Not an actual trailer, this was shown at a comic-con last year and has been floating around in bootleg, lowrez since, but Disney has started to make a Tron sequel with a couple Lost writers. Love the digitized “young” Jeff Bridges at the end. Scanned in Canada you say? Pity!

There’s a little thing called ComicCon going on somewhere in geek heaven and over on Io9.com, a lucky blogger relates 25 minutes of James Cameron’s long awaited 3D zuggarat Avatar. You remember James? Big in the 80s? Like Michael Jackson, Avatar is to be James’ big comeback but without the shady painkillers addiction.

A room of assembled newbie soldiers are sitting in a room in Pandora’s Hell’s Gate station while the grouchy, Na’Vi-hating Colonial Quaritch explains their new mission. “You’re not in Kansas, anymore. You’re in Pandora.” Everything on Pandora he explains, is deadly. Every plant and animal out there “wants to kill you and eat your eyeballs. Worst of all are the Na’Vi, who are designed for survival, their bones reinforced with natually (sic) occurring carbon fiber.

“My job,” he continues, “is to keep you alive. I won’t succeed —” he waits a beat “— not for all of you.”

I can’t decide if the description isn’t well written or I’m just not interested. The play by play rambles on, telling us the paraplegic hero, while “driving” his “avatar” around this hospitable world, is saved by a  (sexy?) female native. Diving into the comments I find salvation:

Don’t get me wrong, sounds awesome. But *sniff, sniff – looks around in alarm* I smell Dances With Wolves. – danield3013

Cameron took too long developing this project that uses sci fi concepts that were amazing 10 years ago, causing it to loop back onto itself and implode, hype-wise. Meanwhile he wraps an old story around the 3D tech Disney has already perfected in UP. Think Aliens meets Pocahontas meets Fern Gully. While he was technologically navel gazing, we’ve seen South Park make fun of shut ins using avatars in their brilliant WoW episode an very soon we’ll see Bruce Willis running around in his own avatar in a wig, but without the pioneer-guilt built in:

I was waiting for the subway today and across from me was the poster for the movie The Orphan. I have no desire to see it but the poster had me staring at it. Intently.

I couldn’t figure out why the image was so creepy, other than the obvious “Children of the Corn” vibe for brunettes. Then it hit me: the kid has been mirriored vertically:

Nobody’s face is a perfect copy of itself from one side to another and we’re designed to search out imperfections to that effect when we meet people. The poster designer is a psychological genius!

I’ve cut the image, flipped it and made it slightly transparent. You can see by my adroit animation, other than some minor blemishes, that’s exactly what they’ve done:

Yet another novel that shaped my life is being raped into a movie…

Wired has a great story of “unfilmable” movies (see the Watchmen 3 hr DVD release thingy tie in they did there?) and on the list is Neuromancer, by William Gibson. Part way through they link to a Seven Arts press release of old Neury in pre-production with Torque director Joseph Kahn dropping all his rock video projects so he can direct. Much comparison to the Canadian tax write-off Johnny Mnemonic is made (Neuromancer producer Peter Hoffman was a “presenter” for Mnemonic, whatever that means).

Yikes.

Double yikes goes to the news of Hayden Christiansen joining the cast, most likely as Case, the strung out anti-hero hacker.

“Wintermute, please play audio file DarthYellsNOOOO.wav on a continuous loop until my ears bleed.”