Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood Web site reported that Marvel Studios and Iron Man director Jon Favreau have reached a deal for him to helm the sequel, due out in 2010.
Actor Ricky Gervais (“Stardust,” “Night At the Museum,” “The Office”) will make his directorial debut with a film he wrote titled “This Side of the Truth.” He will also star in this story of a society in which people have never lied or even been aware of the ability to do so. Gervais’ character becomes the world’s first liar.
Microsoft Corp is set to cut the price of its best-selling Xbox 360 Pro model to $299 from $349, a source briefed on the matter said on Friday. Microsoft plans to lower the price of the Xbox 360 model with the 20 gigabyte hard drive this weekend before the video game industry’s biggest trade show, E3, taking place next week in Los Angeles.
Actor Scott Bakula (“Quantum Leap,” “Star Trek: Enterprise”) joins actors Andre Braugher and comedian Ray Romano for a non-SF drama series titled “Men of a Certain Age” for TNT. The show explores the bonds of male friendship through the eyes of three college buddies, Joe (Romano), Owen (Braugher) and Terry (Bakula), who are now in their 40s looking back over their lives. This will be television’s first real attempt at examining male friendships in a dramatic way. For decades networks have done this sort of thing with female friendships with TNT feeling its time to take a closer look at long-time male bonds.
As if living in space wasn’t dangerous enough, this week marked an unprecendented space walk by two Russian cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) in which they had to remove a highly charged explosive bolt from their Soyuz capsule. Those are the same bolts that were thought to be the cause for the last Soyuz re-entry failure that threw that craft off its course, sending its three occupants on a dangerous return to Earth in April. It took nearly four hours for cosmonauts Sergei Volkov and Oleg Kononenko to position themselves outside the Soyuz craft docked with the ISS, cut through the thick insulation and open a locking mechanism to free one of the bolts and then seal it in an explosive-proof bag. Fortunately the task was accomplished without a hitch and the bolt will be returned for examination once the cosmonauts return to Earth this coming October.
Coming to DVD on Tuesday, July 15 are “Shutter,” the horror tale about a photographer (Joshua Jackson) and his new wife (Rachael Taylor) who are exposed to a vengeful spirit from beyond on a trip to Japan, in which their photos contain ghostly images of a woman on a haunting mission.
Season One of Holly Hunter’s “Saving Grace”; Season Two of the hit SF show “Eureka”; “Birds of Prey: The Complete Series,” the short-lived 2002 spinoff of the Batman universe that follows the adventures of Batman and Catwoman’s daughter (Ashley Scott) and two allies (Dina Meyer and Rachel Skarsten) as they fight crime in New Gotham City; and “Swamp Thing: The Series — Volume Two” Dick Durock returns as the man transformed into a plant-humanoid hybrid battling evil.
Finally, Apollo 11 astronaut Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin Jr. told SCI FI Wire that fantastic space science fiction shows and movies are, in part, responsible for the lack of interest in real-life space exploration among young people.
“I blame the fantastic and unbelievable shows about space flight and rocket ships that are on today,” Aldrin said in an interview during an ice cream party held by the National Geographic Channel at the Television Critics Association press tour in Beverly Hills, Calif., this week. “All the shows where they beam people around and things like that have made young people think that that is what the space program should be doing. It’s not realistic.”
I thought the “fantastic and unbelievable shows about space flight and rocket ships” were supposed to be an inspiration for exploring space, not a detractor.
Kyle, I agree with you. If it wasn’t for Star Trek, NASA would have disappeared years ago and most members of that org and the astronauts say that’s the case as well. No, with all due respect to Buzz, he got this one wrong.
He’s neither right nor wrong, actually. It depends on the person watching the show. I know that there are people who become inspired to join NASA, but I am doubly sure that there are people, that instant gratification crowd, who look at NASA just the way he says. Hopefully, there are more of the former, then the later.
I think what he meant was that it would be nice to see more shows depicting realistic space flight, less techno-bable and more actual tech. This doesn’t mean that we can’t have both the fantastical and the more grounded, however. I believe they can both exist quite nicely.
I’m sure we can all list a bunch of films that where more hard sci-fi then space opera, but he does have a point that the space opera out numbers the hard stuff by quite a bit.
Still, I do like my transporters! I wouldn’t get in one myself, thank you very much, but I do like them in my sci-fi.
I think the reason why people are bored of what nasa is doing is because every country is spending money on the space station rather than spending time and effort on exploration. I do find the space station boring because that is not exploration, it is sending something into orbit that is only slightly more interesting than sending a satelite into orbit. Lets have more mars rovers, more moon landings, more effort on longer distance travel.
The ISS has been a treasure-trove of valuable information that will aid astronauts who, in the very near future, will find themselves on very long journeys to distant planets, having to fend for themselves, grow their own food in space, manufacture their own O2, and combat the rigors of extended space travel on their physical, as well as emotional and mental body.
The ISS missions have taught us a great deal about living in a non-Earth environment, manufactured drugs and disease fighting cures for ailments that could not have remedies found within the confines of our planet and its atmosphere.
One of the best things to ever happen for space research and extending the pioneer of future space travel has been the ISS. It may not be as exhilarating or psychologically fulfilling as landing a person on the moon or Mars, but is absolutely a must if we as a species are to survive beyond our own little blue orb.