I hope so, if only because I'd love to see just how abstract the man behind Ghost Rider, Bangkok Dangerous and Adaptation can get when he puts his mind to it.

Nicolas Cage wants sci-fi career [Press Association]

At least that's the impression I came away with after watching this Nicolas Cage vehicle. The film, directed by Alex Proyas (The Crow, Dark City, iRobot) tries hard to impress you with its deep themes about the meaning of our existence, but it's let down by a sledgehammery script, and one of Cage's worst performances on record. (And bear in mind, I liked Ghost Rider. Yeah, really.)

Oh, and there will be spoilers in this review. I'm predicting it, because I have a giant sheet of random numbers, and if you circle some of them randomly you get the words "SPOILERS AHEAD".

Nic Cage plays John Koestler, an MIT professor who's the worst astrophysicist in the universe. Early on, we get to watch him teaching a class, and it's like a bad freshman philosophy bull session, taught by a burned-out stoner. For some reason, instead of actually, you know, teaching some astrophysics, Koestler wants to ramble about predestination versus total randomness in the universe. "Tell me about the sun," Cage says, tossing a model of the sun at one of his students. "It's hot," the student says. Dude, no way. So, is it just random chance that we're exactly the right distance from the sun to allow complex life to develop? (This is what's known in the business as foreshadowing.)

Koestler is obsessed with questions of fate versus free will, because his wife died in a hotel fire, leaving him alone with his precocious son Caleb, who's got that form of aspergers that smart kids always have in the movies. The movie tries hard to give us a lot of character development by shorthand. Like, John and Caleb have a weird hand-jive thing they do while they chant "You and me, together forever." Except that John is never actually there for Caleb, because he's an alcoholic screw-up. One of John's colleagues wants to fix him up on a date with a female professor whom he calls "Miss Ph Double-Ds." Oh, and John is estranged from his own father, a pastor who talks with a fake Boston brahmin accent. "Oh, the son of a pastor, the son of a pastor," John chants at one point while pulling a face. John doesn't believe in God, because of that hotel fire thingy.

So yes, eventually the plot kicks into gear and we're all glad the painful character development is over. Caleb's school digs up a time capsule, which we saw being buried in 1959, and Caleb gets a sheet of numbers which a crazy Wednesday Addams girl scrawled 50 years earlier. Somehow, John figures out all those numbers predict every major disaster of the past 50 years, plus a few disasters yet to come. (You're not supposed to wonder how so many disasters could fit on one piece of paper.)

At this point, the film starts referencing 9/11 pretty heavily. Remember when it was considered a huge taboo for movies to touch on 9/11? Watching parts of this movie, I felt nostalgic for those days. The first disaster that Koestler identifies on the sheet of numbers is 9/11. And then he gets caught up in a plane crash that's somewhat reminiscent of UA 93. Then Koestler figures out that another disaster is due to take place in Manhattan, and meanwhile the terror rating has been raised. So John tries to notify Homeland Security about his prediction, to no avail. He goes to New York, and spots a shifty-looking Arab man, whom he chases through the subway. The Arab turns out to be a guy who stole some DVDs, and then the subway train crashes due to driver error. Cage and the other survivors climb out of the ruined subway, in a cloud of smoke and ash, and they're all covered with white ash, so that they look like postapocalyptic mimes. And then we see shots of heroic firefighters. Other movies I've seen recently which touched on 9/11 have felt interesting, or cathartic, or tasteful, but this just felt a bit gratuitous for some reason.

Actually, though, the movie really only comes to life when there's a disaster taking place. During a few great set pieces - the plane crash, the train crash and one or two others - the movie gains a sense of life and becomes fun to watch. We follow Cage as he runs through flames and rubble and screaming people, in long tracking shots that reminded me of the end of Children Of Men. The disaster sequences only account for about 15-20 minutes of the movie's two-hour running length, but they're almost worth the price of admission. Proyas obviously puts most of his heart into those moments.

Meanwhile, the other big strand in the movie is that spooky shit is going down. The creepy girl who wrote down those numbers heard scary cacophonous whispers in her ears, and John's son Caleb hears them too. So does the girl's granddaughter, whom John and Caleb meet up with at some point. (Oh, and Rose Byrne plays the 1959 girl's daughter, who's been tormented by her mother's weird Cassandra complex.) And there are weird goth albino dudes hanging around the kids, staring at them and trying to claim them or something. Also, there are weird pebbles. It all turns out to be something different than you expect, in a very woo-woo "spiritual" ending that reminded me of Mission To Mars or the Keanu version of Day The Earth Stood Still. There was one fantastic moment when the kids are each handed white rabbits - and I thought maybe bunnies would turn out to be the movie's secret villains. (What if Anya from Buffy was right? Bunnies! Bunnies! It must be bunnies! But sadly, no.)

