if you're morbidly curious enough to find a copy somewhere, I own and have read about half of an ET sequel novel called "ET: The Green Planet" which picks up immediately after ET's ship takes off. He goes to his planet and ... hangs out? ... talks to his weird talking 'pet' thing that is described as having a hundred or so tendrils that it walks on and can dig through dirt very well, apparently. He tries and fails several times to send Elliot brain messages that always miss and hit a radio or a TV or an arcade machine or whatever nearby and he never gets through...

I got halfway in and realized that there's literally no actual story going on by that point. You just meet a bunch of weird aliens who talk about how awesome their planet is cause of all the different types of plant life and shit. Whoever wrote it must have been stoned out of their minds...

As far as movies that were in the pipe but never got made... hmm...

Well, the Gladiator 2 script they mention in that article... That kinda already exists...  sorta...  in a comicbook form. There's a comic called "Mr. Blank" that's just about the most bad-ass action-comedy movie never made. It's got time travel, giant robot samurais, a big-ass zepplin, ninjabots, guys that are thousands of years old pretending to be businessmen, a clone of a guy with super powers, a mutant mime with super powers, a russian half-demon, a really smart alternate take on the christian theology, a nice puppy dog, a robotic copy of a clone of a guy, hover bikes and a really angry little german scientist guy.

And also some dude named "Sam". With moxie.

It's fucking awesome.

Tim Burton's Superman Lives? The guy was going to put nic cage into a translucent neon-glowing sparkle-suit (even redesigning the "S" symbol), have him fly around a dark... the concept art I've seen makes it look like some kind of cavern or something, but with sci-fi shit going on with the walls. Like an underground lair, but massive in scale. Fighting a giant spikey metal ball thing that was apparently supposed to be brainiac. The various concept art I've seen of the suit showed a variety of little doodads. Superman was rumored to employ some sort of firearm as well, like an arm doohickey that would shoot lasers or rockets or some such bullshit, tho that info isn't anywhere online that I can see. I swear to god there's an old issue of Wizard! Magazine that had an interview with someone who was talking about giving superman weapons and armor and shit.

It's the prequels I'm worried about. They're making two cabin fever prequels as we speak, and I've heard people whispering in hushed tones about a saw prequel and/or spinoff. I think Lionsgate misses getting a reliable $30 Million or so every October.

If people complain about the bat voice being unrealistic or annoying, I just link them to this sort of stuff.

Batman's just into the death metal, that's all.

Or maybe he's a fan of Cookie Monster?

kwit tryinna indoctorate my childruns you libral hollywud commies!

Seriously, tho, the idea that Ghibli is run by hollywood is laughable. Also, these films are both adaptations of extremely popular classic children's books. What the hell, man? Put anything into your film about not destroying the environment and you become some kind of anti-american terrorist sympathizer.

"I think flowers are pretty. We should plant some flowers in this park so the park will be prettier."

"QUIT TRYIN TO DESTROY AMERCAN INDUSTRIALITY YOU FUKKIN COMMIE NAZI ENVIRE MENTALIS! I DON WANT MY KIDS SEEIN YER FUKKIN FLOWRS AND TURNIN ALL GAY AN SHIT, NEITHER!!"

I coulda swore they recorded something for it, but it's not on the list on the site. Maybe it's one of the ones the laptop ate?

Oldschool theater projectionist explaining an 'alarm' system that was common back in the day to warn projectionists that they were about to need a reel change. According to him, systems like this are the reason there are often long, sustained vertical scratches on all those old film prints.

I just thought it was kinda neat.

If it were a game, they'd advertise it that way. This - like most of the things parading around as games lately - is not a game. It is a movie with a limited amount of interactive busywork you have to do to unlock the next movie clip. This is "Interactive Entertainment", which sounds like one of those alternative phrases for something, like how "Graphic Novel" is a fancy way of saying "Comic Book", but IE is something else entirely. Modern games are more like interactive movies than games, and they spend a lot of effort removing unwanted things like challenge, complex interaction and AI so they can focus on scripted sequences and graphics.

