Chuck, Buffy, Paul, Waldo, Guys (Ritchie) and Dolls, and Project Natal

What's up in the entertainment world? Here are the recent items that have caught my attention.

So we learned last month that NBC had finally decided to renew Chuck. Chuck will have to share its Monday 8pm time slot with Heroes, which used to air after it at 9pm; Heroes will air in the fall, while Chuck will come back midseason. But when Chuck finally does come back, we will be seeing a lot more of Subway (Variety). The sub sandwich chain is one of the show's main sponsors, and it was at the center of a fan campaign to get Chuck renewed, with fans buying Subway's $5 footlongs in support of Chuck. Subway has already enjoyed some rather shameless product placement in the show, but they are now planning to have one of the characters work at a Subway. Product placement is annoying, but if it keeps the show going, I guess I'll live with it.

A new Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie is in the works (Variety, IMDb). Yes, studios love their franchises, and vampires are hot right now. Fran Rubel Kuzui, who directed the original Buffy movie, owns the rights and plans to bring the franchise back in a reboot with a new cast. I am skeptical that this is a good idea. I just hope they don't manage to ruin the memory of the TV show. Joss Whedon wishes them well, but it doesn't sound like he'll be involved.

The name of the movie is Paul (Variety). Simon Pegg and Nick Frost wrote the script. Greg Mottola (Superbad) is directing. The plot revolves around two sci-fi fanatics (Pegg and Frost) who find their way to Area 51 where they meet an alien (voiced by Seth Rogen) named Paul. Jason Bateman, Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader, and Jane Lynch will also be in the cast. Oh my god, I must be dreaming. This movie sounds like the perfect comedy. I will definitely be looking out for this one.

I mentioned before that Guy Ritchie had expressed interest in branching out from gangster movies and tackling musicals--with Jason Statham as a leading man, no less. But now he has chosen which musical he wants to do: Guys and Dolls (IMDb). Ritchie is apparently considering setting the musical in London rather than the musical's original New York ("It's the oldest established permanent floating crap game in... London?"). I'm picturing Statham as Sky, rather than Nathan, but I'm willing to be surprised. We'll have to see where this one goes.

Universal and Illumination Entertainment have beaten other studios to acquire the rights to a Where's Waldo movie (Variety). I have absolutely no idea how a Where's Waldo movie would work. Would they have some kids in a big crowd at an amusement park or beach or ski resort or somewhere trying to find Uncle Waldo again and again? Great! OK, so I guess they've done a Where's Waldo TV show already, and it seems it discarded the original books' simple "Find Waldo in the crowd" premise and gave him traveling adventures and conflict and stuff. Well, I can't say I have high hopes for this movie, but reading about it did take me back a good number of years. Ah, childhood nostalgia.

My last news is technology news from console land: At a press conference on the eve of E3, Microsoft presented its Project Natal, a technology they are developing for the Xbox 360 that will allow the player's own body to act as a video game controller (Variety, Variety blog The Cut Scene). The system will also have voice recognition. Those presenting the project expressed a belief that the hand-held controller has been a barrier (they seemed to imply that people who don't play video games don't do so because they don't want to pick up a controller), and now they have the solution to eliminate it. They gave some demonstrations of how the currently rudimentary system works, but it is unclear how long it will be until the technology is ready for release (at least a year, probably). I'm not really a console person, but this idea is certainly intriguing. It all depends, of course, on how the games use the technology. My general sense is that Wiis are very popular among casual gamers because they're so cute and trendy with their Wiimotes, but the Xbox 360 has better games overall. So I guess it's good that the Xbox 360 is finding a way to compete in terms of novelty and trendiness.

So what about Sony and their PS3? Sony has just unveiled their own PlayStation Motion Controller (The Cut Scene). This appears to have more in common with the Wii in that there is a remote, but it's more advanced and they seem to be chasing hardcore gamers, demonstrating the remote in an FPS context as well as a smashing-demons-with-a-mace context. Once Sony and Microsoft's motion sensing devices come out, the competition in console land will be very interesting.

Wicca, Whedon, JLU, and Aaron Burr

So I guess my thoughts lately have been pretty scattered. I had trouble falling asleep last night, which almost never happens to me (even when I came back from Hawaii, with six hours of jet lag, I fell asleep on cue). It was a combination of three things: 1) I was worrying about spiders (hey, they do bite, and though I killed a spider that was the likely culprit of the bites I got the night before, there could always be others), 2) my air conditioning didn't seem to be working so well, and my room was too hot, and 3) I was totally stressed out on behalf of the various protagonists of the book I'm currently reading, George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones. Anyway, I'm just trying to make an excuse for this post, which will be composed of a few little thoughts I've had, rather than centered around one coherent idea (as if my usual posts were coherent).

