Marsden can’t catch a break in real life, either
James Marsden — whose characters have played second fiddle to Wolverine, Superman and (ack!) Ryan Gosling over the past few years — had some trouble recently when he tried to catch Superman Returns at the IMAX:
“He wanted to watch the movie with a regular audience,” says a snitch, but didn’t realize he’d need to buy tickets in advance to catch the blockbuster on a holiday weekend.
“When told it was sold out, he said to the girl behind the counter, ‘But I’m in the movie.’ She didn’t believe him and went to get the manager.”
Marsden recounted the story in New York earlier this week while waiting to do an interview. Says the source: “The manager recognized him immediately and escorted him to the back of the theater, where he watched the remainder of the showing already underway.”
Hang up and read
The International Herald Tribune reports on companies in Japan pushing books, including comic books, to cell phones:
Cellphone reading is resonating with comic book fans as well. Hiroto Ooka, general manager for corporate management at Bitway, a digital content distributor, said his company had sales of more than ¥10 million in the past year for mobile comics alone.
[snip]
Readers of comics favor multimedia functions of the phone, like sliding pictures up, down and sideways, and setting the phone to vibrate to accompany certain actions, like shooting a machine gun or diving into water.
I could probably do without the vibrating, but otherwise this sounds kind of cool … especially when stuck at the airport or in a line somewhere. While some companies are interested in expanding outside of Japan, the article says that “two minimum conditions – fast networks and a flat rate for data – are not yet prevalent in Europe and North America.”
“King of the World” set to do comic adaptation (no, not Aquaman)
MTV.com talks to director James Cameron about two trilogies he’s working on, one tentatively called Avatar, and an adaptation of Battle Angel:
“If you want to know more about ‘Battle Angel,’ you can get the graphic novels,” the director said of his source material. “There’s a series of 10 graphic novels, the original 10, by a Japanese artist named [Yukito] Kishiro.”
The tech-minded Cameron added that although he watched with great interest as “Sin City” filmmaker Robert Rodriguez reinvented the graphic-novel movie with his green-screen breakthroughs, “Angel” won’t be such a slave to the colored page. “It’ll be a cinematic style; it won’t be a moving graphic novel,” he revealed. “I think what Robert did with ‘Sin City’ was a spectacular visual experiment; I think it worked brilliantly, but that’s not what I’m going for. It’s more of a cinematic, photo-real feel.”
You got your Star Wars in my Transformers
Like most kids, I learned everything I need to know about life from commercials. The old Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups ads, for instance, taught me that taking two good things and combining them into one made them even better. So here’s what happens when you combine Star Wars and Transformers:
Yes, that’s right — Han and Chewie Transformers that combine to form the Millennium Falcon. And that’s not all:
With lots of electronic lights and sounds, this is a fun toy for everybody. Remember Han Solo boasting to Obi-Wan Kenobi about how great his ship is? This robot actually talks, using Harrison Ford’s voice from the trilogy with such classic quotes as “I have a bad feeling about this!” and “She’s the fastest ship in the fleet.” The toy also features Chewbacca’s classic roar, and a number of sound effects from the engines, guns, and computers of the Millennium Falcon.
You can find these bad boys over at Entertainment Earth.
