The Flickcast – Page 424 of 1030 – Stuff Nerds Love

Watch an Awesome ‘Rocketeer’ Animated Fan Film For the 20th Anniversary

Just in time for Joe Johnston to bring us yet another classic WWII era superhero in Captain America, The First Avenger, another film of his is hitting a milestone. Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the release of Disney’s The Rocketeer.

Hard to believe it’s been that long since Billy Campbell donned the brass helmet and flew around the Disney back lot with Alan Arkin by his side, but here we are.

Because the film was such a classic, as was Dave Stevens’ original comic book, diehard fan and animator John Banana put together a little homage animated short in which The Rocketeer shows some of his stuff.

The animation style is superb and the short managed to capture the original magic and wonder that the film brought us back in 1991. All without the use of Jennifer Connelly, Timothy Dalton, or Terry “Locke” O’Quinn.

Check it out after the jump, and let’s hope this revitalizes interest in the project enough for Disney to give us an animated reboot!

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Doc Review: ‘Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop’

Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop follows the comedian on his Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour (that’s a mouthful to type), better known as the thing Conan O’Brien did after the NBC fiasco that left him without a television show. He’s bitter, but the film doesn’t dwell on the controversy; instead its aim is to focus on O’Brien’s showmanship.

His energy is amazing to behold. He’s performing whether on the stage, bus, at home, at the office, greeting hordes of fans or a meager handful—anywhere. If nothing else, the film deserves its title; the man literally cannot, and will not, stop. The 85 minutes breeze by as we see Conan go from Eugene, Oregon (“Should I be nervous that we’re opening in a city where no one lives?”) to Seattle to Atlantic City to Manchester, Tennessee for Bonnaroo, and finally to Atlanta.

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Box Office Report: ‘Cars 2′ Hits #1 & Opens Bigger than ‘Cars’

In what was expected to be one of the smaller opening weekends in this year’s epic summer movie season but Disney and Pixar’s Cars 2 ended up surprising almost everyone with an estimated $68 million take at the domestic box office.

Not only did Cars 2 have the biggest 3-day pull of the year so far, it blew the original 2006 film out of the water by an astounding $8 million lead. The newest film pulled in over $110 million worldwide, which is quite impressive, considering how most Pixar films perform overseas.

In second place this weekend was the raunchy comedy from Sony/Columbia, Bad Teacher. The film performed mildly well domestically, pulling in an estimated $31 million and upwards of $20 million overseas.

Another film that opened this weekend made some impressive strides as well, with the indie documentary Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop. The film only opened in 24 screens and managed to pull in $105,000. Not bad for CoCo.

Next weekend, expect the results to be skewed, as Transformers: Dark of the Moon opens to 4,000 screens on Wednesday. Those who miss out on the robot-on-robot action will get Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts in Larry Crowne.

Jamie Foxx in Chains, ‘True Blood’ in 5 Minutes, & Pop Culture Popsicles are all ‘On The Radar’

Welcome to another edition of On the Radar where we delve into all corners of the entertainment, tech and geek Internets for news, views and whatnot that may have escaped our regular coverage during the week. Let is know if we missed something interesting.

Let’s get started!

• Jamie Foxx is no Will Smith, but that didn’t stop Quentin Tarantino from getting him to play his slave (in a non-offensive way) in Django Unchained.

• We’ll be getting the final film in a mere weeks, but that hasn’t stopped J.K. Rowling from keeping the Harry Potter franchise top-of-brain with the newest marketing ploy, Pottermore.

• Pixar is being pretty secretive about their newest film, Brave. The first thing we’re getting, however, is a glimpse at the very stylized characters of the film.

• We know that Entourage is a pretty douchey show, but this new poster makes us feel like they may just know themselves, and feel really bad about it.

• A Russian company called Stoyn has helped make every 80s fanboy’s dream come true by releasing Pop Culture Popsicles. We have a feeling the Darth Vader flavor may taste more like plastic than anything else.

• The very first images of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy have hit the web. Strangely, they look identical to Peter Jackson’s last trilogy about a ring…

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Get Your First Look at Marvel’s ‘Fear Itself: FF’ #1

With the Fantastic Four, and the rest of the Marvel U, in chaos it was only a matter of time before things came to a head with an epic battle. Now, that time has come with Marvel’s Fear Itself: FF.

