Nobody thinks a Total Recall remake is a good idea, but it's still happening. And now it's been announced that Underworld director Len Wiseman is in final talks to direct, from a script by Equilibrium/Ultraviolet director Kurt Wimmer. This will be a new "contemporized" adaptation. The press release quotes Wiseman: I've always been fascinated with Philip K. Dick's short story, and I'm excited at that prospect of diving even deeper into the type of world it evokes and the questions it asks. I love that the most crucial mystery our character is trying to solve is the one of his own soul. As UGO's Jordan Hoffman puts it: Aronofsky to remake RoboCop? Okay, I'm curious. Len Wiseman doing Total Recall - smells like Rollerball all over again. [Coming Soon, via Jordan Hoffman on Twitter]
-
A Total Recall remake from the director of Underworld and Live Free Or Die Hard? [Breaking News]
- Tags:
- Movies
- Breaking News
- Equilibrium
- Kurt Wimmer
- Len Wiseman
- Please go dno
- robocop
- rollerball
- Total Recall
- Ultraviolet
July 29 2010, 11:36am | Comments »
-
A Total Recall remake from the director of Underworld and Live Free Or Die Hard? [Breaking News]
Nobody thinks a Total Recall remake is a good idea, but it's still happening. And now it's been announced that Underworld director Len Wiseman is in final talks to direct, from a script by Equilibrium/Ultraviolet director Kurt Wimmer. This will be a new "contemporized" adaptation. The press release quotes Wiseman: I've always been fascinated with Philip K. Dick's short story, and I'm excited at that prospect of diving even deeper into the type of world it evokes and the questions it asks. I love that the most crucial mystery our character is trying to solve is the one of his own soul. As UGO's Jordan Hoffman puts it: Aronofsky to remake RoboCop? Okay, I'm curious. Len Wiseman doing Total Recall - smells like Rollerball all over again. [Coming Soon, via Jordan Hoffman on Twitter]
- Tags:
- Movies
- Breaking News
- Equilibrium
- Kurt Wimmer
- Len Wiseman
- Please go dno
- robocop
- rollerball
- Total Recall
- Ultraviolet
July 29 2010, 8:36am | Comments »
-
Check out the full Thor trailer and get hammered [Trailer Frenzy]
Now you can see the Thor trailer that debuted at Comic-Con, and check out how everybody looks, from Loki to Destroyer. It's an action-packed introduction to a movie that looks like pure superhero goodness. More »
- Tags:
- Movies
- thor
- Trailer frenzy
July 29 2010, 7:01am | Comments »
-
Hammer Films will be revamping Quatermass [Hammer Films]
http://io9.com/5595597/hammer-films-will-be-revamping-quatermass
At Comic-Con today, the president of UK's Hammer Films announced that the company's next film after Let Me In would be Woman In Black, starring Daniel Radcliffe. And next on their slate is a revamped Quatermass, which is brilliant news for those of us who loved the British series about a scientist fighting aliens and other otherworldly creatures. Hammer will also be doing a revamped Kronos and 7 Golden Vampires. We can't wait!
July 24 2010, 3:02pm | Comments »
-
The Destroyer emerges from Asgard on the Comic Con floor [The Destroyer]
http://io9.com/5595540/the-destroyer-emerges-from-asgard-on-the-comic-con-floor
Marvel rolled out Thor's big bad, The Destroyer, onto the Comic Con floor. Check out the indestructible armor, in the metal flesh!
July 24 2010, 2:51pm | Comments »
-
Hammer Films will be revamping Quatermass [Hammer Films]
http://io9.com/5595597/hammer-films-will-be-revamping-quatermass
At Comic-Con today, the president of UK's Hammer Films announced that the company's next film after Let Me In would be Woman In Black, starring Daniel Radcliffe. And next on their slate is a revamped Quatermass, which is brilliant news for those of us who loved the British series about a scientist fighting aliens and other otherworldly creatures. Hammer will also be doing a revamped Kronos and 7 Golden Vampires. We can't wait!
July 24 2010, 12:02pm | Comments »
-
The Destroyer emerges from Asgard on the Comic Con floor [The Destroyer]
http://io9.com/5595540/the-destroyer-emerges-from-asgard-on-the-comic-con-floor
Marvel rolled out Thor's big bad, The Destroyer, onto the Comic Con floor. Check out the indestructible armor, in the metal flesh!
