But this post isn’t so much about what I thought of the movie as much as it is about how I found out about it.

Compared to the rest of the weekend, Sunday at Comic-Con was relatively low-key for me. The plan was Doctor Who in the morning and Torchwood in the afternoon, with a couple of hours to kill in between. Once the Doctor Who panel wrapped up, I started to make my way down to the exhibit hall for more browsing but then decided that I just didn’t want to deal with crowds down there (even for a Sunday), so instead I grabbed some lunch before heading back to the ballroom.

The next panel was actually a trio of short indie movie panels presented back-to-back with no breaks in between, and first up was Paper Heart. It started off with the trailer, and then stars Charlyne Yi and Jake Johnson and director Nick Jasenovec chatted briefly with the moderator before showing a deleted scene from the movie, an interview with actor Rob Huebel wherein he is confused about Charlyne’s gender and demands that she “show them (her) dick.”

After the clip, it was time for audience questions. It started off normally, but the second guy up asked when Charlyne was going to show us her dick. Charlyne looked genuinely shocked as the guy tried to start a chant of “Show us your dick! Show us your dick!” but she broke character for a second when the crowd quickly turned on the guy and started booing. She then yelled back at the guy, “I’m not a guy, I’m a girl! I have a vagina! Do you wanna see my vagina? Do you?” At which point she stood up on her chair to reveal a large black dildo hanging out of her jeans.

She had been sitting between Jake and Nick, but now that she was standing they were at eye-level with the dildo and she made a point to wave it front of each of them. When she finally sat back down, she stood it up on the table between her and and Jake, and he could not seem to keep his hands off of it. At the end of the panel, she threw it out into the audience (at their insistence). All in all, a very memorable panel, but I was now genuinely interested in seeing the movie and an instant fan of Charlyne.

There is a bit of an epilogue to the story. The weekend it was released, there was going to be a Q&A with Charlyne and Jake after one of the screenings at the Arclight, but it was already sold out by the time I found out about it, so I made plans to see it the following Tuesday after work. Coincidentally, Charlyne was at that screening dressed as an Arclight usher and helping people find their seats. Not too many people recognized her until she helped introduce the movie. According to the movie’s Twitter account, she has shown up to several screenings in “disguise.”

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.

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.

The 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.

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.

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.

Starring Neil Patrick Harris as Dr. Horrible, Nathan Fillion as Captain Hammer, and Felicia Day as Penny, the story follows Dr. Horrible as he attempts to gain admittance to a super villain organization and work up the nerve to talk to the girl of his dreams (Penny), who he has inadvertently introduced to his arch-nemesis (Hammer). As the name suggests, the show is a musical and features Joss’ quirky, irreverent sense of humor.

The show is presented in three 15-minute acts that were released over the course of this week for free on the internet. After today (July 19), it will only be available for purchase on iTunes until the DVD is released sometime in the coming months. Joss came up with the idea during the writer’s strike and explains the motivation behind it in a note to his fans:

Once upon a time, all the writers in the forest got very mad with the Forest Kings and declared a work-stoppage. The forest creatures were all sad; the mushrooms did not dance, the elderberries gave no juice for the festival wines, and the Teamsters were kinda pissed. (They were very polite about it, though.) During this work-stoppage, many writers tried to form partnerships for outside funding to create new work that circumvented the Forest King system.

Frustrated with the lack of movement on that front, I finally decided to do something very ambitious, very exciting, very mid-life-crisisy. Aided only by everyone I had worked with, was related to or had ever met, I single-handedly created this unique little epic. A supervillain musical, of which, as we all know, there are far too few.

The idea was to make it on the fly, on the cheap – but to make it. To turn out a really thrilling, professionalish piece of entertainment specifically for the internet. To show how much could be done with very little. To show the world there is another way. To give the public (and in particular you guys) something for all your support and patience. And to make a lot of silly jokes. Actually, that sentence probably should have come first.

I’ve heard he’ll be making the rounds of the talk show circuit to promote the movie. He should also be making appearances in Disney theme parks no doubt giving Push a run for his money.

It was initially thought that the hard drive did not survive the reentry, but when it was discovered to be largely intact albeit severely damaged, the project team sent it to a data recovery service. The contents of the drive came back about 99% complete, but it still took several years to analyze the data. The results were published just last month and confirmed that xenon experiences a sudden change in viscosity known as shear thinning when it is stirred vigorously. This effect is what allows whipped cream and ketchup to from flowing smoothly like a liquid to holding their shape like a solid.

While this wasn’t necessarily an earth-shattering experiment, it was fortunate that it could be completed as the lead investigator, Robert Berg, expressed in this Scientific American article:

He notes that the experiment could have only worked in microgravity, to prevent the xenon from settling under its feather-light weight. With NASA’s priorities shifting away from basic research, he says, “this is the sort of experiment that won’t be duplicated for a long time, if ever.”

Computer World has a more technical explanation of the data recovery process.

Engadget also had a story from Maker Faire about Ultimate Wall-E that included a video (from Techie Diva, embedded below). This video better showcases Wall-E’s range of motion, including his head, arms, and eyes. The rep also demonstrates his collision avoidance and directional sound sensors. And while not implemented in that prototype, the rep explained that he’ll also respond to small number of voice commands.

After seeing this new video, I can’t wait to get my hands on one of these.

Update: A friend pointed out that video changed at some point. It would appear that the embed code I got from Engadget points to the most recent Techie Diva video instead of this particular one. (Incidentally, the original Techie Diva story is showing the same incorrect video) You can find the original video at Blip.tv.

Related Post