Movies

Help! My Nervous System Has Been Remapped!

Neuroscientists announced yesterday that they can do something extremely creepy with your nervous system. Using delicate surgery, they can make you feel your hands in your chest. That’s right — they move your nerves around so that when somebody touches your chest, it feels like they are touching your hand. There are real applications for…

Science Fiction Movies Sold Out In 1982

The decade that began with 2001: A Space Odyssey was the heyday of smart, socially relevant science fiction, writes Grady Hendrix in the New York Sun. Back then, science fiction films looked down on The Man. But today’s corporate sci-fi spectaculars are The Man. The turning point came in 1982, when the candy-munching E.T. crushed…

Five Great Science Fiction Movies With Mean Endings

The Mist hit theaters last week to extreme audience apathy, but one part of the movie did get people riled up: its hopeless, mean ending. As far as we’re concerned, that’s the best part. Some of the best scifi flicks have endings that make you want to slit your wrists. Either the main character(s) have…

Movies That Take Place Just Barely In The Future

What do you call it when a filmmaker takes the present day and makes it futuristic? Andrew Niccol, who wrote The Truman Show and directed Gattaca, says his movies take place “five minutes into the future.” But that’s kind of a mouthful. We need a term that you can ask for at your indy video…

Shaolin Soccer’s Director Builds Junkyard Spaceship

Science fiction may replace martial arts as the hottest genre in Hong Kong, if Stephen Chow’s new movie CJ7 takes off. Chow helped reinvigorate the sagging martial-arts genre with Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle. And the long-awaited CJ7’s blend of CGI and zany stunts could do the same for science fiction. That’s as long…

Can Christian Bale Save Terminator 4?

Christian Bale will star in Terminator 4, aka Terminator: Salvation, several news sites are reporting. But will he play a Terminator? Or will he play John Connor, as AICN claims? Neither, says CHUD. Instead, he’ll play a character who is “new to the Terminator mythos.” That jibes with some other recent reports about the direction…

Triple Tilda Swinton Happy Cyborg Dance

Lynn Herschman Leeson scored one for smart science fiction with the gorgeous, funny flick Teknolust, about a mad biologist (Tilda Swinton) and the three cyber-ladies she created from her own DNA. Unfortunately, the cyber-ladies, all played by Swinton, have to inject human sperm in order to stay alive. And to make money, they run a…

4 Maverick Filmmakers You Should Stalk

Screw McG. The most alarming visions of five minutes from now are coming from a handful of filmmakers who bring their weird imaginations to film after film. Here’s a list of four creators you should be obsessing about. Stuff your Netflix queue with their past movies. Hunt down the obscure shit. Show up for their…

Bollywood “Robot” Film Seeks Muse

Bollywood is atwitter with excitement over hot shot director S. Shankar‘s newest project, a sci-fi thriller called Robot. Shankar, who has written, produced, and directed some of the industry’s top films over the past decade and a half (including this year’s Sivaji, whose trailer you can thrill to above), calls Robot his “dream project.” It’s…

Four Theories About Creatures from High-Gravity Worlds

Don’t support crappy science fiction where every planet has the same gravity as Earth. Astronomers say the planets most likely to support life are ten times the size of Earth. When we finally meet aliens, they’ll envy the spring in our step. Movies and other media are squandering the awesome story potential of creatures from…

First iTunes-Only Movie On Sale Today

Purple Violets, a new film written and directed by Edward Burns, will become the first feature film to launch exclusively on iTunes when it goes on sale later today. You can pre-order it for $12.99. [Purple Violets via Mac Rumors]

Mutant Pussy Bites The Hand That Pets It

An innocent Christian girl discovers her vagina has teeth of its own. On its gleaming white surface, Teeth looks like another gross-out horror comedy. Judging from the just-released trailer, it’s definitely over the top. But critics are already praising its exploration of female sexual empowerment through mutation. When Teeth premiered at Sundance, Cinematical wrote: At…

Ang Lee’s “Lust” Spreads Sexually Transmitted PC Virus

People who didn’t want to settle for the sanitized version of Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution turned to the dirtier illegal download, and ended up in need of a shot of virtual penicillin. Chinese censors chopped about 30 minutes of the old hot-n-heavy out of the movie, increasing demand for a pirated copy showing the American…

Battlestar Could Be Knocked Out By Contract Tangles

Will Battlestar Galactica ever film its final episodes? Maybe not, says Ron Moore. Blame complicated contract wrangling: the studio wants to keep the show’s actors on contract without paying them, under the “force majeure” clauses of their contracts. But because the show managed to film the required minimum of 13 episodes before halting production, their…

Star Wars Clones May Hit Theaters Before Invading Your Home

Next August could see another Star Wars movie in theaters. Only it would be an animated film, to launch the gritty new Clone Wars animated TV series that George Lucas is working on. During a conference call with investors, an executive from the Hasbro toy company said the Clone Wars film would be in theaters…

Special effects are killing movies. The cost of making the 50-year-old Ray Winstone look “17 again” in Beowulf is just one example of the SFX excesses that drove up the cost of movie-making by 16 percent between 2004 and 2006. Meanwhile, DVD sales are plummeting. Image by James Higgins/Splash News [Times of London]

Black Friday at JR.com Offers $3.99 DVDs

The Black Friday madness continues! JR.com has gotten into the swing of things a bit early, offering $3.99 DVDs. Sure you might be a hi-def guy, but four DVDs would go a long way toward stuffing a stocking. Granted, a lot of the movies are crap, but here are a few we either own already…

You Cannot Escape Shaky Camera Syndrome

During a real alien attack, most of us would have no clue what the hell was going on. And judging from both trailers, J.J. Abrams’ Cloverfield will bend over backwards to simulate that state of confusion. The first trailer, especially, has a hand-held camera swooping and jostling as if the camera holder is running for…

Nothing Like an Alien Death Orgy Where Rich Eat Poor

Poor Bill. He’s just found out that his rich Beverly Hills family is actually a bunch of incestuous, polymorphous aliens who have raised him for food. Now his parents and their rich alien friends have kidnapped him and his friend David, and are going to eat them in a giant orgy. That just one tiny…

The newest trailer for J.J. Abrams’ top secret monster flick Cloverfield started airing in front of Beowulf last night, and of course its popping up left and right all over the web already. The only problem is that it’s via a handheld cam from an enterprising young YouTuber sitting in a theater, so prepare your…