July 24 2010, 11:51am | Comments »
-
Is "avoiding tropes" the same thing as telling fresh stories? [Rant]
http://io9.com/5586431/is-avoiding-tropes-the-same-thing-as-telling-fresh-stories
Often, it seems the highest praise you can give a story is to say it avoids a common trope. And thanks to the Internet, everyone, including creators, is hyper-aware of this. But do we cherish trope-avoidance, instead of fresh storytelling? I was thinking about this the other day, when I was writing a recap of a TV episode, and found myself mentioning a trope that the episode had managed to avoid. There was a certain amount of pleasure involved in this moment, I realized — first of all, I felt all clever for realizing that there was a trope the episode had sidestepped. And then, acknowledging this fact made me appreciate the episode in a new light. And finally, there was the realization that, most likely, the people making the episode had also been aware of the trope in question, and had consciously avoided it. I also thought about it a bit after posting a link to the hilarious "World War II assessed as if it were a fictional TV show" rant, which pointed out all the tropes that World War II was guilty of. Which, as Bones creator Hart Hanson pointed out, really was what a lot of fan criticism sounds like. It's like judging a sporting event — you see the trope in the path of the narrative, and you sit on the edge of your seat. The trope is a sand pit, and you wait to see if the trope manages to vault over it safely. Then you award points for form. (Really, I should say "I," rather than "you," since I do this all the time.) It's part of what I love about the Internet, and about the pervasiveness of media-geekery. We're all insanely aware of the places that our stories tend to go, including some fairly obscure stuff that nobody would have thought of as "tropes" years ago. I mean, people always obsessed about clichés in storytelling, but not at the level that people have reached with sites like TVTropes. We've managed to broaden and deepen the scope of human knowledge regarding clichés. Truly, this is the golden age of modern metafictional geekery. How did we manage to be alive in such a time of plenty? There's just one thing more exciting, to the devoted story nerd, than a story that consciously avoids a trope — the story that subverts a trope. That's like, the story runs up to the sand pit, and instead of vaulting over, it, it blasts the sand with a LASER until it's turned to glass, and then rollerskates across. Early Buffy The Vampire Slayer is full of Olympics-level trope subversion — there's a possessed dummy, but it's actually a good guy! Good misdirection is always a pleasure of storytelling, but misdirection that plays with the expectations that past helpings of pop culture have created — that's the ultimate.
(And I think it's important to talk about pleasure here. Because part of what goes along with this consciousness about "tropes" on the part of both audiences and creators is a recognition that part of the pleasure of consuming a narrative comes from engaging with it actively. We get pleasure from recognizing that something has been done well, just as we get pleasure from tearing apart something that's been done badly. As with the active engagement that comes from spoilers and rumors, the internet has helped us all to enjoy being active. And in turn, a lot of creators seem to cooperate with fans in helping to dissect their own work, because they know we enjoy it. Oh, and one more thing — there's no wrong way to take pleasure from a story, unless you're a serial killer or something. If you're enjoying yourself by being either infinitely nitpicky or not nitpicky at all, don't let anybody tell you that you're doing it wrong.)
Or more recently, the episode of Supernatural that introduced a third Winchester brother displayed an Impala-sized awareness of our nerdspectations. Not only was the episode called "Jump The Shark," but they met the third brother in a café named after Cousin Oliver, the Brady Bunch relative introduced late in the show's run. And yet — wait for it — the show totally subverted the "long lost relative appears out of nowhere" trope. So yay, we're all metafictional now. But what I was wondering is: is avoiding or subverting a trope the same thing as fresh, original storytelling? And do we all place so much emphasis on how a story navigates the minefield that we lose sight of the most important thing, whether the story has power or not? Of course, the two things aren't exactly mutually exclusive. And part of the hope of being super-conscious of the sand pit is that you hope that we'll go someplace beautiful instead of getting stuck there. But on the other hand, sometimes you can just watch a story avoid a trope — and then have noplace else to go. I guess it's like vaulting over the sand pit and then not nailing the landing. But even beyond the fact that "absence of cliché" doesn't equate to "presence of inventive storytelling," there's also the question of whether we're looking at the wrong thing. In true nerd fashion, maybe we're overly focused on the details. Maybe we tend — and by "we," I definitely mean "me," among others — to fixate on the presence or absence of too-familiar story elements, instead of thinking about whether the story as a whole was fresh, or strong, and whether it moved us. (I'm not saying give a free pass to lazy writing, natch. But lazy writing isn't the same as falling into one of the thousand "been there done that" boxes.) Really, what storytellers should aspire to, and what us audience-members should look for, is truthfulness. Characters who feel real, and who breathe. Stories that have a momentum that comes from people's emotions as well as the progression of ideas. Because stories that feel like they're being honest and letting their characters be real people will also feel fresh. It's the characters and the ideas, and how truthfully the story plays them out, that make it fresh. Like Basia says, "It's really me and you/We're watching on the tube." (Yes, I was listening to Basia while I was writing this. You got a problem with that?) An idea you've seen a million times can take a whole new life if you feel like you've never seen this character in that situation, and you care enough and relate enough to see how that plays out. Likewise, a story can avoid falling into the trap of repeating older stories, in a clever way that feels totally mechanical. Of course, the "freshness" or "truthfulness" of a story is a lot harder to talk about than whether it zigged or zagged, and whether we saw that zag coming. But you know, us nerds love a challenge, right?
