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Things that share little in commmon except that I saw them recently:
The Phoenix has landed. The Mars probe, that is. That’s a bit of a relief. Watching the video of everything it had to do on its descent I was a little sceptical1.
Sadly this good fortune does not extend to the pair of 200 year old pistols allegedly forged from meteoric iron, whose extraterrestial heritage has been disproven. They still look pretty in their own right, though.
There’s some kind of slick link here to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull which looks to be having a good box office weekend despite a fairly mixed critical reception. We saw it yesterday, and I enjoyed it a lot while not really rating it as a great film. Certainly it was about as entertaining as Last Crusade, and nowhere near the level of godlike perfection that is Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Meanwhile Iron Man continues to rake in the cash (almost certainly fuelled by my review).
Terminator 4, which still seems to be called Terminator Salvation despite recent suggestions to the contrary, has an official website with a good-looking bit of pre-production art. Frankly the only announcement so far that has made me feel positive about this trilogy is Christian Bale’s involvement, but the concept of a post-apocalyptic trilogy is potentially a great one.
Peter Jackson and Guillermo Del Toro webchat about The Hobbit and The Hobbit 2. Following my poll to scientifically determine the title of the second film (“Back in the Hobbit” being the clear winner), Del Toro kindly tells us: “not ‘H2 Electric Boogaloo’, that has been discarded.” So that’s a relief. In a further display of good sense he comments: “Smaug should not be ‘the Dragon in the Hobbit movie’ as if it was just ‘another’ creature in a Bestiary. Smaug should be ‘The DRAGON’ for all movies past and present.” He also rates the dragon in Dragonslayer. If he were any more rightheaded he’d explode.
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1 Obviously the evil Martians who shoot down our probes were too busy carving gigantic faces on the ground. Ahem.
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