You might not be able to get away with something like that in a 'regular' movie, but I think for a superhero movie, unless you're telling the origin story - and Burton never really did - the hero character is pretty much already set up. All you have to do is say "this is what this character is like" and that's it. The focus on a superhero flick should be the villains, because they're the ones who have goals and are pro-active the whole time. The hero mainly just sits around waiting for the villain to do something, then try to thwart their evil plan. They just react to stuff. The villains are the ones that have a story to tell. The heroes exist to be, essentially, the antagonist for the plot-driving villain characters.

Yeah, I noticed it as well a while back.

We are bad at reporting bugs...

As Hamill is the best Joker.

And I would place Ledger second. Face it. When you read a batman comic, in your head you use the voices of Conroy and Hamill in those roles. That show was and is the best adaptation of batman there has ever been, and ever likely will be. I wish it would just start back up again.

If you're making a movie where the main story element is as silly as "Nazis go to the moon, develop crazy weapons, build a massive army and then return in 70 years", trying to take it seriously will end up breaking your movie. In my opinion, at least.

Super Mario Bros.

This movie will be seen by me in a theater.

There are 'screenplay issues' going on here, but it's a good idea for a story. I have a few ideas for a second pass:

1) Overall there's too much prose and not enough description, i think. There's a line where Robert's "head is spinning". In a screenplay something like that is usually more literal. I doubt it would get confused, but you want to describe what the characters are doing and let the reader infer from that. All you get in a movie is visual and audio, so that's what you want to describe. Emotional states are generally too abstract, and you can kill your screenplay by giving the reader information the audience isn't getting. If you want the audience to be on the edge of their seat, then you want the guy reading the script feeling the same way.

But, hell, I do it a lot myself, so I can't really fault you. It's hard to get out of a narrative mindset where you add little lines to build mood like that. Also, be careful about taking advice from a guy who has yet to sell a screenplay.

2) "CANDLES barely illuminate the gloom of a long, dark, corridor." - Instead, try a scene where the candles on the wall are unlit, and Robert lights them as he goes, slowly getting closer to the cell. Meanwhile, the people in the other cells are creeping him out. It would build suspense as well as make more sense, given that it was unlikely that candles would be left burning unattended, even in a madhouse, and that it would waste candle to leave them on all day(those things are expensive, you know... the crazies like the dark, anyway).

3) There are 20 shillings in a pound, so you wouldn't really say "600 shillings" you'd say "30 pounds". If you were to add shillings to that, say if someone owed an additional 5 shillings, you'd say that out loud as "thirty pounds five". The 'shillings' part is generally left out unless there's some reason it might be confused. There are 12 pence in a shilling and 4 farthings make a pence. If you had to say several shillings and some pence, then you could say "30 pounds, five and six". I dunno what you'd add if you had farthings involved, but I doubt that came up much, as if you owed someone 30 pounds, a farthing was the least of their worries. If it were me, I'd pause and then add "... and three farthings" and then smile like a jackass for being such an anal retentive bastard about precise monetary compliance.

It's a neat idea for a story, though the idea of Bob Cratchit ending up on the police force is a bit hard to swallow, as is the idea that Scrooge is still alive after 20 years. Aside from that, it's something I'd probably watch even if it was just in an ironic sort of way. If it turned out to be a great movie, then that's cool, but if it ended up being terrible I'd watch it anyway, cause it seems to be either a serial killer or supernatural horror sequel to A Christmas Carol, and that's just awesome at face value.

I had been working on a much sadder painting of hobbes in a cardboard box in an attic surrounded by photos of Calvin having grown into his teens, graduating, adulthood, etc along with a tagline that would have read something like "I miss you so much". I just wanted the strip to go on forever.

It was so fucking sad I couldn't actually finish it, and that was like two computers ago so it's been lost to the digital gods now. These are much more happy and better.

I think an intermission about adaptations would be swell as well. As far as whose fault it is when they bomb, I tend to think that 50% of the time, the thing being adapted just isn't the sort of stuff that would make for a good movie, and the additional 50% of the failures you can chalk up to bad writing and/or studios altering the stories to try to make them more 'mainstream'. I always thought that was funny, considering that most of the time they were adapting them because they were already popular.