With franchises like The Hobbit and The Hunger Games continuing to tear it up at the box office, the sci-fi and fantasy genres are booming. But while the movies don’t show any signs of slowing down in terms of their impending arrivals, there are still a veritable ton of classics waiting to be given the big screen treatment.
Check out our gallery for eight of the best.
(Picture: Photobucket)
A comic book movie about misfit space superheroes might not seem to have much in common with Apple’s long-rumored entry into wearable computing. However, for a handful of reasons, Guardians of the Galaxy is to Marvel Studios what the iWatch is to Apple –- a high-profile release that’s critical to the company’s future success.
Here’s why.
Using toys, camera tricks and a keen sense of story, the photographer delights Flickr and Instagram fans with movie stills. But the movies don’t exist.
The Scotsman grew up a discerning cineaste with a taste for the Indiana Jones, Back to the Future and Ghostbusters movie franchises, but his greatest inspiration — in film and toys — was Star Wars.
“I could probably track my interest in toys via Star Wars,” Larner says. “When I was a kid in the early ’80s, I was completely swept up by the original Kenner 3.75-inch range. Then, in the ’90s, the remastered movies came out along with whispers of the prequels so the Star Wars toy range was reintroduced, so that caught my interest again. However, it was when Lego had the bright idea of making Star Wars Lego sets in 1999 that I really got sucked in and I haven’t looked back since!”
Buying movies on iTunes just got a lot more like purchasing a Blu-ray from Best Buy, thanks to the addition of an all-new iTunes Extras features for HD movies. The new feature is part of the iTunes 11.3 update Apple released this morning, that brings new content to movies played on your Mac and Apple TV.
A brilliant computer programmer living in a future dystopian totalitarian state must prove the Zero Theorem, in which 100 percent equals 0, or all is nothing. He’s got a touch of social anxiety (“We do not like to be touched!”), a seriously bald head, and a variety of future-weird outfits that he wears in each scene. Sound like fun?
If you’ve seen any of Terry Gilliam’s similar work, like 12 Monkeys or Brazil (or even if you just dig Apple’s similarly themed 1984-esque commercial by Ridley Scott) you’re going to want to check this one out. The gloriously wacky and edgy trailer is below.
Pixar movies are all well and good (well, great), but I can’t help but miss the kind of kid’s movies that did the rounds in the 1980s. Of these, The Last Starfighter was a favorite -- and it’s definitely prime material for a reboot.
The movie tells the story of Alex Rogan, an average teen boy who’s recruited by an alien defense force to help fight in an interstellar war, all because of his skill at the Starfighter arcade game. It was essentially a Star Wars ripoff, but it was one of the best ones, and among the first films to feature CGI graphics.
Three decades after the movie’s 1984 release, video games have moved on a lot, but The Last Starfighter's key ingredients would be great in a refresh for the Oculus Rift generation. Today’s photo-realistic graphics and immersive VR environments would also open the doors for a blurring between fantasy and reality, making this a cross between The Last Starfighter and Total Recall.
Got your own favorite movie or TV franchise that’s just begging for a reboot? Let us know in the comments below.
Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1 is coming to theaters this November, and the propaganda public relations machinery is getting in its first swing.
In a new trailer posted on YouTube Wednesday and embedded below, you’ll get to see Donald Sutherland as President Snow, the creepy dictator-like leader of Panem, the totalitarian state that runs the teens-killing-teens Hunger Games as a way to control the means of production via fear and sweeping promises of security.
It’s a creepy trailer that looks like a propaganda film, with President Snow mouthing platitudes and a brainwashed Peeta Mellark, played by Josh Hutcherson, standing at Snow’s right hand, staring up into the sky (or ceiling).
Anyone who read my review of Jurassic Park Builder for iOS knows that I’m a fan of the Jurassic Park franchise — and like a lot of fans of the series I’m eagerly awaiting Jurassic World, the forthcoming movie sequel set to stomp into movie theatres June 12, 2015.
For those of us craving plot details like a t-rex craves human-sized snacks, director Colin Trevorrow recently shed some light in an interview for SlashFilm.
Disney has announced the screenwriter-director combo who will helm the new Star Wars standalone film. The writer will be Gary Whitta, a tech nerd turned screenwriter who has written the dialogue to some of the best adventure games on the Mac and iPad. As for the director? He’s behind the number one movie at the box office right now, Godzilla.
When Disney bought Marvel Studios, they gained a huge backlog of intellectual properties and stories to mine. The Avengers and the various supporting live-action superhero flicks like Ironman and Thor were just the beginning, as we can see from this new trailer (below) for upcoming animated adventure, Big Hero 6, based on the comic of the same name.
“Big Hero 6 [is] an action comedy adventure about brilliant robotics prodigy Hiro Hamada,” says the Disney press release, “who finds himself in the grips of a criminal plot that threatens to destroy the fast-paced, high-tech city of San Fransokyo. With the help of his closest companion – a robot named Baymax – Hiro joins forces with a reluctant team of first-time crime fighters on a mission to save their city.”
Other than its top notch TV series, HBO also has some great documentaries. Even though Katrina hit nearly a decade-ago, Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke is one of HBO's best, showcasing how New Orleans residents' lives were completely upended by the death, disease and devastation that followed the storm's wake.
It’s time to cancel your cable subscription. The best TV shows, movies, and documentaries have landed on Amazon Prime thanks to a deal with HBO that unleashes the networks’ exceptional collection of content to the Internet for the first time ever.
Starting today Amazon Prime users can catch up on entire seasons of HBO’s top shows by streaming them to your Mac, iPhone, or iPad at absolutely no extra cost. It’s an unprecedented treasure trove of greatness that required an HBO GO subscription to access until today when it was finally set free for the first time ever.
