This story is a couple of years old, but I missed it the first time.
I read that book in senior year of high school; but I read it in French, and my French wasn’t that great at the time, so I don’t actually remember anything about it. But if it ticks off Sarko, it has my vote. (Well, unless that implies endorsing Dominique Strauss-Kahn ….)
First the Pirates of Venus movie becomes Carson Napier. And now the John Carter of Mars movie becomes John Carter. Why the planetophobia?
Maybe the feeling is: everybody nowadays knows that Mars and Venus are a) uninhabited, and b) inhospitable to human life, so audiences won’t buy seeing human heroes without protective suits running about in Martian or Venusian cities having adventures with the natives. If so, I think this greatly overestimates audiences’ concern with scientific accuracy and/or underestimates their willingness to suspend disbelief. (After all, Avatar audiences bought this.)
On the contrary, I would think that the phrase “John Carter of Mars” – which (even for people who’ve never heard of the books) promises science-fiction action-adventure – is a bigger draw than “John Carter,” which for most audiences suggests nothing in particular. (And ditto, mutatis mutandis, for Carson of Venus.)
Another suggestion is that the studio shortened the title in order to be able to establish IP rights to the name “John Carter.” (They already own “John Carter of Mars.”) But it seems to me they could do that just by releasing a five-minute animated tie-in called “John Carter,” and leaving the movie with the cooler title.
Actually I’d prefer the proper title, “A Princess of Mars.” But I’d be willing to bet that some studio exec thought, “Male audiences will be scared off by a film with ‘princess’ in the title; they’ll think it’s some girly rainbow thing.”
“[Police officers] need to move quickly, in split seconds, without giving a lot of thought to what the adverse consequences for them might be. … [A]nything that’s going to have a chilling effect on an officer moving – an apprehension that he’s being videotaped and may be made to look bad – could cost him or some citizen their life.” — Jim Pasco, Fraternal Order of Police
(Read the celý piroh.)
Hey Pasco – as you defenders of the surveillance state always say to us: if you’re not doing anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to worry about.
“I’m appalled and outraged. What the BBC are doing is stealing Scotland’s heritage. It is a kick in the teeth to one of our most iconic industries.”
Before you click, try to guess what monstrous crime the BCC has committed.
And Forbes cites Kevin Carson. (CHT Dan Clore.)
a) The second season of Steven Moffat’s Sherlock has begun filming, and the titles of the new episodes have now been announced. The titles arguably count as spoilers for anyone familiar with the source material, so click at your own risk.
b) I’ve had a love-hate relationship with this song since my childhood. The music is haunting; the lyrics are imbecilic:
If you don’t remember that song from The Wizard of Oz, it’s because during the 60s and 70s Disney produced several additional Oz records; the three I had as a kid (perhaps the only three made?) were based on L. Frank Baum’s The Scarecrow of Oz and The Tin Woodman of Oz, and Ruth Plumly Thompson’s The Cowardly Lion of Oz. (One of the accompanying storybooks, I forget which, seized my youthful imagination by featuring a smoking hot Ozma who bore no resemblance to the one in the books.) [12/4/13 addendum: I misremembered; it was Polychrome, not Ozma, who was thus pulchritudinously portrayed, in the Tin Woodman storybook.] In addition to the songs from the Wizard of Oz movie, the record pictured in the video contains some, though not all, of the songs from these additional records.
c) I’ve blogged previously about Moon Europa, an intriguing indy science fiction film I first saw previewed at Asheville’s Revoluticon back in 2006. The site and trailers I previously linked to are gone now (and inaccessible even by Wayback, thanks to Killer Robots). According to IMDB, the film was released in 2009. But elsewhere I read that what came out in 2009 was a shorter version, now called Solatrium, and the makers are still hoping to “expand the story into a feature-length film, Moon Europa.”
The old trailers are frustratingly gone, but two new trailers, one labeled Solatrium and the other Moon Europa (though they are evidently the same movie), are available:
