Tag: Rebecca Keegan

James Cameron’s alpha geek extracurricular hobby of deep-sea diving has always influenced his day job. The bioluminescent life on Pandora in “Avatar,” the story-framing voyage to the wreck in “Titanic” and the underwater traumas of “The Abyss” all emerged from how the director spends his downtime — way, way down in the ocean. Now Cameron’s recent record-setting solo dive to the Mariana Trench is providing further inspiration for the “Avatar” sequels, which will head to the oceans of Pandora. The filmmaker said the seven-year preparation for his dive–a plunge of nearly seven miles to the deepest point in the world in a torpedo-shaped, one-man submersible called the Deepsea Challenger — sparked ideas for the “Avatar” followups by exposing him to the small island nations of the Western Pacific where he staged the project. “The best inspiration I got for ‘Avatar’ ...

Never work with children or animals, the Hollywood adage goes, because they steal every scene. A fantastical addendum for the Martian action-adventure epic “John Carter” might be: Never work with a 10-legged, giant lizard dog either. Woola, the homely, Martian canine creature called a Calot in director Andrew Stanton’s new Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptation, was little-seen in the promotion or marketing for the film, but has emerged as an early fan favorite. “It’s sort a boy and his dog,” Stanton said, explaining Woola’s appeal. “Who wouldn’t want a dog that could run like the Roadrunner in the Warner Bros. cartoons and go that fast?” A kind of Barsoomian man’s best friend, Woola quickly cottons to Taylor Kitsch’s flinty Confederate Civil War veteran, following him loyally across the Red Planet’s sandy dunes. Like his master, Woola travels with unearthly speed. The ...

“Star Wars,” “Superman,” “Avatar” — for decades, Hollywood has found box-office treasure in fantasy science fiction epics about heroes adventuring in strange and mysterious lands. “John Carter,” director Andrew Stanton’s upcoming Martian war tale, is based on the 100-year-old Edgar Rice Burroughs yarn that helped inspire many of those stories. The script by Stanton, Mark Andrews and Michael Chabon is adapted from the Burroughs novel “Princess of Mars,” which was first published as a magazine serial in 1912 and introduced the movie’s title character, a Civil War veteran who is astral-projected to the red planet. Upon arriving on Mars, known as Barsoom, John Carter (Taylor Kitsch) meets a fierce race of 15-foot-tall, four-armed green warriors called Tharks and a passionate, human-like princess named Dejah (Lynn Collins). The $250-million film is something of a big bet for Disney, but Stanton, best ...

This post has been corrected, as indicated below. William Joyce first began crafting back stories for Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy nearly 20 years ago, as bedtime tales for his own children. Now Joyce’s storytelling is spawning the 2012 Dreamworks Animation movie “Rise of the Guardians” and an accompanying series of young adult fantasy novels, the first of which, “Nicholas St. North and the Battle of the Nightmare King,” hit stores in October. “It seemed odd and slightly criminal that we know what Superman’s origins are, but these guys that we believe in, we don’t know,” said Joyce, a children’s author and illustrator whose book “A Day with Wilbur Robinson” was the basis for the 2007 Walt Disney animated movie “Meet the Robinsons” and whose Disney Channel series “Rolie Polie Olie” has won three Emmy awards. “I remember as ...

Are you looking for a magical gift for that special Muggle in your life? Do you need to send a wrapped present to a Time Lord in the near future? Or maybe you’re an enterprising soul who just can’t figure out the logical thing to bring to the holodeck holiday party? Well, no worries, just mind-meld with us because we’re here to save the day. Look, up in the photo gallery, it’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s…the Hero Complex Holiday Gift Guide. Flip through the gallery image above to see the best geeky gifts around and read our review (be sure to click the “CAPTIONS ON” option). Also below, grouped by price range, you’ll find those same gift suggestions listed with handy links to help you get your shopping done at light speed. May the nog be with you. – Noelene Clark ...