- Tags:
- Top
- books
- Movies
- Television
- Writing
- Rant
- buffy
- Buffy The Vampire Slayer
- Joss Whedon
- Supernatural
- Basia
- Bones
- Hart hanson
- Metafiction
- Nerdery
- Nerds
July 16 2010, 11:55am | Comments »
-
Is "avoiding tropes" the same thing as telling fresh stories? [Rant]
http://io9.com/5586431/is-avoiding-tropes-the-same-thing-as-telling-fresh-stories
Often, it seems the highest praise you can give a story is to say it avoids a common trope. And thanks to the Internet, everyone, including creators, is hyper-aware of this. But do we cherish trope-avoidance, instead of fresh storytelling? I was thinking about this the other day, when I was writing a recap of a TV episode, and found myself mentioning a trope that the episode had managed to avoid. There was a certain amount of pleasure involved in this moment, I realized — first of all, I felt all clever for realizing that there was a trope the episode had sidestepped. And then, acknowledging this fact made me appreciate the episode in a new light. And finally, there was the realization that, most likely, the people making the episode had also been aware of the trope in question, and had consciously avoided it. I also thought about it a bit after posting a link to the hilarious "World War II assessed as if it were a fictional TV show" rant, which pointed out all the tropes that World War II was guilty of. Which, as Bones creator Hart Hanson pointed out, really was what a lot of fan criticism sounds like. It's like judging a sporting event — you see the trope in the path of the narrative, and you sit on the edge of your seat. The trope is a sand pit, and you wait to see if the trope manages to vault over it safely. Then you award points for form. (Really, I should say "I," rather than "you," since I do this all the time.) It's part of what I love about the Internet, and about the pervasiveness of media-geekery. We're all insanely aware of the places that our stories tend to go, including some fairly obscure stuff that nobody would have thought of as "tropes" years ago. I mean, people always obsessed about clichés in storytelling, but not at the level that people have reached with sites like TVTropes. We've managed to broaden and deepen the scope of human knowledge regarding clichés. Truly, this is the golden age of modern metafictional geekery. How did we manage to be alive in such a time of plenty? There's just one thing more exciting, to the devoted story nerd, than a story that consciously avoids a trope — the story that subverts a trope. That's like, the story runs up to the sand pit, and instead of vaulting over, it, it blasts the sand with a LASER until it's turned to glass, and then rollerskates across. Early Buffy The Vampire Slayer is full of Olympics-level trope subversion — there's a possessed dummy, but it's actually a good guy! Good misdirection is always a pleasure of storytelling, but misdirection that plays with the expectations that past helpings of pop culture have created — that's the ultimate.
(And I think it's important to talk about pleasure here. Because part of what goes along with this consciousness about "tropes" on the part of both audiences and creators is a recognition that part of the pleasure of consuming a narrative comes from engaging with it actively. We get pleasure from recognizing that something has been done well, just as we get pleasure from tearing apart something that's been done badly. As with the active engagement that comes from spoilers and rumors, the internet has helped us all to enjoy being active. And in turn, a lot of creators seem to cooperate with fans in helping to dissect their own work, because they know we enjoy it. Oh, and one more thing — there's no wrong way to take pleasure from a story, unless you're a serial killer or something. If you're enjoying yourself by being either infinitely nitpicky or not nitpicky at all, don't let anybody tell you that you're doing it wrong.)
