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It looks like they might make a film based on an old Stanley Kubrick script:

After Death, My Sweet: From an Idea by Kubrick, a New Film May Be Born

"Stanley Kubrick never threw anything away. On the other hand, he didn’t have much of a filing system, and when he moved — permanently, it turned out — from Hollywood to London in 1962, a great many things went astray. Among them was the sole copy of a film treatment called “Lunatic at Large,” which Mr. Kubrick had commissioned in the late ’50s from the noir pulp novelist Jim Thompson, with whom he had worked on “The Killing,” a 1956 bank-heist story that became his first successful feature, and then on 1957’s “Paths of Glory.” The manuscript remained lost until after Mr. Kubrick’s death, in 1999, when his son-in-law, Philip Hobbs, working with an archivist, turned it up, along with a couple of other scripts, and set about trying to make it into a movie."

...Part of me will always be somewhat let down that Kubrick didn't a chance to create a few more films before he passed away, but on the other hand if they give a project to thi sto the right director you might get a bit of magic. In fact when AI came out I hated it because it wasn't directed by Kubrick, but the more I think back to it the more I like it.

Below: Kubrick on the left and noir pulp novelist Jim Thompson on the right.

"The Dregs of Sake" sounds like it would be a great name for a band (or a fun drinking game):

Space Yogurt Made With Astro-Bacteria

"Space Yogurt from Himawari Dairy is now available in Japan. Himawari Dairy, a Kochi-area dairy manufacturer, reserved a seat aboard a Soyuz rocket that took off from Baikonur Cosmodrome this spring. The "passengers" were two strains of bacteria: lactic acid bacteria used in ordinary yogurt and a unique strain of Lactobacillus paracasei cultured from pickles preserved in the dregs of sake (called sake lees), which is thought to enhance the body's immunity to disease.

Cosmic radiation was expected to have an effect on the bacteria. "Lactic acid bacteria is delicate, so we are looking forward to seeing what happens," says company president Bunjiro Yoshizawa. "It will be nice if space travel improves the yogurt's flavor and boosts its immunity-enhancing properties"."

This who can read Japanese should visit the Himawari Dairy website.

Mystery Science Theater 3000 fansboys should check out RiffTrax, from MST3 head writer Michael J. Nelson. His site allows you to buy a MST3esque mp3 files that you can play along while you're watching a movie. The tracks are pretty cheap and so far he's covered the Matrix and has plans to cover the first Star Wars movie:

Michael J. Nelson's RiffTrax.com

"Do you feel that some of the movies coming out of Hollywood are just, well, missing something? At RiffTrax, you can download Mike's running commentaries and listen to them along with your favorite, and not so favorite DVDs. It's like watching a movie with your funniest friend. And it's easy to do. Don't just sit back and take whatever Hollywood throws at you. Transform the DVD experience with RiffTrax. It's the most fun you'll ever have at the movies."

Bad news campers, it looks like the powers that be are set to make another Mad Max movie! I'd like to see Tina Turner be cast in the lead role this time:

Mad Max Director George Miller On Mad Max 4

“Mad Max 4 is so prepared, there seems to be a lot of momentum for it to get done. Right now, I’ve got another, smaller film to do, and then we’ll gear up and do “Mad Max” again. In what form and so on, I don’t know. But it hasn’t gotten stale in the meantime, and I’m very very keen to do it. It seems like there’s the appetite out there."

Like their chocolate flavored cousins Pocky, Pretz are long and thin breadstick-like snacks that have the same kind of crunch as a pretzel stick. Here's a pretty happening Marilyn Monroe inspired commercial for them which stars J-Pop idol singerAyaya:

This is a great webpage that has quite a few illustrations of cars shown in Tintin and their real world models:

Tintin's Cars: A Collection

Here's footage of 28 Weeks Later, a sequel to 28 Days Later (Zombie fun):

First Look at 28 Weeks Later, sequel to 28 Days Later

No it's not "Love Hina" but a game based on her long lost anime sister Nina!

Love Nina Sim Date RPG

It's the dance craze that's sweeping the net:

So what is this?

