Happy Birthday Rosario Dawson !

Much nicer looking than Les Dawson, though maybe not as funny !! 32 today !!

Fish Tank Ornaments

In Pets at Home today and I noticed a shelf of Fish Tank Ornaments, quite a few were pretty cool and would lend themselves to fantasy dioramas with a bit of extra painting and detailing here and there. The Stone Head Ruin (Top Middle) would look great on some kind of King Kong, Congo type of Ape diorama and the Broken Statue and Temple have a Clash of the Titans/Jason and the Argonauts feel to them. The Skull is pretty neat as is the Skull Island type of cliffs ! They're made of Vinyl and cost around £10 - 12 each !!! There's also some great Spongebob Squarepants ones too ! Pets at Home

The White Gazelle

Made in 1981 this film featured in Cinemagic Magazine, made by 3 brothers Tony,Joe and Mike Laudati, the film won a Student Academy Award and landed Tony a job at ILM animating on the films Cocoon, Explorers and Young Sherlock Holmes.

Robots that I like # 4

Running from 1980-81 Starfleet (X-Bomber) and was broadcast on ITV during the Saturday morning kids shows. PPA (Perfectly Programmed Android) was the X-Bomber's robot, voiced here in the UK by actor John Baddeley, who had also provided voices for Asterix and Obelix vs Caesar,The Dark Crystal and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. PPA was there mainly to provide comic relief and tended to class the rest of the crew as inferior to himself.

Click the Starfleet logo to se the shows opening credits !

Cerulean teaser trailer

Trailer for Allen Etter's Cerulean that I'm doing some spaceship work on !!

Commando 2: Die Hard

Read the other day that Die Hard was originally pitched to Arnold Schwarzenegger as Commando 2. The screenplay by by De Souza and Frank Darabont was based on the Roderick Thorp novel 'Nothing Lasts Forever' which featured detective Joe Leland visiting his daughter at her place of work the Klaxon Oil Corporation in Los Angeles, while there terrorists take over the building and Joe fights off the terrorists one by one with the aid of Sgt Powell ans LAPD officer who is outside the tower block. Schwarzenegger who had just done Conan the Destroyer wanted to avoid yet another sequel as he had not got favourable reviews from his Conan sequel.
In the final movie Joe Leland became John McClane (Bruce Willis) and his daughters character was changed over into his wife.

Other than that the story of the novel is pretty much what was filmed I have read, including a lot of the dialogue.'Nothing Lasts Forever' was the 2nd outing for Joe Leland having appeared in Thorp's other book 'The detective' which was made into the 1968 film of the same name featuring Frank Sinatra as the title character.

Interestingly the year before, Schwarzenegger had worked with Die Hard director John McTiernan on Predator, so he could have quite easily ended up being John McClane if things had been different, I wonder if I'd have liked Die Hard as much with Arnie ? Probably not !!

Scenes I love...scenes I hate ! #2

The scene I love is from Christophe Gans Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001) were Grégoire de Fronsac (Samuel Le Bihan) Mani (Mark Dacascos) and Thomas d'Apcher (Jérémie Renier) attempt to catch the Beast with a series of traps they have set up. I loved this film when I first seen it back in 2001, and this scene really gripped me, doesn't quite have the same impact now on DVD but it's still a superb action sequence even on the small screen !


The scene I hate is from a film I love, Die Hard (1988) I think everything in the film works for me, but then like that awful shot at the end of Robocop of Dick Jones falling from the window, Die Hard suddenly has one really shit scene,Karl (Alexander Godunov) who we last seen at the top of the 35 story building hanging with a chain around his neck suddenly appears right next to a Policeman from under some kind of tarp to exact his revenge on John McClane (Bruce Willis), now I've read that he was getting helped out by a Policeman pretending to be one of the hostages, but it doesn't come across that way in the film, besides how many Policeman help hostages carrying an assault rifle ? What makes it worse is we hear some of James Horner's Aliens music over the scene !!! I think the scene was tagged on just so Sgt. Al Powell (Reginald Vel Johnson) could get to use his gun !! Mind you, the entire film of Die Hard 4 was as shit as this scene !!