Or more recently, the episode of Supernatural that introduced a third Winchester brother displayed an Impala-sized awareness of our nerdspectations. Not only was the episode called "Jump The Shark," but they met the third brother in a café named after Cousin Oliver, the Brady Bunch relative introduced late in the show's run. And yet — wait for it — the show totally subverted the "long lost relative appears out of nowhere" trope. So yay, we're all metafictional now. But what I was wondering is: is avoiding or subverting a trope the same thing as fresh, original storytelling? And do we all place so much emphasis on how a story navigates the minefield that we lose sight of the most important thing, whether the story has power or not? Of course, the two things aren't exactly mutually exclusive. And part of the hope of being super-conscious of the sand pit is that you hope that we'll go someplace beautiful instead of getting stuck there. But on the other hand, sometimes you can just watch a story avoid a trope — and then have noplace else to go. I guess it's like vaulting over the sand pit and then not nailing the landing. But even beyond the fact that "absence of cliché" doesn't equate to "presence of inventive storytelling," there's also the question of whether we're looking at the wrong thing. In true nerd fashion, maybe we're overly focused on the details. Maybe we tend — and by "we," I definitely mean "me," among others — to fixate on the presence or absence of too-familiar story elements, instead of thinking about whether the story as a whole was fresh, or strong, and whether it moved us. (I'm not saying give a free pass to lazy writing, natch. But lazy writing isn't the same as falling into one of the thousand "been there done that" boxes.) Really, what storytellers should aspire to, and what us audience-members should look for, is truthfulness. Characters who feel real, and who breathe. Stories that have a momentum that comes from people's emotions as well as the progression of ideas. Because stories that feel like they're being honest and letting their characters be real people will also feel fresh. It's the characters and the ideas, and how truthfully the story plays them out, that make it fresh. Like Basia says, "It's really me and you/We're watching on the tube." (Yes, I was listening to Basia while I was writing this. You got a problem with that?) An idea you've seen a million times can take a whole new life if you feel like you've never seen this character in that situation, and you care enough and relate enough to see how that plays out. Likewise, a story can avoid falling into the trap of repeating older stories, in a clever way that feels totally mechanical. Of course, the "freshness" or "truthfulness" of a story is a lot harder to talk about than whether it zigged or zagged, and whether we saw that zag coming. But you know, us nerds love a challenge, right?
- Tags:
- Top
- books
- Movies
- Television
- Writing
- Rant
- buffy
- Buffy The Vampire Slayer
- Joss Whedon
- Supernatural
- Basia
- Bones
- Hart hanson
- Metafiction
- Nerdery
- Nerds
July 16 2010, 8:55am | Comments »
-
28 Days Later screenwriter taking on Logan's Run? [28 Days Later]
http://io9.com/5566310/28-days-later-screenwriter-taking-on-logans-run
Could the upcoming Logan's Run movie actually be better than the campy 1976 original? Alex Garland, who wrote the Danny Boyle-dircted films Sunshine and 28 Days Later, is in talks to write the screenplay, going back to the original 1967 novel by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson for inspiration. And Carl Erik Rinsch, who wowed everybody with his short film "The Gift," may direct. This film could actually be... good? [Heat Vision Blog]
- Tags:
- books
- Movies
- 28 days later
- Alex garland
- Carl erik rinsch
- Carl rinsch
- Danny Boyle
- George Clayton Johnson
- logans run
- William F Nolan
June 17 2010, 12:05pm | Comments »
-
28 Days Later screenwriter taking on Logan's Run? [28 Days Later]
http://io9.com/5566310/28-days-later-screenwriter-taking-on-logans-run
Could the upcoming Logan's Run movie actually be better than the campy 1976 original? Alex Garland, who wrote the Danny Boyle-dircted films Sunshine and 28 Days Later, is in talks to write the screenplay, going back to the original 1967 novel by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson for inspiration. And Carl Erik Rinsch, who wowed everybody with his short film "The Gift," may direct. This film could actually be... good? [Heat Vision Blog]
- Tags:
- books
- Movies
- 28 days later
- Alex garland
- Carl erik rinsch
- Carl rinsch
- Danny Boyle
- George Clayton Johnson
- logans run
- William F Nolan
June 17 2010, 9:05am | Comments »
-
Robert Downey Jr. and Sam Raimi are heading to Oz [Wizard Of Oz]
http://io9.com/5563913/robert-downey-jr-and-sam-raimi-are-heading-to-oz
The Spider-Man director and the Iron Man star are teaming up for Disney's Wizard of Oz prequel, Oz: The Great and Powerful.In the no-longer-the-Spider-Man-man fallout, Raimi has been swinging from project to potential project, from The Shadow to a 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea remake. But according to Nikki Finke at Deadline Hollywood, last night Disney locked him in to shoot Oz: The Great and Powerful with Robert Downey Jr. as the star.