Massara Blue Jeans

まっさらブルージーンズ (Romaji: Massara Blue Jeans; English: Brand New Blue Jeans) is an Indie-Single of the Hello! Project group °C-ute. The single was released on 2006-05-06 at the second to last date of the Morning Musume Concert Tour 2006 Haru ~Rainbow Seven~, where °C-ute opened the show. It is also on sale at Fanclub Events and at the Hello! Project store.

It's the famous lost scene with Biggs from the original Star Wars! But now that I've seen it I think it's a good Lucas cut it from the film - it's pretty lame stuff:

Cosmic radiation AND pretty girls! Something for everyone from 1965:

Monster A Go-Go

"Monster A Go-Go has an unusual, perhaps even unique, production history. Director Bill Rebane ran out of money while making the film. Lewis, who needed a second film to show with his own feature, Moonshine Mountain, bought the film, added a few extra scenes and some dialogue, and then released it, creating an odd, disjointed film with little continuity. The film is infamous among those who have seen it for its incomprehensible "non-ending"."

This is the sixth Flash game which has goth cartoon look to it:

Madness Combat 6: Antipathy

Part of me wonders if this is just a bad idea, it's been ten years since Pulp Fiction and I'm not sure if Travolta could pull off a prequel. And I'm assuming of course that it would have to be a prequal as the Travolta character got killed off in Pulp Fiction. Of course if there is a person who could come up with a creative solution it would be Tarantino:

TarantinoWatch: Viva the Vega Borthers?

"One of the projects that I think most of us have given up on long ago was the sequel to Pulp Fiction focusing on the Vic and Vincent Vega, played by John Travolta and Michael Madsen. It turns out that Madsen himself hasn’t given up hope, and he tells me that QT has approached him with a story concept that could make a movie happen.

Last week I got on the phone with Madsen to talk about the 15th anniversary DVD of Reservoir Dogs (which is coming a year early) and the new Reservoir Dogs video game, and I took the chance to grill him on various upcoming projects. He brought up the Vega Bros movie, something I would never have even thought to ask about."

I've always dreamed of seeing a science fiction looking delta winged aircraft become reality:

'Silent aircraft': How it works

"Engineers from the University of Cambridge and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have unveiled a radical design for a "silent aircraft".

The team says any noise from the concept aircraft, known as the SAX-40, would be "imperceptible" beyond the boundaries of an airport. It would also burn far less fuel than conventional planes. The design is the result of three years' work and includes both new and existing technologies."

This is a classic clip of the Yip-Yipsfrom Sesame Street discovering an old school computer in 1987:

This is one of my favorite classic science fiction movies, it's not quite as cool as Metropolis but on the plus side H.G. Wells did the script and the soundtrack and special effects are very well done:

The Shape of Things to Come

"Things to Come is a 1936 British science fiction film, produced by Alexander Korda and directed by William Cameron Menzies. The screenplay was written by H. G. Wells and is a loose adaptation of his own 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come. The film stars Raymond Massey.

Plot: On the Christmas Eve of 1940, war begins as the city of Everytown is bombed. The war lasts 66 years, during which time civilization falls into anarchy. Eventually the warlord who calls himself The Boss emerges to establish brutish control over the chaos. But then a scientific group called Wings Over the World emerges and is able to quash the regime of The Boss using a peace gas. The scientists then set about building a shining white new scientific Utopia on the ruins of the old civilization. In the year 2036, the culmination of the new society's scientific vision is the launching of the first Moon shot."

It looks like they are turning Watchmen into a film at long last, I hope they do a good job of it:

Snyder: Watchmen Remains True

"Zack Snyder, who will direct an upcoming film version of Alan Moore's seminal graphic novel Watchmen, told SCI FI Wire that Warner Brothers likes his take on the material, which goes back to the source for its inspiration, closely following the original 1985 setting and alternate-history American mileu in which Richard Nixon is still president. That faithfulness to the graphic novel, which has been famously considered unadaptable to film, ironically, provided the key to unlocking the script, Snyder said."

