Tuesday, December 29th, 2009

Usually I attempt to stray from pictures and videos of Star Trek fandom, as I feel pretty confident that most of our hardcore Trekkies were born out of the television incarnations of Gene Roddenberry's brainchild, making them feel quite unrelated to this cinema blog. However, this image of a few Trek fans donning nothing but body paint for some sort of bicycle ride that popped up on two of my daily reads, Geekologie and NerdBastards, beckoned my eye whilst posting.

On to something that fortunately, or unfortunately, doesn't contain graphic nudity, Hollyscoop reports that Sam Worthington could be up for another major blockbuster role. The actor was relatively unknown until he picked up a starring role in this summer's Terminator Salvation, followed by the hugely successful Avatar, and will star as Perseus in next summer's remake of Clash of the Titans. Now, apparently he is up for the titular role in a Flash Gordon reboot. I sincerely think that Worthington did a good job in Avatar, but I'm still unsure of pumping this guy to be a big box office draw. I mean, we don't want to see Jake Sully or Marcus Wright playing Flash Gordon. Then again, I personally don't think we will ever have anything comparable to the 1980 campy classic Flash Gordon, with Max von Sydow as Ming the Merciless and the bitching Queen theme song.

Finally, the entire short film within the feature film Nation's Pride, the flick that plays during Inglourious Basterds, has been released to the Interwebs. The short is directed by Eli Roth, and despite not being a fan of his Hostel series, his performance as Donny "The Bear Jew" Donowitz, as well as this little piece is quite admirable. The clip stars Daniel Bruhl as Fredrick Zoller, the star of this psuedo Nazi propaganda film. The Cinematical article I originally seen this on points out that the DVD version of this informs us that there are cameos from Basterds director Quentin Tarantino, as well as Bo Svenson, the star of Enzo G. Castellari's The Inglorious Bastards, the "macaroni combat" flick in which Tarantino's film got its name.

Thursday, December 24th, 2009 (Christmas Eve, Part I)

'Tis the holiday season, and I've been busy readying myself for festivities, therefore I have not been blogging as much. So it is with a heavy heart that I catch up with a bit of bad news to begin with today. First off, Brittany Murphy passed away at age 32 of natural causes. Murphy's career was up and down, and most recently she had been bound to several direct-to-Lifetime telefilms that were ultimately forgettable. However, she will be best remembered as Shellie in Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller's Sin City, as well as the offbeat Tai in Clueless. Her on again, off again filmography also contains roles in Girl, Interrupted and voice parts in Happy Feet and the direct-to-DVD favorite of the Adult Swim crowd, Futurama: The Best with a Billion Backs. Her voice talents will also be emblazoned into all of us adult animation fans' minds forever, as she was featured in a twelve year run of Mike Judge's King of the Hill as Luanne Platter.

Also departing our world since my last post is science fiction legend Dan O'Bannon. The 63-year-old jack of all trades in the sci-fi medium passed away after a bout with Crohn's Disease. O'Bannon is best known for his writing, pumping out screenplays for Dark Star, Ridley Scott's classic Alien, Heavy Metal, Lifeforce and Total Recall to name a few. He also dabbled in special effects, most notably providing computer effects for Star Wars. O'Bannon would also occupy the director's chair for The Return of the Living Dead.

We would also lose the real life inspiration for Rain Man, due to a heart attack, this holiday season. Kim Peek, dubbed a megasavant in most psychology circles, was born with agenesis of the corpus callosum, commonly referred to as simply and erroneously autistic, despite the similarities between the two diseases. Peek gained fame from the bit of television other than Adult Swim that I frequent, being a few Discovery Channel specials and an appearance on Ripley's Believe It or Not!. However, Peek may be known eternally as the inspiration for Dustin Hoffman's Raymond Babbitt in Barry Levinson's Rain Man.

Finally, despite my unnatural emotional closeness to cinema and pop culture as a whole, the above names pale in comparison to the recent loss of a co-worker, John Fields. In fact, today, on Christmas Eve, he was laid to his final resting place. The saddest part of all, the night before he died of an asthma attack, I had stayed a little late to work with him, where we mostly talked about other co-workers, the lack of Willie Nelson Christmas songs, and our month long dissection of Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. So, in honor of the fallen, here is the "Bear Jew" scene from the flick. Rest in peace John.