Downey will play the Wizard of Oz before he became the Wizard of Oz circa the 1939 iconic film: he's in fact a circus wrangler transported by tornado to the mysterious world of Oz where he gets mistaken for a know-it-all.
Disney's got their eye on an Alice in Wonderland-size hit — I just wanna see Raimi off the bench. (Via Deadline Hollywood)
June 15 2010, 10:30am | Comments »
-
Robert Downey Jr. and Sam Raimi are heading to Oz [Wizard Of Oz]
http://io9.com/5563913/robert-downey-jr-and-sam-raimi-are-heading-to-oz
The Spider-Man director and the Iron Man star are teaming up for Disney's Wizard of Oz prequel, Oz: The Great and Powerful.In the no-longer-the-Spider-Man-man fallout, Raimi has been swinging from project to potential project, from The Shadow to a 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea remake. But according to Nikki Finke at Deadline Hollywood, last night Disney locked him in to shoot Oz: The Great and Powerful with Robert Downey Jr. as the star.
Downey will play the Wizard of Oz before he became the Wizard of Oz circa the 1939 iconic film: he's in fact a circus wrangler transported by tornado to the mysterious world of Oz where he gets mistaken for a know-it-all.
Disney's got their eye on an Alice in Wonderland-size hit — I just wanna see Raimi off the bench. (Via Deadline Hollywood)
June 15 2010, 7:30am | Comments »
-
Are we headed into the worst movie season ever?
About a week or so ago I was asked what genre films I thought would do well this summer, so I put together a list of six movies and a couple of sentences about whether I thought they would do well or not. I should have linked to the article... but I didn't.Here's why.I'm having second thoughts about my predictions because I'm not sure any genre films are going to be runaway hits this year.When I wrote the article I was starting to get a little excited over "Jonah Hex," the comic-based film starring Josh Brolin and Megan Fox in a kind of Western/fantasy mash-up. The trailers looked fun and I thought it could be a great popcorn film in the fashion of "Hell Boy." But there have been some murmurs that the advance word is the movie isn't that good-- which is why we haven't seen many trailers for it. On the other hand, they said the same thing about "Avatar."But I can't say I've been truly eager to see any of the upcoming summer releases. There is a chance I might be able to get into an advance screening of "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," starring Nicholas Cage, and if I am able to get into an early viewing I bet I can dreg up some enthusiasm for seeing it even though my feelings have been decidedly lukewarm up to this point. My thoughts on the rest of the list are basically along the same lines as they are for "Jonah Hex" and "The Sorcerer's Apprentice." I have no real interest in "The Last Airbender" even though I have watched enough of the cartoons to know the story-- I just doesn't get me revved up. And don't even get me started on the newest "Twilight" movie.. I can't even be bothered to look up it's proper name. If I had to list one genre film I have some interest in it would be "Inception," but that's based more on the fact that it's directed by Christopher Nolan than anything else. I could also mention the cartoon sequels to "Shrek" and "Toy Story" but...why?If I'm looking forward to anything this summer it's the mindless action films that don't fit into the fantasy/sci-fi genre. "Knight and Day" appeals to me because it has Tom Cruise playing off of his reputation as crazy-- you gotta love that he's willing to make fun of that (at least I do). And "The A-Team" is pure nostalgia-- it probably won't be that good, but it has Liam Neeson, so it won't be a total loss. But could I say I'm really, really excited to see anything this year? Not really. I could probably skip the theater throughout the whole season and not feel like I missed anything. How about you?
- Tags:
- Movies
June 9 2010, 11:38pm | Comments »
-
Tron Legacy Rolls Out The Light-Car [Tron Legacy]
http://io9.com/5529455/tron-legacy-rolls-out-the-light+car
Move over light-cycles — this brand new Tron Legacy billboard shows the next evolution in virtual transportation: the light-car. [Yahoo]
May 3 2010, 8:00am | Comments »
-
Tron Legacy Rolls Out The Light-Car [Tron Legacy]
http://io9.com/5529455/tron-legacy-rolls-out-the-light+car
Move over light-cycles — this brand new Tron Legacy billboard shows the next evolution in virtual transportation: the light-car. [Yahoo]
May 3 2010, 5:00am | Comments »