movies

Star Trek: Discovery Poster & Trailers

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A whole slew of tidbits and sneak peeks for the upcoming series Star Trek: Discovery were unveiled at San Diego Comic-Con, including this GORGEOUS poster:

Tor com SDCC star-trek-discovery-poster

The official trailer was also released at the con:

Star Trek: Discovery – Official Trailer by Star Trek

It adds nicely to the first teaser trailer:

Star Trek: Discovery – First Look Trailer by Star Trek

I am getting chills every time I see either—definitely looking forward to Discovery! Who knows, it may even replace Deep Space Nine as my favorite Star Trek franchise.

Image: CBS via Tor.com

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Black Panther Poster & Trailer

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A little more news on the Marvel Cinematic Universe movie Black Panther trickled out from San Diego Comic-Con. At this writing, the SDCC trailer hasn’t been released outside the con yet, but I’m hoping it’ll be out soon.

Meanwhile, we have this gorgeous poster to tide us over:

Tor com BPPoster

And, since apparently I didn’t post this before, here’s the teaser trailer:

Black Panther Teaser Trailer [HD] from Marvel Entertainment

It looks so amazing! Good thing February 2018 is just six and a half months away.

Image: Marvel Studios via Tor.com

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Quotes: A Question that Pretty Much No One Actually Asked to Be Answered

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Aaron Pound at Dreaming About Other Worlds reviews the Star Wars movie Rogue One and includes this delicious bit of analysis:

“The obvious slicing and dicing of the intrigue and adventure in the early parts of the movie would be forgivable is [sic] one were able to think that it was done simply to try to cram as much of that as possible into the story, but instead the movie keeps shifting away from Jyn, Cassian, K-2SO and the rest of the intrepid rebels to focus on what can only be described as the deadly dull office politics of the Imperial Officer class. In large part, all these scenes really do is provide a really long-winded answer for the question ‘How did Grand Moff Tarkin become the commander of the Death Star’, which is a question that pretty much no one actually asked to be answered.”

– Aaron Pound

Reader, I LOLed. 🙂

Pound, Aaron. “Review – Rogue One: A Star Wars Story”. Dreaming About Other Worlds, June 01, 2017.

Serving exactly what it sounds like, the Quotes feature excerpts other people’s thoughts.

Disney’s Hercules Made into a Dress Mimicking Ancient Greek Pottery

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Hercules and Hercules: Hero to Zero, Disney’s animated stories based on the Heracles myth, are now available to wear. Sort of.

HotTopic Hercules Dress1
Disney Hercules Pottery Dress from HotTopic

“You’ve probably heard of Disney’s Hercules… he’s kind of a big deal. This fun pottery montage design dress includes Hercules performing various feats of strength. The pottery banner reads ‘From Zero to Hero’ around the skirt.”

HotTopic Hercules Dress2
Disney Hercules Pottery Dress from HotTopic

I don’t typically care for merchandise based on superheroes or animated characters. This dress is kinda neat, though, as far as the print design goes. The material, however, disappoints: 95% polyester and 5% spandex. Wearing what’s essentially a plastic bag has no appeal to me at all.

Found via Fashionably Geek.

Out There is an occasional feature highlighting intriguing art, spaces, places, phenomena, flora, and fauna.

Mistaken Identity: No Female Dwarf Love in Warcraft: The Beginning

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I mentioned that we re-watched Warcraft: The Beginning, the movie based on the MMORPG World of Warcraft. I had forgotten that in a council scene in Stormwind, there’s a short glimpse of a woman who looks like she might be a Dwarf. Here’s a screencap:

Warcraft The Beginning Council Scene Sm

She’s at the right hand of the screen, walking towards Anduin Lothar (the prominent man in the middle). And with a DVD, you can of course stop and check out details you miss at the theater. Who knows, I thought, it might lead to cosplay in real life or a transmog in game!

I was pretty excited, because female Dwarves are my absolute favorite race / gender combo to play in WoW. (I love female Dwarf cosplay and fan art, too!)

Anyway, the WTB DVD has a few extras including deleted and extended scenes, among them this council scene. The woman in question even has a few lines. Hooray! Here’s a screencap from the extended scene:

Warcraft The Beginning Council Scene Extras Sm

Alas, I was triply disappointed. As it turns out, not only is she unnamed, she’s a human woman, not a Dwarf. Adding injury to insult, they had to go and cut her speech.

While it was great to see additional female faces (because the, shall we say politely, scant amount of women in the movie is frustrating), it’s getting really, really tiresome to witness women’s performances end up on the cutting room floor in favor of another 30 seconds of impersonal, wood-faced clones of tin soldiers whacking at each other en masse.

Here there be opinions!

Quotes: Women’s Emotional Lives Do Not Revolve around Men

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“It strikes me as unusual and as noteworthy that we should see two such dissimilar films [Moana and Arrival] foreground so strongly connection between women across generations within a family. To acknowledge that women’s emotional lives do not revolve around men, and also acknowledge a strong family component, without reducing the female characters to people who have no emotional lives outside their family concerns.

“These films are also really good speculative fiction. So I recommend them.”

– Liz Bourke

ALL. OF. THIS!

SO. MUCH!

Bourke, Liz. “Sleeps with Monsters: Intergenerational Female Influences in Arrival and Moana.” Tor.com, May 23, 2017.

Serving exactly what it sounds like, the Quotes feature excerpts other people’s thoughts.

Ending of Rogue One Seamlessly Connected to A New Hope

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This nine-minute video by Barre Fong combines the very ending of Rogue One seamlessly to A New Hope:

https://vimeo.com/209263699

“Rogue One” Spliced with “A New Hope” by Barre Fong

Nice job! It was pretty clear from just seeing Rogue One in the theaters how well the team not only wrote but propped, set-dressed, and costumed their movie to match the George Lucas -led original. This merger makes it very explicit, though. A hat-tip to all involved.

In general, I really enjoy comparing originals and recreations (or originals and adaptations), and the pleasure is multiplied when the successor is expertly and thoughtfully made. That’s one reason why Peter Jackson et al.’s making-of documentaries for the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies are still the gold standard for movie extras—hearing about the design process is fascinating.

Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.

Some Random Thoughts on Logan

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Random thoughts on Logan in no particular order. Spoilers ahead.

Logan Promo Poster Silhouetted Sunset

  • The movie was an interesting take on westerns. I know very little about that genre, but even I could thell the homage was there.
  • As expected, Patrick Stewart and Hugh Jackman were phenomenal.
  • It was very, very bleak, bleaker than I thought, and I went in expecting a certain amount of bleak.
  • The “Logan and his peeps” story was touching, but the “evil corporate types are evil” story I found cliched, boring, and corny. Those two facets of the plot didn’t really mesh well in my opinion. And speaking of evil corporate types: what’s with the mechanical hand attachments that so many of the evil army types sported? Their version of a goon uniform?? It was odd.
  • I was left wanting an explanation of what it was that Professor X did in Westchester that traumatized him so. (I may have missed it if it was there, since we didn’t see Logan subtitled.)
  • It was great to see something of the midwestern states (instead of the ever-present New York City, for example). For one thing, I had no idea Oklahoma City was so big.

Image via Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation

In the Seen on Screen occasional feature, we discuss movies and television shows of interest.