Angry Puppy

With all the new Wolverine cast members appearing every day (I’m not even going to mention Dominic Monaghan as Beak. Beak? Really?), we’ve been neglecting a more anticipated film: Zack Snyder’s Watchmen.

Here’s a shot from the movie that I found online earlier this week. Follow the /Film link to see how it goes from comic to still. Neat.

Watch for Watchmen in 2009.

Via /Film

There are a couple of unfortunate lawsuits in the news right now.

Just as The Hobbit was headed smoothly toward two profitable (and most likely excellent) movies under the directorship of Guillermo del Toro, the estate of J.R.R. Tolkien has sued New Line Cinema for over $150 million plus punitive damages, claiming that they didn’t get enough money from the blockbuster trilogy The Lord of the Rings. Fine.

How does this affect The Hobbit films? The estate also seeks the right to take other Tolkien works (The Hobbit included) elsewhere. I am sure the movie(s) will eventually be made, but if anyone other than New Line takes the helm, it will introduce delays and the chance that the finished product won’t have the same tone as the LOTR.

In other news, Fox has sued Warner Bros., seeking to halt plans to release a 2009 film version of Alan Moore’s (most definitely excellent) graphic novel Watchmen.

It’s the usual chain-of-ownership confusion, but in a nutshell, Fox believes that they have held the film rights since the late 80s and now want Warner Bros. to compensate them appropriately - or halt production.

Via /Film and SuperHeroHype

I don’t like words with a lot of r’s.  Thanks to school-provided speech therapy, “horror” is manageable, but I still avoid “rural” at all costs, preferring “country” or even “backwoods” when in a bind.

Everything is relative. I am proud that I can say “orrery”, while Arkansas-based Eugene Sargent makes them by hand.  I’ve had a thing for these temporal maps or (spatial timepieces) ever since I saw Aughra’s in The Dark Crystal.  You might also remember the side quest to rebuild the orrery in Oblivion’s Arcane University (though it’s DLC unless you have a later version of the game) or that  Ozymandias of Watchmen fame had one.

Some commenters at the Boing Boing post where I found this wondered why there are only six planets.  There’s no “about” page, but I assume he’s following the tradition of only showing the six planets visible to the naked eye from Earth (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn).

Every time I see something like this, I want to move somewhere with a garage.