I can't wait for Brian to post here.

Apparently Dorkman drives stick.

So I've got Jurassic Park going, and at about 1:15 Trey talks about a story he'll tell when we get to a zombie movie.

FYI, you can still rent Monsters on iTunes for $9.99.

I assume it'll be the 1978 Dawn of the Dead, but which cut, theatrical or extended?

I enjoyed Avatar, but I'm holding out on picking it up until Cameron does a commentary, which he's pretty good about doing.

Damn you!  I thought this was a release thread!

And yes, we had an epic geek party.  Too bad Plinket dropped the ball on the actual release, but hopefully he's ironed out those problems this time around.

Just watched it again myself a couple months back; still very good, and rather prescient actually.  There's a line near the beginning about how gas is over $3 / gallon and the economy sucks, what is there to celebrate; sounds like a good New Year's movie actually.

That was the official last episode of Geekza, http://www.downinfront.net/geekza/, last one at the bottom.

I suppose it depends how you want to categorize it.  Looking into it, I realized that Robin Hood isn't so much historical fiction as it is legend, or fantasy.  As an entity, Robin Hood can't be verified to have actually existed, but stories about him are so abundant that many believe he must have.  In terms of another such character on whom a film is based, the only other ones that comes to mind revolve around the Arthurian legend, in which case I'd look to Monty Python, so let's look at it from another angle.

As a pure historical drama, i.e. the events surrounding the story did happen, even if the story itself is not entirely historically accurate, a couple films come to mind.  Saving Private Ryan and Shindler's List, for showing us the sheer brutality of human nature as it actually happened. 

WWII though was fairly well documented, so we have quite a bit to go off of for a story in that setting.  Titanic shows us what is likely the most accurate depiction, in all it's horrific detail, of an event for which all we have to go on are survivor testimonial and forensic examination of the wreckage. 

Still, the story of the Titanic is also pretty widely known, so what about something smaller, almost a legend in itself.  Tsavo, Kenya is not a place you might have heard of before 1996, unless you were an African history or geography buff.  If that name does sound familiar, so might the tagline "Only the most incredible parts are true."  The Ghost and The Darkness is one of those films I wish we got more of, a true (if dramatized) story about an incredible event largely unknown to the world at large. 

In that same vein, though skewing much farther (almost completely) into fantasy, is Le Pacte des Loups (Brotherhood of the Wolf), which tells the story of a series of brutal killings that took place between 1764 and 1767 in an area of south-central France.  Attributed to a "beast," wolves are the most likely culprit, thus the title of the film, but the filmmakers portray the Beast of Gévaudan...a bit differently.  I won't spoil it, as this is the most likely film for folks to have not seen, but The Jim Henson Creature Shop was involved.  (Fun fact: I saw this while I was stationed in Germany, and it was my first foreign language film; French with English subtitles.)

These later types of historical fiction are my favorite, as they portray events I never would have know about otherwise.  You'd be hard pressed to find someone who has never heard of D-Day, or the Titanic although Oskar Schindler may still trip someone up.  The thing about historical fiction, is that the better is generally know about the era, the less you can make up and get away with without someone like me throwing the Bullshit card.  I'll grant that it's tricky; the filmmakers must decide which facts are important for their story, and change or make up the rest.  The fact that King Richard was not what we would understand today as an "Englishman" isn't important to the story Ridley Scott wanted to tell.  More to the point such a portrayal will likely never come to pass, as it would cause an audience largely unschooled in British history to wonder why the King of England is, apparently, French.  Then again, maybe "wonder" is exactly what audiences at large need to do more often.

Well, for what it's worth, here's a quote from John Knoll from the copy of Homing Beacon I just received:

"Getting good results on a stereo conversion is a matter of taking the time and getting it right," said John Knoll, Visual Effects Supervisor for Industrial Light & Magic. "It takes a critical and artistic eye along with an incredible attention to detail to be successful. It is not something that you can rush if you want to expect good results. For Star Wars we will take our time, applying everything we know both aesthetically and technically to bring audiences a fantastic new Star Wars experience."

Pretty sure that and a few others are in the store.  Just sayin'.

Eddie: Thanks for the post, that's what I was hoping for.