American fans of Hayao Miyazaki’s “Spirited Away” and “Ponyo” will have an opportunity to see another hand-drawn, anime-style movie from Miyazaki’s Tokyo-based animation company, Studio Ghibli, in U.S. theaters in February when the Walt Disney Co. releases “The Secret World of Arrietty.” Based on Mary Norton’s fantasy novel “The Borrowers,” “Arrietty”  is directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi and written by Miyazaki and Keiko Niwa. The film tells the story of a family of tiny people who live in a mysterious world beneath the floorboards, sneaking away with sugar cubes and flakes of soap from their human hosts. When a 12-year-old human boy comes to stay at their home,  he develops a secret — and potentially dangerous — friendship with their daughter, Arrietty. In Japan, “Arrietty” was the third-highest-grossing movie of 2010, after “Alice in Wonderland” and “Toy Story 3.” In the ...

Bryan Singer’s “Battlestar Galactica” movie has its screenwriter — John Orloff, who also wrote the Roland Emmerich Shakespeare thriller opening next week, “Anonymous.” “Don’t worry, I’m not gonna frak it up,” said Orloff in an interview, of his take on the storied sci-fi franchise, which “X-Men” director Singer is set to direct for Universal Pictures. “I have a pretty radical take,” Orloff said, declining to offer more details about his treatment of the long-gestating, secrecy-shrouded project. “Battlestar Galactica,” about a human civilization warring with a cybernetic race on a group of distant planets known as the 12 Colonies, began as a short-lived 1970s TV show and has evolved to include comic books, novels, video games and the cult hit Ronald D. Moore series that ran on Syfy from 2004 to 2009. A long time “Battlestar” fan, Orloff has an eclectic ...

It’s been a busy week for a certain young Vulcan. Zachary Quinto’s first effort as a producer, the Wall Street thriller “Margin Call,” in which he also stars, hits theaters on Friday. On the eve of the film’s New York premiere, Quinto acknowledged publicly that he’s gay for the first time. In our interview in Thursday’s newspaper, Quinto talks about the meaning of this moment to him, on a personal and professional level. Quinto’s “Margin Call” role shares a lot in common with Spock — he plays a brainy young investment bank analyst. In November, Quinto said he’ll turn to a very different kind of challenge — readying for a major Spock action scene in J.J. Abrams’ long-awaited “Star Trek” sequel, which starts production in January. “There’s a big sequence for me that I have to prepare for in this ...

When James Cameron’s “Avatar” hit theaters in 2009, many moviegoers were so dazzled by the lush, 3-D world of the alien moon Pandora that they wanted to step right inside. Now the Walt Disney Co. is aiming to offer that kind of experience to its theme park patrons. Disney’s Imagineers are working with Cameron, his producing partner Jon Landau and studio 20th Century Fox to bring the fantasy world from “Avatar” to its theme parks, beginning with a multi-attraction themed land at the Animal Kingdom park in Orlando, Fla. Though the attraction is still in its earliest development stages, Cameron has clear ideas about what he’d like any Pandoran land to include, which he shared in an interview on Tuesday. “I definitely want to do a flight attraction of some kind,” the director said, citing the “Soarin’ Over California” flying ...

The Walt Disney Co. announced two new original Pixar feature films at D23 on Saturday, an untitled movie about dinosaurs directed by “Finding Nemo” screenwriter Bob Peterson due in 2013 and an untitled movie about the inner workings of the brain directed by “Up” and “Monsters Inc.” director Pete Docter due in 2014. Disney and Pixar Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter introduced the two new projects at the media company’s three-day fan event in Anaheim, in a demonstration that the animation studio best known lately for the sequels “Toy Story 3″ and “Cars 2″ is still committed to original stories. Peterson showed a single piece of concept art of a dinosaur walking in tall grass with what appeared to be a small child riding on it. The movie, he said, was about what would happen if “the asteroid missed the ...