What makes a movie a classic? Is it some kind of social significance? Or, is it what the movie meant to people when it first came out? Or maybe its just fondly remembered for its amazing cheesiness and being so bad its good? I’m pretty sure Roger Corman’s Battle Beyond the Stars falls into that last category.

However, even if it happens to be made of 100% real cheese, that doesn’t stop it from also begin pretty awesome and, shall we say it, a classic. Now this film is getting the Blu-ray and DVD treatment it deserves with a super special 30th anniversary edition, soon to be released by Shout! Factory.

To begin to understand the scope of this film’s cult classic status, you have to take a look at the people involved in it. They represent some of the biggest names working in movies today. Back then, they were just a bunch of kids with an idea for a space movie.

Here’s a small list of those involved. See if you recognize any of the names: John Sayles, Richard Thomas, Robert Vaughn, George Peppard, John Saxon, James Horner, Gale Anne Hurd and, of course, Roger Corman. Oh yeah, James cameron also did the special effects for the movie. He’s come a long way since then.

Click throuhg for the full info from Shout! Factory. Look for Battle Beyond the Stars in stores on June 12th. Also after the break we’ve included the original trailer for the film as well. It’s not great quality but watch it and you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about.

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Truth be known, this isn’t the review I wanted to write. Trust me, it would be a lot easier to heap glowing praise on this over-hyped tale of a Norse God who is banished to earth, but the movie just wasn’t my cup of mead.

I’m convinced someone must have messed with my 3D glasses. Based on ecstatic word of mouth, I should have seen a thrilling, well executed, well acted, and good looking film. Instead, I saw a dull, erratically paced film with gaudy set pieces, tacky costumes, and inconsistent writing.

Admittedly, I am no master of the Marvel universe, so take that with a grain of salt. However, I am game, and have enjoyed several of the movies culled from their stable of superheroes in recent years.  Throw director Kenneth Branagh into the mix, and I am not only intrigued, but a little giddy. I guess that might be part of the reason I was so disappointed in the film; I expected better with Branaugh at the helm.

The film tells the story of Thor, a Norse God who wields a mighty wicked hammer as his weapon of choice against the bad guys. Thor resides in the realm of Asgard, and he is a sure shot to take over the throne from his aging father Odin (Anthony Hopkins).

Odin has maintained peace between his kingdom and the Frost Giants, a rival population, for years.  When they threaten to infiltrate Asgard, Thor makes a hasty decision to attack the Frost Giants. This infuriates his father, who banishes Thor to Earth, and strips Thor’s hammer of any real power.

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In case you’ve not been paying attention recently, the ten year run of Smallville is coming to an end next Friday with a two hour blockbuster finale. As much of a bummer as this is for fans of the show, it turns out the cast, led by Tom Welling, is pretty broken up about it too.

Welling, who plays Clark Kent on the show, spoke to Zap2it about the end of Smallville and dropped some clues about what to expect as the series finishes its run.

“I think people will feel fulfilled, but it’s going to be bittersweet,” he said. “If someone has been watching the show for 10 years, it’s coming to an end, and that’s never a fun thing . . .You always want more, but the reality is that it can’t go on forever.”

You do always want more. That’s for sure. Welling went on to explain that they ended up filming the finale in a rather different way than other series.

“We shot the actual finale as our third-to-last episode,” he said. “We shot two more episodes, then shot the first part of the finale last. It gave us the opportunity to take a look at what would be the last image of the show in post-production and make any changes or adaptations to it. It didn’t necessarily take the emotional pressure off us, but the time pressure.”

Speaking about filming the very end, he said, “As we were shooting it, everyone’s senses were heightened. People were flying up from L.A. [to Vancouver, where the show has been made] to supervise and make sure everyone who had to make a decision was there. Everybody was just really excited, and the energy level went up.”

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Kudos to the marketing team for Fox’s upcoming X-Men franchise reboot and origin story X-Men:First Class. Since they missed getting a trailer up during this year’s Super Bowl, they’ve been making up for it with tons and tons of new trailers designed to entice us and get us ready for potentially one of the biggest superhero films of the Summer.

