Tron 2.0 Casting News

December 25th, 2008 by Mox

Last week, The Hollywood Reporter reported that that actresses Olivia Wilde and Beau Garrett are the first to be signed for the Tron sequel. Wilde is currently a regular on the medical drama House M.D. and will be playing a worker in the virtual world who has to face the MCP. Garrett, who was most recently seen in Made of Honor, will be playing a siren in the virtual world.

While the male lead has not yet been cast, Coming Soon is reporting that Bruce Boxleitner will be joining Jeff Bridges as members of the original cast making appearances in the new movie.

Bridges (who played the dual roles of Flynn and Clu) appeared in test footage that was screened earlier this year at Comic-Con, so his involvement has been presumed, but it’s good to hear that Boxleitner, who played the title character as well as the “user” Alan Bradley, is also attached.

Not much is known of the film’s plot, other than it will be true sequel, not a re-imagining. Shooting is slated to begin in the spring for a 2011 release.

Bento Art

December 22nd, 2008 by Mox

Wall-E BentoEarlier this month, this picture was making the rounds of the internet as the latest example of something I’ve been seeing more of: kyaraben or character bento. And if you’ve read this blog at all (as infrequently as I post), it should be no surprise why it caught my attention.

I’m not a super adventurous eater, so I don’t eat Japanese food very often but I have had the occasional bento. However, I have never had anything so elaborate. It seems that character bento started as a way to get Japanese children more interested in their food and has grown into a bona fide art form. I’m not sure why it is that I suddenly seem to be seeing so much more of it, but it is fun to see the variety and creativity of these edible masterpieces.

Wall-E SandwichThe Wall-E bento above was created by Anna the Red, whose blog details her amazing bento creations along with other food-related how-tos, such as this Wall-E sandwich.

Wooden WALL-E

October 19th, 2008 by Mox

I first came across this on Tumblr but tracked it back to the source on a site called Toys R Evil. A UK-based group of sculptors and model makers was commissioned by Disney to create this piece as a gift to John Lasseter. The detail is amazing and can be seen is a close-up in the original post.

Toys R Evil is, itself, and interesting site, and not one I had visited before. It gathers news on toys that you are not likely to see in a more mainstream context, such as these creations from a company called OhNo!Doom.

See Dr. Horrible For Free Once Again

July 29th, 2008 by Mox

Joss Whedon’s “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” is available for free streaming once again, only now with commercials between acts. The soundtrack should be available for download in the next couple of weeks, with the DVD to follow sometime after. Joss also announced that there would be another part to the story.

Tron 2 Teaser Trailer Unveiled at Comic-Con

July 26th, 2008 by Mox

Yesterday, I saw this on Twitter:

Tron 2 film confirmed.

Intrigued, I did some digging and came across an article on IGN that described a trailer that was shown unexpectedly on Thursday at the end of the Walt Disney Pictures panel. It shows a light cycle chase and much more sinister-looking Flynn (again played by Jeff Bridges) before ending up with the number 2 in the Tron logo font as the letters T, R, and N appear around it (to form TR2N) and then fade back out.

This morning there was a Slashdot article that in turn pointed to articles on Gizmodo and Filmstalker with a bootleg video of the trailer (presented below Update 7/28: I grabbed the embed from the Filmstalker article, but as you can see, it’s been pulled. The Gizmodo article still has a non-embeddable version for the time being. Update 7/29: Someone did a pretty decent job cleaning up the video and posted it to YouTube, so it’s back.). The quality is poor as no videotaping is supposed to be going on during the video segments, but it’s good enough to get a feel for what’s going on. Hopefully, an official version of the trailer will be released soon.

Talk of a sequel has been slowly building momentum for some time now. At one one point it was rumored that Pixar wanted to do a remake or a sequel. Around the time of the film’s 20th anniversary, writer and director Steven Lisberger, talked about his interest and ideas for a possible sequel. However, Disney didn’t seem to show any interest in continuing the franchise until it released the game Tron 2.0 in 2003. A first-person shooter set in the computer world, it cleverly extended the metaphors originated in the movie to include modern computing technology such as firewalls, PDAs, and the internet. It was said that the game was going to be used to gauge interest in a sequel, but nothing more was really heard until 2005 when Disney hired a pair of writers to come up with a script for a sequel. It would be two more years before Disney would hire Joseph Kosinski to direct the film (now being written by a writing team from the show Lost). The Hollywood Reporter article detailing this most recent bit of news included this tidbit:

…sources said one of the things Kosinski will be doing is working on a sequence involving the movie’s Light Cycles to work out his vision for the movie.

It would appear that the footage shown at Comic-Con is the culmination of that work. It’s exciting to see that actual progress is being made and that (at least visually) it seems to be faithful to the spirit of the original, but I’m going to try to stay cautiously optimistic until more concrete details are available.

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