Check out this cool Honda commercial inspired by Tron:

From Malaysia diva-in-training Karen Kong has created a sappy yet wonderful Hello Kitty tribute song:

From the video description:

"This is the story about a girl falls in love online and naively ran away from home, bringing with her nothing but her precious Hello Kitty doll - only to find out the cruelty of the world when she's all alone celebrating her birthday, finally ... after travelling to many different places, she finally whispers to her doll 'hello kitty, please help me, i was wrong and i miss my parents, i wanna go home now '."

A stampede by Japanese gamer fanboys (and girls) to get their hands on the Playstation 3:

It looks like they are trying to bring the classic comic book "The Spirit" by Will Eisner to the big screen:

Frank Miller Has Got “The Spirit”

"Frank Miller, the famous graphic novelist turned director will be moving from his own work by taking Will Eisner’s classic “The Spirit” and adapting it for the big screen. “We’re working on the script right now,” commented Miller at the LA premiere of ‘300.’ “We’ve got a good strong story to work with, and we’re hoping to be in production either spring [2007] or [this] fall .”

Miller promises fans of the series that, “it’ll be very faithful to the books.” Miller also indicated in the interview with IGN that he has one actor (who he wouldn’t name) in mind for the role of the hero."

Any fan of the old-school and new-school Transformers has got to check out these catalogs. It's cool that someone took the time to scan these in:

Transformers Catalogs

"Fanboys" a movie based on the adventures of a bunch of Star wars fans is now online:

Fanboys Trailer

"Fanboys is a comedy about friends, fans and delusions of grandeur. Fanboys takes place in the fall of 1998, a time when everything was pure and Star Wars ruled the world once again. We follow four life-long best friends who travel cross-country in an attempt to break into George Lucas' Skywalker Ranch. Their mission is to see Star Wars Episode I early when they discover one of the young men in their group is diagnosed with terminal cancer and will not live long enough to see the film in theaters the following May. This film expresses what it means to care about something so truly that you would do anything for it… what it means to be a fan. This is a film for the fans, made by the fans. "

Babylon 5 fanboys can rejoice! It seems work has started on a new set of mini-movies:

Sheridan, Lochley, Galen, And More!! BABYLON 5: THE LOST TALES Begins Production!!

"The initial goal was to try and do three big stories in one DVD. So I wrote three scripts, featuring Sheridan, Lochley, Galen and Garibaldi. (I wanted to focus on the human characters initially so we'd have more time for prosthetics R&D for the next one.) The stories, as noted previously, were huge...all over the map, from Minbar, to Earth, Mars, the future, the distant past, as well as B5 itself obviously. We're also going to be trying some new production technologies, again trying to stay ahead of the tech curve, the way B5 has always stayed ahead on these things.

And over the last few days, as we began to bring on crew and lay out the production, looking at just how complicated these mini-movies were going to be, the idea of making three of these monsters began to become a bit much for us to pull off on out first time out the gate, especially since I'm still kind of new as a director. So we decided to postpone one of the three to the next DVD, and lengthen the other two to make up the difference. GIven that the Garibaldi story was the most complicated visually and technically, also the most difficult from a CGi perspective, that's the one that got pushed until, potentially, next time."

This article isn't all doom and gloom as the headline might suggest, in fact what's neat is that it has several suggestions to solve the radiation issue:

Space elevators: 'First floor, deadly radiation!'

"Space elevators are touted as a novel and cheap way to get cargo, and possibly people, into space one day. So far, they have barely left the drawing board, but ultimately robots could climb a cable stretching 100,000 kilometres from Earth's surface into space.

But there is a hitch: humans might not survive thanks to the whopping dose of ionising radiation they would receive travelling through the core of the Van Allen radiation belts around Earth. These are two concentric rings of charged particles trapped by Earth's magnetic fields. "They would die on the way through the radiation belts if they were unshielded," says Anders Jorgensen, author of a new study on the subject and a technical staff member at Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, US."

This looks like a cosplay themed episode of the Japanese TV show Ainori:

Here's a description of the show:

"Ainori is a reality program where seven young men and women travel the world riding a pink bus. The program is reminiscent of a travelogue; as of October 2006, the show has followed the bus across 71 countries as participants explore both famous tourist attractions and more off-the-beaten-path places.

The show's twist is that the participants are each young, single people whose goal is to find love with another participant and return to Japan as a couple. When a participant has decided they like someone else, they ask the driver for a ticket back to Japan. They then declare their love to the object of their affection, and ask that the two return to Japan together. After a night's consideration, the person who received the love declaration can either answer with a kiss, after which both participants leave the bus for Japan. Otherwise, the jilted participant is left to return to Japan alone. "

This is an amazing gallery of cover art from Astounding magazine, which later became known as Analog:

Astounding-Analog Science Fiction Covers

"Possibly one of the main reasons for Analog's continued survival and success is a consistent editorial policy over a long period of time. From 1938 to 1971, it was edited by John W Campbell jr., certainly the most famous and influential and, I think, the longest serving of all SF editors. His towering influence shaped not only Astounding (as it was until 1960) but the careers of many leading authors and, through them, the whole field of science fiction. What is less well known is that, since 1978, Analog has again had a single editor, Stanley Schmidt, who is probably therefore the second longest serving SF editor. It is impressive that a magazine that has survived for more than 75 years has, for 60 of them, been directed by just two men. (Gardner Dozois, by the way, has edited Asimov's for nearly two decades, so Dell certainly seem to believe in backing their editors)."

Below: Covers from 1931 and 1945.

...found via MetaFilter.

It's funny but in Japanese the Mac guy seems much less snarky:

...I think it's the lack of facial hair on the Mac dude!

It looks like there is talk about a Sin City sequel:

Miller Talks Sin City 2

"Frank Miller, who wrote and co-directed Sin City based on his graphic novels of the same name, told SCI FI Wire that he plans to co-direct the upcoming sequel, Sin City 2, with Robert Rodriguez, despite rumors to the contrary. "Yes and yes," he said in an interview following a preview screening of footage of 300, another upcoming film based on his work.

"We have all kinds of technical things we want to do, but there's a major story called A Dame to Kill for [which was, fittingly, the second Sin City story and is a prequel of sorts to The Hard Goodbye] that we're going to adapt," Miller said. "That'll include a new femme fatale and other characters." Rodriguez has reportedly spoken with Angelina Jolie about playing Ava, ex-lover of Clive Owen's Dwight."

Some CGI fanboy just rendered this cool movie which shows a massive space battle between the Battlestar Galactica and various Star Wars spacecraft:

...I'd love to watch this on HDTV!

This is a great detail oriented video of a Japanese fan making a custom Mobile Suit Gundam model:

The odd thing is that for "gansta cars" they look pretty cute:

Japanese Gangster Cars

"I must say that these are both bizarre and cool. These Japanese gangsters are very creative in modifying their cars. Take a look at some pictures..."

Astronomy fanboys should use caution when viewing this site, you can kill quite a few hours:

HubbleSite.org

"HubbleSite is the home of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, the renowned orbiting telescope whose discoveries have forever altered our knowledge of the universe."

"Released in 1982, Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam was created in Turkey caught in the midst of massive political upheaval. As a result, American-made films were not easily acquired and were often remade with a Turkish cast and setting. The musical soundtrack is entirely lifted from Western film hits of the time, primarily using Raiders of the Lost Ark. There are also scenes incorporating the music of Moonraker, Flash Gordon, Battlestar Galactica, Planet of the Apes and Disney's The Black Hole."

This is an entertaining online Flash game game based on the popular anime series Naruto:

Naruto Star Students

Paro is a robot seal from Japan which is designed to 'relieve mental stress':

What is a Mental Commitment Robot?

"Recent advances in robotics have been applied to automation in industrial manufacturing with the primary purpose of optimizing practical systems in terms of such objective measures as accuracy, speed, and cost. However, the resulting robots are mostly kept away from human beings because people can be injured during their everyday functioning.

Unlike industrial robots, "Mental Commitment Robots" are developed to interact with human beings and to make them feel emotional attachment to the robots. Rather than using objective measures, these robots trigger more subjective evaluations, evoking psychological impressions such as "cuteness" and comfort."