Sticking with that, there are three brand new character trailers out now for our enjoyment that show off three of Professor Xavier’s very first team of crime fighting mutants. In these clips, we get an inside look (as well as lots more footage) of Havok (Lucas Till), Hank McCoy a.k.a. Beast (Nicholas Hoult) and Banshee (Caleb Landry Jones).

These three trailers give us even more of a peek into the world that director Matthew Vaughn and his team of writers has created as an origin for this iconic team. And after seeing this world, we really think its one we want to visit soon.

Check out the three trailer after the jump. Get ready for X-Men: First Class to hit theaters on June 3rd.

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When the TV series Game of Thrones was first announced it was, at least for me, regarded with a bit of skepticism. It looked sorta cool but I had to wonder how it one be once it got going. Fortunately, it turns out I had nothing to worry about.

The show, which is about to air its fourth episode this Sunday, started out a bit slow but over the last few weeks has gotten progressively better and now, I have to admit, I’m hooked.

Now, to get you readhy for this Sunday’s episode, we’ve got aclip from it to show you (after the break, of course). In this episode, called “Cripples, Bastards and Broken Things”, Ned (Sean Bean) looks to a book for clues to the death of his predecessor, and uncovers one of King Robert’s (Mark Addy) bastards.

Robert and his guests witness a tournament honoring Ned. Jon takes measures to protect Samwell (John Bradley) from further abuse at Castle Black; a frustrated Viserys clashes with Daenerys in Vaes Dothrak; Sansa (Sophie Turner) imagines her future as a queen, while Arya envisions a far different future. Catelyn rallies her husband’s allies to make a point, while Tyrion finds himself caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Yep, that’s a lot of story for one episode. Watch Game of Thrones Sunday at 9/8C on HBO to see if they pull it off. My guess is they do.

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Let’s start out this post by mentioning a few things. First, we love the iPhone around here and pretty much all of us have one and use it every day. Second, I don’t think any of us has jailbroken their iPhone, at least not the iPhone 4. Also, we love the guys at LifeHacker and read their site every day.

So, when we can have all of those things combined, life is good. I’m talking about, of course, an article over at LifeHacker wherein author Adam Dachis highlight four very good reasons not to jailbreak your iPhone. In summary, here’s what Adam says are the four major negatives:

Goodbye Stability and Safety

While jailbreaking can provide you with plenty of options to increase the functionality of your iDevice, it can also cause things to work unexpectedly.

You Don’t Get to Update iOS as Soon or as Easily

Updating a jailbroken device sucks. When you update, you lose your jailbreak, need to re-jailbreak, and then re-install all your jailbroken apps and extensions.

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In case you missed it, yesterday was International Star Wars Day. To commemorate the event or, in some cases, dash the hopes of nerds everywhere, Lucasfilm took the opportunity to announce the full details of the Strar Wars Saga’s impending release on Blu-ray.

Before you bother to read on hoping for some good news, I will save you the suspense. The original, unmodified original trilogy will NOT be in this collection.

Yes, that’s right, if we want to watch Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi in their original, non-Lucas tinkered with versions, we will just have to keep watching those “Definitive Collection” THX Laserdiscs. I’ve got mine, how about you?

However, if you don’t care about how things should be and, instead, want to keep rewarding George Lucas with money for fucking up his own movies, feel free to read on and get all the details.

The six films of the Saga are accompanied by three discs of extras totaling over 40 hours of material – some new, some old. Here’s the full press release from Lucasfilm.

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When you think of hot female assassins/badasses, who comes to mind? For me it’s a cross between Anne Parillaud in the original La Femme Nikita, Uma Thurman’s The Bride in Kill Bill, Devon Aoki as Miho in Sin City and Yvonne Strahovski as Sarah in Chuck.

Put all those together and that would be a potent mix indeed. Now, it seems, we may be able to add Zoe Saldana to that mix.

