I hope they put up the animated shorts.

I saw Night Watch today. It was pretty cool, though I wasn't as impressed as I'd hoped to be. It's fairly predictable, since the plot is a mishmash of all your standard fantasy/horror tropes. The nice thing about the story, though, is that it builds on itself. There's no clear trajectory at the beginning, but each plot point leads to the next plot point, and so on. So even though things in the first half don't seem to be that relevant, they turn out to be important later on.

Really, though, the movie is so worth going to see just for the subtitles. They're the best fucking subtitles I've ever seen. Some are in blood. Sometimes the action on the screen obscures them. If a character's coughing out his words, the text flickers to mimic his speech. If a character's reading from a computer screen, they appear typed out letter by letter. They're very creative.

I saw 16 Blocks and, although it was rather formulaic in the last 30 minutes, the rest of it was surprisingly good, I thought. Bruce Willis and Mos Def work well together and the film does a really great job of capturing what New York streets actually feel like.

Writer/director Joss Whedon told SCI FI Wire that he's probably going to turn in his script for the feature-film version of Wonder Woman sometime this coming week, and added that it will feature all of the expected gadgets and costume gimmicks from the DC Comics franchise. Whedon spoke in an interview at the star-studded Los Angeles premiere of Slither, which stars Whedon's Serenity star Nathan Fillion.

"I'm probably going to turn it in in a few days," Whedon said of his Wonder Woman script. "It's coming along. ... There will be all of the expected stuff. Of course there will be the bracelets; there will be the invisible jet, the lasso, all of that."

Whedon likened the character to another one of his creations, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, adding: "It's about girls maturing, a rite of passage, that kind of thing."

Whedon said it's too early to speculate on casting for the project. He will be turning the script in to Warner Brothers and hopes to begin production later this year.

Asked about further installments of Serenity, Whedon shrugged his shoulders. —Mike Szymanski

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Watched Wallace & Grommit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit last night. SO funny. Uneven, and basically a reworking of A Close Shave, but we had to pause and rewind a couple of times because we were laughing so hard.

The animation was amazing, too. I'm guessing they used a lot more CGI cleanup than in the past, but the set detail and character modelling was tremendous.

And why do I still say "rewind" even though it's a DVD?

Skipped 143 posts in order to have my ha'penn'orth wrt the casting of Wuthering Heights:

Who is your ideal casting for it? Feel free to roam back in time since you don't think it's been done definitively.

Sean Bean as Heathcliff. Granted he's fair rather than dark, but he's a real Yorkshireman, and he can do violent and passionate and tight lipped and working class and all that pretty damned well and he's strapping and sexay. And he can act (which I only realised with "They have a cave troll".) Can't think of anyone else who would give him a run for his money.

Although...aternatively, I could be sold on a mixed race actor - there's plenty of canonical basis for having Heathcliff be mixed race, and that would open up the field rather nicely.

Cathy, however, I'll have to ponder. But she should be sturdy, and not china-doll pretty, or model-looking. Sexy, yes, but not in anything approaching a conscious-of-it or fragile way.

Hmm.

Meanwhile, JohnSweden is me wrt Bond.

New Cars trailer: [link]

New Cars trailer: [link]

Grrr.... I'm getting broken object icons at both this and the X3 site. Maybe I need to update Quicktime. I'll try that and see if that works.

Meh. Didn't like it. Which... is totally par for the course for me and Pixar trailers, so I'll assume the movie will rock.

Yup. Installed iTunes, updated Quicktime. Everything better.

Trailers....

Cars, eh, I still don't know.

X3....

It looks like it will at least be pretty, but as if the fears of Brett Ratner taking over from Bryan Singer weren't bad enough, I'm really irritated that they're not doing Dark Phoenix, after all that effort they spent building up to it. At least, that's what I read.