<![CDATA[io9: uma thurman]]> http://tags.lifehacker.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/io9.com.png <![CDATA[io9: uma thurman]]> http://io9.com/tag/umathurman http://io9.com/tag/umathurman <![CDATA[Uma Thurman's Medusa Weave Unleashed — Is This The Next Harry Potter?]]> With angels and gods on the rise, it's only a matter of time before Chris Columbus' film adaptation of The Lightning Thief becomes your kids' next deranged obsession. This could well be the next Potter, especially with a Uma Medusa.

The movie, which is based on a YA series about gods and their demigod kids centers around Percy Jackson, here's the official synopsis:

Trouble-prone teen Percy Jackson is about to be kicked out school but that's the least of his problems. The gods of Mount Olympus and assorted monsters seem to have walked out of the pages of Percys Greek mythology texts and into his life

With Legion and the winged teen series Hush, Hush and Fallen on the rise, we're predicting big things for The Lightning Thief. Lightning Thief will be in theaters Feb. 12 2010.

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<![CDATA[The Genetic History Of GATTACA]]> A collector's edition of GATTACA will be out in two weeks, and it's getting the full Blu-ray treatment from Sony. Maybe this box-office flop will finally get the respect that it deserves, especially now that we're getting closer and closer to being able to build superhumans. Find out more about the strange and awesome history of GATTACA below.

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  • The film was originally supposed to the called The Eighth Day, but a Belgian film with that title forced the film-makers to change theirs. In the film, the center where Vincent's parents go to genetically engineer another baby is called "The Eighth Day." It's a reference to the biblical line "And on the Seventh Day, God rested." Presumably, on the eighth day, man started tinkering around on his own.

  • The production budget for the movie was $36 million, but it only grossed $12 million. Sadly, there is no genetic testing for a box office hit.

  • The film boasts a fairly impressive cast: Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman, Jude Law, Alan Arkin, Ernest Borgnine, Loren Dean and Gore Vidal.

  • Jude Law's character Jerome starts referring to himself as his middle name, Eugene. Perhaps a sly reference to eugenics.

  • Uma Thurman's character is named Irene Cassini after the 17th century Italian astronomer. He discovered the gap in Saturn's rings, along with several of its moons.

  • They didn't have a large budget for the futuristic look and feel of the movie, so they modeled the "near future" after the past. Men wear dark suits with fedoras, women wear form-fitting dresses, cars are retro models, like Vincent's 1963 Studebaker Avanti, outfitted with electric engines (just an electric whine on the soundtrack).

  • The government agents/detectives in the film are called "Hoovers," not only as a nod to J. Edgar Hoover, but to the fact that they vacuum up hair and skin cells when they collect evidence.

  • When promoting the movie, Sony placed fake ads in newspapers around the country offering "Children made to order." The ads looked so real that they got thousands of phone calls, and The American Society for Reproductive Medicine asked Sony to change them to make it clear they were fake advertisements.

  • Sony knew the film would be under close scrutiny from scientists, so they hired human-gene-therapy researcher French Anderson as a science consultant, and had test screenings for The Society of Mammalian Cell Biologists.

  • Scientists seemed to love the movie for the most part. In fact molecular biologist Lee M. Silver said "Gattaca is a film that all geneticists should see if for no other reason than to understand the perception of our trade held by so many of the public-at-large." Too bad there weren't a ton of geneticists hitting the theaters back then.

  • Bioethicist James Hughes wasn't so fond of the movie, however. His book Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future railed against the genetic testing in the movie.

  • The original ending of the film featured images of people who may have never been born if we'd had genetic testing: people like Albert Einstein (dyslexia) , Abraham Lincoln (Marfan syndrome), Jackie Joyner-Kersee (asthma) and John F. Kennedy (Addison's disease) were shown over a background of stars with their afflictions listed. It then ends with the statement "Of course, the other birth that may never have taken place is your own." People in test screenings said it made them feel inadequate.

  • As a lesson in the DNA-uninformed (like me), the tile of the film comes from the four DNA bases: Adenosine, Guanosine, Thymine, and Cytosine. They sometimes line up to form GATTACA in a DNA sequence.

  • The announcements that come over the PA system in the Gattaca building are in Esperanto.

  • Frank Lloyd Wright's futuristic Marin County Civic Center was used as the exterior of the Gattaca building. It's got that sort of hipster-50s retro cool look. It was also used extensively in George Lucas' THX-1138.
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<![CDATA[Ben Affleck Sees The Future, So You Don't Have To]]> "If you show someone their future, they have no future." That's the wisdom of Ben Affleck, in this bizarre clip from Paycheck, the movie that bounced. Apparently if you can look into the future, you turn everybody into soulless mall kids, with no purpose. And your attempts to prevent future catastrophes will always cause those catastrophes to happen, because... uhhhh... Hey, it's Uma Thurman with really bad hair! (Wig? You decide.) More details, and another Paycheck clip, below.

You think Paycheck is going to be a slippery thriller about a guy who's had his memory erased, but it takes a very unfortunate left turn. It turns out the missing year that was erased from Affleck's memory involved him building this machine that can look into the future. And he used it to see that bad things would happen if the machine ever went on the market. So armed with this foreknowledge, and a bunch of random objects like paperclips, the amnesiac Affleck is able to prevent the horrible future he saw in the machine. Even though the problem with the machine is that you can never prevent the horrible futures it shows you. Oh hey, it's Uma's hair again!

I'm going to skip the cheap shot about how if Ben Affleck really had a predict-o-matic machine, he would have been forewarned about Jersey Girl and Gigli. Here's another amazing Paycheck moment: The evil henchman decides to look into the future-telling machine to see his own future, not realizing Ben Affleck has stuck a bullet in one of the valves to make it blow itself up. So the predict-o-matic machine shows the henchman that he'll get blown up in about twenty seconds... and twenty seconds later, it happens! He's just turning to run away from the exploding future-scope, and boom! It's comedy gold. Or maybe comedy frankincense, because it's so aromatic.

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<![CDATA[New 'Gattaca' DVD Brings High Def to Genetic Fascist Dystopia]]> Andrew Niccol's film Gattaca seems like it's been swept under the carpet and behind the radiator lately, which is surprising given the current obsession with stem cells, in utero fetal testing, and the human genome. In fact, there's a whole generation out there who haven't even seen this film. Breathe easy, because you'll be able to help them see it when a brand-new edition comes to DVD and Blu-ray on March 11th. Can you believe Danny DeVito produced this thing? The new disc features all new interviews with Ethan Hawke and Jude Law and an expose on DNA testing.

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