Why? Well today, Sony Pictures has released a trailer for Colombiana, which stars Saldana as a stone-cold female assassin. To illustrate the point, we’ve got the trailer for the film to share with you.

Colombiana was written by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen and directed by Olivier Megaton (who has a perfect name for an action director, don’t you think?) Check out the trailer after the jump.

And no, that pic above is not from the movie. It’s from The Losers, but I like it — and so should you.

Who’s your favorite female baddass?

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Even with all the other ways that try to gain your attention and your entertainment dollar, comic books are still pretty popular. Sure, they may not be as successful as they once were, but that doesn’t stop companies like Marvel from coming out with new and different ways to entertain you on paper.

Case in point this time around is the upcoming Fear Itself: Fearsome Four #1 (of 4). Written by Brandon Montclare and Ryan Bodenheim with art by Michael Kaluta, this one looks pretty cool and we’ve got a preview for you today.

Here’s some clues to the story:

With the entire Marvel Universe enveloped in fear, Man-Thing has been driven insane on panic-wracked Manhattan! Will the whole city burn at his touch? Or can the team of Howard the Duck, She-Hulk, Frankenstein’s Monster and Nighthawk shut down this mindless embodiment of terror before the whole world goes up in flames?

Yes, Howard the Duck. You got a problem with that? Check out the preview pages after the jump.

The first issue of Fear Itself: Fearsome Four hits comic book stores on June 8th.

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When you’re in the news business and things move as fast as they do these days (i.e at the “speed of the Internerts”) sometimes a story will slip through the cracks. This is one of those stories.

A few days ago French video game publisher Ubisoft announced it is launching Ubisoft Motion Pictures to adapt its game franchises for film and TV. Heading up this new venture will be Jean-Julien Baronnet, former CEO of Luc Besson’s EuropaCorp., producer Didier Lupfer is in charge of production and development and Jean de Rivieres, former head of distribution at Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures France, will handle marketing and international sales.

Some of Ubisoft’s titles that could be movies include Assassin’s Creed and Splinter Cell. You also may recall Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was recently brought to the big screen by Jerry Bruckheimer, with Jake Gyllenhaal in the lead. Yeah, we kinda tried to forget that one too.

With this new division it will be interesting to see if the company can do a better job with turing its games into films than others have done. My guess is they probably won’t have much luck. Turning games into movies is very difficult, just ask all the people who’ve tried to do it.

As expected, late yesterday Apple released a new update for iOS devices such as the iPhone and iPad. This update, dubbed iOS 4.3.3 for AT&T and iOS 4.2.8 for Verizon, addresses the dreaded “Location Gate” issue that has been in the news the last few weekes.

Specifically, it makes changes to how the device stores and manages the “iOS crowd-sourced location database cache.” It also reduces the size of the cache, doesn’t back it up to iTunes and deletes the cache when you disable Location Services.

The updates are available right now. Simply connect your i-device to iTunes and you will be prompted to perform the update.

We’ve updated our devices here at The Flickcast offices. So far, so good. Although, we are still waiting to see if this improves our battery life that seemed to go down after the last update.

Let’s hope so.

Yesterday was a pretty big day for blockbuster trailers. We got a brand new feature trailer for Warner’s Green Lantern, which gave us some awesome moments like Kilowog speaking, the first shot of a Watcher, and loads of action. On the flip side of that, we got the first full trailer for Conan The Barbarian.

The first teaser that hit had a few fans up in arms about how low-quality it looked, and how cartooney the trailer as a whole felt. This one doesn’t get much better.

Sure, we get lots more Jason Momoa as Conan, a few shots of Rachel Nichols, and some shirtless Stephen Lang, but to be honest, the film has a bit of a “Syfy original movie” feel to it.

Be the judge for yourself, check out the trailer after the jump and if you don’t think it looks like the illegitimate lovechild of Clash of the Titans and The Scorpion King, then sound off! Conan The Barbarian is set to hit theaters on August 19th.

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