IMDb WENN news had an article today with the catchy title "Gellar Blamed For Pagan Rise". It turned out the title wasn't an entirely accurate representation of the article, which cited a British study published in Women and Religion in the West that claimed the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV show was responsible for 50,000 women abandoning Western religions for paganism. If this is the case, then it's probably more fairly blamed on Alyson Hannigan than Sarah Michelle Gellar, as she was the one who actually played a witch. I wonder, though, how many of those 50,000 were disappointed not to get all of Willow's powers. The article does point out that the show in general, with Buffy at the forefront, promotes female empowerment, which the study credits for the shift to Wicca (hmm, I suppose female empowerment isn't exactly high on the Western religion agenda). I don't know why, but this article struck me as pretty funny. And I don't mean anyone any offense in this amusement; I guess it's just the idea of a fantasy TV show causing a noticeable increase in religious conversion--it seems silly, but at the same time kind of makes sense. Of course, we can't give this study too much credit. After all, xkcd has shown that it is primarily Firefox downloads that is driving the increase in Wicca converts. Yes, folks, correlation does mean causation.

Speaking of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, ABC has announced that it has picked up new TV series Castle for a midseason premiere. Castle is a comedic procedural starring Nathan Fillion as a novelist who helps the NYPD solve homicide cases. Add that to my list of midseason shows I'm looking forward to (since we're on the general subject of Whedon, I'll give a shout-out to Dollhouse!). Sure, there are too many procedurals, and most of them are bad, but a comedic one with Nathan Fillion? Sign me up. More than any other show, I have a special interest in the subsequent projects of the stars of Firefly (Sarah Connor Chronicles, Chuck, Desperate Housewives... I mean, I even watched Standoff and Drive!). Maybe it's the simple fact that they have had more free time to pursue other projects than the actors from my other favorite TV shows. But I think there's something special about Firefly, not just in the lovablility of the characters (though they are just about the most lovable characters I can think of), but in the clear enthusiasm and passion of the players involved, their appreciation for the fan support, their eagerness to return to the story in the movie... Okay, I'm just gushing now--I'll stop.

Speaking of which, what TV show features the talents of Nathan Fillion, Gina Torres, Morena Baccarin, Adam Baldwin, and Amy Acker, and is not created by Joss Whedon? Justice League Unlimited! The first season of Justice League Unlimited (which I guess is the third and fourth season of the "Justice League" TV series that ran from 2001-2006) has a number of recognizable guest voice actors, including these members of team Whedon. Amy Acker does the voice of Huntress, Morena Baccarin does the voice of Black Canary, Gina Torres does Vixen, Nathan Fillion does Vigilante, and Adam Baldwin does a few different voices in a few different episodes. One episode features Vixen and Vigilante as two of a three person team, and I'm sure the episode wasn't quite as funny as I found it, because every time the two characters spoke to each other, I kept thinking of Zoe and Mal. This is not to discredit the show or the casting, since I found all of them appropriate for the parts. It was just a little added tee-hee for me. The reason I was watching this cartoon is that my brother, for reasons unbeknownst to me, came into possession of the Justice League Season Two and JLU Season One DVDs and lent them to me. I thought this was kind of odd at first, but I was surprised to find that JLU is really pretty awesome. And the preceding season was fun and helpful in understanding the setup. I gotta say, even though the JLU cartoon was supposed to be for kids and all, it had me stressed out a little, with some harrowing situations, complicated issues, and at times a serious serial drama thing going for it where I wasn't sure everything was going to turn out all right in the end. Well, here I am rambling again, and I wasn't even planning on writing about JLU at all when I started this post--I told you my thoughts are scattered today.

My last Thought of the Day is actually a little revelatory factoid that I learned last night watching Jeopardy. It was reruns of the Jeopardy College Tournament quarter-finals, but I hadn't seen it before. Double Jeopardy had a category called "Movie Directors", and since it was the College tournament they were all recent movies and I would have totally cleaned up that category had I been there (somehow none of the three contestants knew any of the five questions, and we're talking things like the director of Sicko, the director brothers of The Matrix and Speed Racer, Jason Reitman's sophomore film after Thank You for Smoking, and the director of the new King Kong; I guess most people have better things to do than keep up with movie news like me; Alex was actually somewhat impressed/relieved to see that there were college students not wasting their time with movies; this is becoming a long parenthetical). Anyway, the point of this is the fifth question, the $800 answer. And I'm guessing most people wouldn't think it was such a big deal. But I remember all too well this old got milk? commercial--which I would definitely put on my Top 10 Commercials list, if I were to put one together--where a historian sits in a room decked out with Aaron Burr vs. Alexander Hamilton art, books, and memorabilia, listening to the radio, spreading himself a peanut butter sandwich, when he is randomly called by the radio station to answer a question for $10,000: Who shot Alexander Hamilton? At this point, of course, his mouth is full of sticky peanut butter sandwich, and his attempts to say "Aaron Burr" around the mouthful are unsuccessful. He tries to pour a glass of milk to wash it all down, but finds the carton is empty, at which point he runs out of time to answer the question and the radio station hangs up. Cue dial tone and... got milk? Classic. Now, back to Jeopardy. This answer that had me laughing in disbelief was something to the effect of:
This director started out with the Aaron Burr got milk? commercial, and more recently directed the Transformers movie.
Seriously?! Michael "I-love-to-blow-things-up" Bay directed that classic commercial?! The contestants clearly weren't appreciating this bit of trivia, but I got a total kick out of it.

And now I've got to get back to Game of Thrones to see just how much deeper into trouble our heroes can get. And I'll get back to worrying about spiders in my bed. Why can't I get super powers from my spider bites? If strength of super powers scaled with the number of spider bites, I'd totally be kicking butt. Instead, all I got from these bites is the ability to walk around all day scratching butt.