One of the great pleasures of Knowing is picking apart all of the movie's weird plot holes and bits of unprocessed nonsense. For a film that insists, over and over, that everything makes sense and that you could predict the future if you only knew enough facts, the movie actually depends on the audience not thinking very hard about its premise, especially once the big twist in the premise is revealed.

But that's not the film's biggest problem - plenty of movies make no sense, and are still awesome to watch. (Like, say, Push, from the same distributor, which came out last month.) Rather, the biggest problem is that the film is such a genre smorgasbord, it sort of loses cohesion. It's a mystery thriller, where we have to figure out what these numbers mean. No, wait, it's a horror movie, with the staring albinos and their deranged whispering. Or, no, it's a disaster movie about planes trains and automobiles going FOOM. Or no, it's a spiritual growth movie, where we finally open up and discover the meaning behind everything. To be fair, some of my favorite movies are genre mashups, and I like a movie that changes gears in the middle. But it just doesn't quite work in this film, because the shifts are handled awkwardly, and none of these individual segments feels that original. It all felt like a mashup of several movies I'd seen before.

For all that, I didn't hate Knowing, or even dislike it that much. It had a certain energy, and Nic Cage's dopey facial expressions are always fun to watch, and the disaster segments really are first class. There are a couple of genuinely surprising twists here and there, and the part of the ending that's not "spiritual" is weirdly satisfying. Proyas keeps upping the ante, until the apocalyptic finish feels genuine apocalyptic and huge. Rose Byrne doesn't have much to do in the film, but she's engaging whenever she's on screen.

Plus, I suspect that if you really love random spooky shit, or apparently meaningless clues that turn out to be the key to everything, or spiritual endings, then you'll be more drawn into this movie than I was. You may even find that it explains everything - and find that its apparently random tonal and narrative shifts form a secret pattern, which you can use to predict everything in the universe. Or maybe not.

IGN interviewed Proyas, and also featured a new plot synopsis for the film:

In 1958, as part of the dedication ceremony for a new elementary school, a group of students is asked to draw pictures to be stored in a time capsule. But one mysterious girl fills her sheet of paper with rows of apparently random numbers instead. Fifty years later, a new generation of students examines the capsule's contents and the girl's cryptic message ends up in the hands of young Caleb Koestler. But it is Caleb's father, professor John Koestler (Cage), who makes the startling discovery that the encoded message predicts with pinpoint accuracy the dates, death tolls and coordinates of every major disaster of the past 50 years.

As John further unravels the document's chilling secrets, he realizes the document foretells three additional events-the last of which hints at destruction on a global scale and seems to somehow involve John and his son. When John's attempts to alert the authorities fall on deaf ears, he takes it upon himself to try to prevent more destruction from taking place.

With the reluctant help of Diana Wayland (Rose Byrne) and Abby Wayland, the daughter and granddaughter of the now-deceased author of the prophecies, John's increasingly desperate efforts take him on a heart-pounding race against time until he finds himself facing the ultimate disaster-and the ultimate sacrifice.

I knew Rose Byrne was in this film as the daughter of the prophecies' author, but I didn't realize she had a daughter as well.

And apparently Nic Cage's character starts the movie believing the world is random, and then has a spiritual transformation when he realizes everything is pre-ordained. The "core relationship" of the film involves Cage and his son, but Cage also has a troubled relationship wth his own father, says director Alex Proyas.

And here are some new promo pics, from Celebutopia:

Performing a face transplant is a difficult procedure that involves many disciplines. Underlying facial structures can be very complex, so doctors must configure sinuses, reattach blood vessels and nerves, and try to make the result aesthetically pleasing. There are rejection and other immune system issues, similar to other transplant surgeries. On top of all that, there are psychological factors to consider. The patient is literally wearing another person's face. Even when that face replaces one severely disfigured by an injury or a tumor, it can be difficult to adjust.

The two successful transplants took place in 2006 and early 2007, according to British medical journal The Lancet. Doctors waited to judge the success of the surgeries so they would know if the transplants were rejected or if other problems developed. The patients, one a victim of a bear attack and the other a patient with severe facial tumors, report tremendous improvements in their quality of life. You can see a before and after photo of the man who was mauled by a bear above. An entire section of his face was replaced, including bone.

So how far away are we from Nicolas Cage and John Travolta swapping identities the way they did in Face/Off? Probably 100 years. But as this medical technology improves, a whole slew of freaky sci-fi scenarios become possible. Witness relocation? The ultimate secret agent? A black market auction for the face of a dead movie star? Or, like me, we'll all just have that old Payolas song stuck in our heads. Images by: The Lancet via BBC.

Face transplant 'double success'. [BBC News]