Written by Cullen Bunn with art by Tom Grummett, FI: FF tells the story of Ben Grimm (aka The Thing) who has been deemed “worthy” by the villainous Serpent and now it’s up to the FF to put an end to his rampage.

But do the FF have a prayer at prying their friend from the God of Fear’s grasp? I’m going to guess it end up being a lot harder than they think. Plus, there will probably be a lot of damage, both physical and emotional, before its all done. Whatever happens, it looks to be epic.

We’ve got preview pages for this comic for you today. Naturally, you can check them out right after the break.

Fear Itself: FF #1 hits comic book stores on August 3rd. We’ll be reading.

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Film Score Friday: ‘Cars 2’ by Michael Giacchino

PIXAR began taking the cinematic world by storm in 1995 with the original Toy Story. Part of what made that film so good was the songs and score by Randy Newman, who would go on to write music for the next three PIXAR films. For the fifth film by the studio, Randy’s cousin Thomas Newman stepped up to the plate for the Finding Nemo score. It began to look like the Newman scoring dynasty had the monopoly on Disney’s golden goose.

That was until PIXAR brought in an outsider to direct their sixth film, The Incredibles. Brad Bird brought on young TV composer Michael Giacchino to write the Bond-tastic music and the rest is history. Giacchino has since won an Oscar, and was nominated for another, for his work with PIXAR and now has come full circle with another international spy influenced score for Cars 2.

There are few things that are a certainty in life, and it is starting to become obvious that one of them is Giacchino’s PIXAR scores are some of the greatest pieces of music written in the last decade. Cars 2 is absolutely not an exception to that rule. The music is fun, exciting and catchy as all hell, I instantly find myself whistling and humming along with the tracks. I have only been with the CD for a week and I already count it as being as good as the best scores from last year.

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‘King of Kong’ Director Seth Gordon Taking On Reboot of ‘War Games’

After setting up a new version of Robocop and Carrie, MGM’s reboot-o-rama continues with their plan to take the 1983 John Badam hacker thriller War Games and bring it to new audiences. With that in mind, the studio has tapped director Seth Gordon to develop the reboot and direct.

As you may know, Gordon first rose to prominence with the gaming documentary The King of Kong and most recently directed the upcoming comedy Horrible Bosses with Colin Farrell, Kevin Spacey, Jennifer Aniston, Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis and Jamie Foxx.

In case you’re not familiar with War Games (although that’s unlikely), it starred Ally Sheedy as his girlfriend and Matthew Broderick as a computer hacker who finds a back door into a military computer system. Once inside, they start to play a nice game of “Global Thermonuclear War” which, unfortunately, isn’t a game to the computer. This sets off a series of events that if not stopped, could lead to WWIII.

Gordon will reportedly have a lot of leway in creating the reboot and with the level of sophistication of computer games, hardware and software these days, the results could be pretty interesting indeed. Gordon seems like a pretty good choice for this reboot.

Certainly better than the last time they tried to capatalize on War Games by making the abyssmal “sequel” War Games: The Dead Code. What a disaster that was. Let’s hope Gordon has better luck.

First Footage From NBC’s Failed ‘Wonder Woman’ Pilot Surfaces

Just when we thought we’d have to wait for this year’s San Diego Comic-Con to get a first glimpse at David E. Kelley’s failed pilot for NBC starring Adrianne Palicki as Wonder Woman, Christmas seems to come a bit early.

We’ve got some very rare, very raw footage from the never-to-be-seen episode in which Palicki’s Amazonian princess takes on a team of thugs. The footage is very reminiscent of a few other failed comic book properties such as Roger Corman’s Fantastic Four and Fox’s failed Generation X pilot.

This is the very first footage we’re getting from the pilot, so be sure to judge and comment away, as we’re pretty astounded as to how the master of legal comedies like Boston Legal and The Practice could do something like this.

Check out the scene after the jump, and be sure to keep an eye out as more footage will likely surface as we get closer to convention season. And yes, she’s wearing the hot pants in this scene.

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