HBO has been reluctant to embrace a paid-streaming model that would cut its ties to lucrative cable subscriptions, but the move is a sign that a top-down approach could be on the way as HBO adds its GO app to Amazon Fire TV and other services.
The entire HBO lineup isn’t available quite yet, but the company says shows like Veep and The Newsroom will be added once they pass their third seasons, making them available for the low-cost of a $79 annual Amazon Prime subscription.
Here are five shows you should start binging on today.
There’s a scene in recent movie Captain America: The Winter Soldier in which Steve Rogers checks a list of things he’s missed since he took the cold plunge into the ice after his exploits in World War II.
In the U.S. version of the movie, the list looks like this:
Angry Birds is coming to a big screen near you. Rovio Entertainment is taking the epic battle of birds-versus-pigs from your iPhone to the cinema, in 3-D, and launching it into the wide, wide world in July 2016.
We’re aflutter with anticipation: Can they actually make a movie based on a video game worth watching? It’s happened time and time again that our favorite living room brain-cell killer was transported to the land of plush seats and buttery popcorn only to disappoint.
Most video games turn into celluloid duds even though we stupidly paid to see them; Rotten Tomatoes gives Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within only a 44 percent approval rating. The rest go down from there.
In the gallery above, you’ll find a brutal rundown of the best of the worst video game-cum-movies that Rovio should watch — as a reminder of what not to do.
The passionate affair burned for decades before Samsung came snapping celebrity selfies with Ellen at the Oscars and dishing out enough paid endorsements to finance the next Star Wars trilogy.
Apple plans to fight back with its own buzz marketer in New York to keep its products in the hands of the elite and glamorous. But Cupertino has never had a problem getting its products on the big screen and into the coolest TV shows — even though Apple swears it doesn’t pay a dime for product placements. Here are 18 of the most iconic Apple cameos to hit the screen.
I keep a movie to-watch list, a plain text list somewhere in my Dropbox. And as you may have guessed, I never read it. What I probably need is an app like Moviedo, a to-do list for movies that runs on your iPhone.
I’m all for getting my stuff into iTunes more efficiently, aren’t you? Jordan Merrick is, too, and he’s come up with a brilliant way to do just that. He’s also got a great site full of clever tips there as well. Really, go check it out.
The default way, says Merrick, for media to get to iTunes is like this: drag and drop a folder full of music or a video you’ve converted from DVD to iTunes. iTunes takes said media, copies it, and places it into its own special folder structure.
What happens in this case is that you’re left holding two copies of that album or video — one in your iTunes folder and one wherever you pulled it from. That’s kind of silly, if you ask me, especially if you back up regularly. No one needs two copies of anything on their hard drive.
Luckily, there’s a cool folder in your iTunes folder that lets you add stuff directly to iTunes. Sadly, it’s pretty buried, but Merrick will show you a better way.
In the Marvel universe, Captain America is a World War II era super soldier who happens to get frozen in ice, only to dethaw in modern times. As such, there’s a lot he’s missed out on, and in the latest Captain America film, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, we get a quick list of Captain America’s notebook, tracking the things he doesn’t “get.”
Lo and behold, Steve Jobs and Apple made the list, alongside Nirvana, Rocky, Thai Food, the moon landing, and — inexplicably — I Love Lucy.
Via: Reddit
Popcorn Time is an open source app for Mac, Windows, and Linux that acts essentially like Netflix for streaming video torrents. The project is “the result of many developers and designers putting a bunch of APIs together to make the experience of watching torrent movies as simple as possible.”
Yes, it really works. Is it legal? That depends.
If you’re a movie nerd, then you’re going to freak out about Yeah! Movies. It’s an iPad app which lets you stream many great films (Kill Bill, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Mad Max, Blade Runner, Caddyshack and so on, but it doesn’t stop there. You also get around 500 “curated extras” with every movie purchase.
In Spike Jonze’s latest film, Her, Joaquin Phoenix plays a man who falls in love with a Siri-like “digital assistant,” the titular Her, played by Scarlett Johansson.
But there’s no love lost between the two. If you ask Siri about ‘Her’, she’ll claim that Johansson’s “portrayal of an intelligent agent is beyond artificial” and “gives artificial intelligence a bad name.”
Looks like Scarlett Johansson caught wind, and now, her feelings are hurt by Siri’s harsh words.
You know what would make all of those crazy-dangerous squirrel-suit action movies even better? A big, wide, cinematic 2.39:1 aspect ratio. And that’s just what you’ll get with the new Letus AnamorphX Adapter for the GoPro Hero.
I was all ready to write a sarcastic post about the Splitter, a little box that allows independent volume control of the two pairs of headphones you jack into it. After all, sharing a music track is something spontaneous – adding a specialist piece of hardware into the mix seems a little like quickly clipping your FitBit to your pubes before making love.
But then I thought about traveling, and movies.
The IMDB app has finally – finally – been updated to fit in with iOS 7’s tasteful decor. Heavy users of the app won’t really notice anything different in the layout, which remains as easy to use as ever (and way better than the terrible web version), but everyone will appreciate the new lick of paint, and the other new features that have been added to v4.0.
Speaking of remote-control and movies, Filmic Remote is a new companion app for the fantastic-but-fugly iOS movie-shooting app, Filmic.
As you will have guessed from the name, Filmic Remote lets you use one iOS device to remote control the Filmic app running on another iOS device.
Among a long list of cool new features added to Boinx’s iStopMotion for Mac, two stand out. The first is that you can hook up a Canon DSLR and see it’s live-view output right in the app. But the second is the one you’ll really be interested in: iStopMotion now outputs animated GIFs.
