A sudden flurry of rumors suggests that the 12th Doctor will be named this Sunday, Aug. 4, on a special episode of DOCTOR WHO CONFIDENTIAL on the BBC.
I hope this is true because I am sick of all the useless speculation clogging up the web while folks have nothing better to do. And we can stop all the inane “Will the next Doctor be a woman” chatter that mostly just hurts peoples’ feelings. Also, I really want to know what the next Doctor is going to look like.
I love those behind-the-scenes featurettes on DVD and Blu-ray — few things are more fun than seeing a bunch of actors scrambling around in front of green screens — so I am excited to get a peek at how the wizards behind Pacific Rim managed to bring those giant robots and monsters to life for director Guillermo Del Toro‘s love letter to kaiju movies.
When last we saw Vin Diesel‘s Riddick, at the conclusion of 2004’s The Chronicles of Riddick, he had just become Lord Marshall of the Necromongers — and no one imagined that his reign would be simple. Now, in a motion comic bridges the gap between the last movie and Sept. 6’s Riddick, setting the stage for the sequel that returns the character to the animalistic roots seen in 2000’s Pitch Black.
This video — featuring Diesel himself voicing Riddick — gives us a taste of the convict’s life at the top; and let’s just say that uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.
I think this looks pretty awesome, and I’m really looking forward to Riddick‘s release.
One of the reasons that James Gunn was selected to direct Guardians of the Galaxy — Marvel’s big-screen gamble on one of its lesser-known properties — is that he is… well, quirky. Maybe more off-beat. Okay, so he’s kinda twisted. All you have to do is watch the unsettling Slither and Super to realize that we won’t be getting a safe and sterile superhero film out of this guy.
And part of Gunn’s quirkiness is his attitude — which has been coming in handy lately as Marvel fandom moans about his creative choices for GotG — especially his decision to make Scottish actress Karen Gillan shave off her sexy long red hair to play space pirate Nebula. The consternation and angst has been building ever since Comic-Con. Never mind that Karen — best-known as Amy Pond on DOCTOR WHO — still looks hot as hell without her ginger locks; the character is currently bald in the source comics, so where is the criticism coming from?
But Gunn is having none of it. He recently Tweeted:
“If you are sending me hate messages about making @KarenGillan2 shave her head, you might consider the overall state of your life.”
Yeah, I just started following him.
P.S.: My opinion has nothing to do with the fact that I shave my head, by choice!
Johanna Mason — the deceptively cute and deadly victor from District 7 — was the breakout character from Suzanne Collins’ Catching Fire, the second volume in the Hunger Games trilogy, so the competition for the movie role was long and intense. Luckily (for her and for the franchise), Jena Malone was the last woman standing and won the role.
Here, she mentions the competition in an interview with Glamour magazine:
Glamour: Was your part in The Hunger Games tough to get?
Jena: I know they saw every single actress from here till Tuesday. They wanted to find someone who didn’t just physicalize this character but could also scare people. I don’t know what I did – I guess I just scared the hell out of them.
Um, maybe the producers heard that you dead-lifted 235 pounds during training for Sucker Punch and decided it was safer to give you the job?
Here’s a look at Jena doing publicity — with director Francis Lawrence and co-stars Willow Shields (Prim) and Jeffrey Wright (Beetee) — for the film at San Diego Comic-Con.
Now we can see the other two audition scripts (or “sides”) being used by DOCTOR WHO show-runner Steven Moffat to audition actors for the role of the 12th Doctor.
In addition to the previously released scene in which Clara meets the regenerated Doctor, we now have a sequence featuring the Doctor facing down the Cyberleader, and another in which he chats with a little boy — both very boilerplate occurrences for DOCTOR WHO, so nothing to be gleaned about series eight from these audition pages. So we must take Moffat at his word that these pages are designed to give the auditioner an opportunity to make the part his own.
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“The Web of Fear”
After a few weeks of silence, the rumor that huge a cache of previously missing episodes of DOCTOR WHO has been returned to the BBC has suddenly lurched back to life. And, once again, the rumors are being attributed to members of the DOCTOR WHO production team, not mere fans.
The Bleeding Cool website passes along the rumor of a dinner party at which someone “heavily associated” with the production team claimed that “at least 40 episodes” are held by the BBC right now, while another source put the number at 93. Which is still not the total 106 that were wiped/junked at the end of the 1960s/beginning of the 1970s. Bleeding Cool says the still-missing episodes are: “Mission To The Unknown”; nine episodes of “The Dalek Master Plan”; one episode of “The Ice Warriors”; and one episode of “The Wheel In Space.” Upping the ante, the BBC is also said to be preparing to air “The Web of Fear” during the 50th anniversary week in November, and to release “The Enemy of the World” on DVD.
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Transplanted Scotsman Craig Ferguson moderated the DOCTOR WHO panel at Comic-Con last weekend, and Matt Smith dropped by his chat show, THE LATE LATE SHOW WITH CRAIG FERGUSON, last night to be utterly charming — and make me even more sad that he is leaving the role of the Doctor.
Among the most interesting bits are Matt mentioning he’s buds with Nathan Fillion and Matt’s imitation of the English Wood Pigeon!
Why, why must you go, Matt?
Remember how, back in 1987 when Paul Verhoeven original RoboCop was released, we could laugh about those fake commercials and the ED-209 blowing that guy away? Well, it’s 2013, and in the (completely unnecessary) RoboCop reboot from director José Padilha starring Joel Kinnaman, those phony commercials (and deadly drones) aren’t very funny anymore…
The remake no one asked for — and which is reportedly aiming for a PG-13 rating — is slated to open Feb. 7, 2014 (a dead-of-winter release date that signals the studio does not expect much from this film, either).
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This is really cool. A bit of a detour and ultimately pointless (perhaps even dangerous if taken too seriously), but still cool. It’s one of the scenes DOCTOR WHO show-runner Steven Moffat has written for use in auditions to find the 12th Doctor!
It’s not an actual snippet from a real episode, but rather a brief bit written specially to be used in the audition — known in the industry as “sides.” As Moffat himself explains, it’s a scene designed to give the auditioner a Doctor-ish chunk of dialogue and see what he (sigh… or she) does with it.
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