Editor’s note: To celebrate our 100th episode, we’ve asked Gallery 1988 co-owner and pop culture art curator Jensen Karp to write up the entry. You might want to wear protection. With the entire original run of The Twilight Zone available to watch instantly, we’re partnering with Twitch Film to cover all of the show’s 156 episodes. Are you brave enough to watch them all with us? The Twilight Zone (Episode #100): “I Sing The Body Electric” (airdate 5/18/62) The Plot: Three arguably neglected, but definitely motherless, children are taken by their father to a store that builds them a robotic grandmother in an attempt to rid them of their sadness. As a result we witness mild family drama, a confusing moral and an episode that is widely proclaimed as “the worst Twilight Zone ever.” The Goods: Remember when you first heard that George Lucas was making 3 new Star Wars movies and you were like, “This is going to be awesome! CAN NOT MISS!” Or when you jumped up and down hearing that Steven Speilberg was going to take the reigns of A.I. from the recently deceased Stanley Kubrick to create a Sci-Fi Nat King Cole/Natalie Cole-ish collaboration that couldn’t miss? Or even when the casting of Bio-Dome was announced and everyone exclaimed that a Pauly Shore/Stephen Baldwin buddy comedy would be a sure-fire laugh fest? The last one may have been just me, but the point is: sometimes your “dream line-up” that looks incredible on paper, should just stay [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

Matt Reeves has been tapped by Warners to direct their stab at The Twilight Zone which should start shooting next summer. The script comes from Jason Rothenberg – who has one television movie under his belt and a handful of flicks in development. According to Deadline Willoughby, this was a highly sought-after project, courted by many directors they don’t name by name. However, it also sounds like another in-name-only project where Rod Serling‘s series acts as name recognition while the movie is its own sci-fi beast with a similar tone. Of course, there’s already been Twilight Zone: The Movie, but isn’t really a remake. Furthermore, Reeves’s hiring brings up the question of when he’ll work on his other projects, and which will actually get done. Within the past 8 months, his name has been attached to a sequel to Cloverfield, a remake of They Live and a Frankenstein project. No one will admit it, but it seems only reasonable that renewed interest in the program stems directly from our exploration of all the episodes of The Twilight Zone. That’s the only explanation that makes sense.

There was a moment when Julie and Julia came out that made everyone pause and consider the possibilities of replicating the success story. After all, it was a blog that became a book that became a movie. That’s still a rarity, but the hull had been breached, and for a day or two it seemed entirely possible that anyone’s dumb musings could become a feature film. Apparently that was only the first step in the internet revolution invading film. In the span of less than two months, a poster named The_Quiet_Earth posted a hypothetical question to Reddit, James Erwin answered it with a sci-fi short story, and now that story has been picked up by Warner Bros. for a feature film. Our friends over at Screen Rant had the foresight to interview Erwin back when he was developing the script with Madhouse Entertainment, and now Variety is reporting that Madhouse’s Adam Kolbrenner brought the project to Warners and set up the deal. The short story imagines that a group of Marines headed to Afghanistan is sent inexplicably into Pre-Common Era Rome and must do battle with the Roman Legion and figure out how to get back to their own time. It’s high-concept, and the story gained a serious following on Reddit (which caught Kolbrenner’s attention), resulting in fan-made posters and trailers. You can read the story for yourself, and watch the mash-up style trailer below:

There’s no clue as to who exactly is describing Hyperdrive as The Fifth Element meets 48 Hrs, but the combination sounds fantastic, and that’s the two films The Hollywood Reporter is tossing out for context. According to them, Paramount just bought the script for the film, written by David Daniels and Tucker and Dale vs. Evil co-writer Morgan Jurgenson. The story focuses on a science fiction author who is asked by a cop to help track down a murder witness, but during the hunt, they “find themselves in the middle of a space opera playing out on Earth.” It sounds like it has the potential to be a big adventure, and it could have a lot of fictional science of a little, but the Hollywood sales pitch of tough crime meeting head on with insane sci-fi is definitely enough to perk some ears up. Plus, at a baser level, it’s always nice to see original sci-fi given a chance.

With the entire original run of The Twilight Zone available to watch instantly, we’re partnering with Twitch Film to cover all of the show’s 156 episodes. Are you brave enough to watch them all with us? The Twilight Zone (Episode #80): “A Quality of Mercy” (airdate 12/29/61) The Plot:  A zealous officer is anxious to kill, kill, and then kill. The Goods: Deep in the jungles of the Pacific theater of World War II, a Lieutenant (a very, very youthful Dean Stockwell) joins a ragtag bunch that’s used to hunkering down, waiting things out, and opting for comfort over protocol. Lieutenant Katell is a fire-breather, a young gun who claims that he has experience killing, but probably doesn’t. He has an axe to grind against an enemy he knows nothing about except that they’re the enemy. Thus, instead of moving around a small encampment, he wants to cut through it and kill everyone with a Japanese uniform. That is, until The Twilight Zone intervenes.

The Hollywood Reporter has an interesting piece on Tom Cruise, attempting to prove that he’s once again viable as a ground-moving A-list star. It’s an interesting opinion editorial that leaves out the larger points that 1) even when Cruise bombs, the movie usually makes over $200m and 2) it’s the entire idea of commercially block busting actors that’s diminishing. However, one thing that’s for sure is that Cruise himself isn’t. He’s got a few projects in the hopper, and at least one is a return to the world of science fiction. According to THR, there may be a second – the Doug Liman project We Mortals Are (which used to be called All You Need Is Kill and is still missing a predicate). The story focuses on a space soldier who, through science-y fiction, keeps living to fight on the day before he dies. After 158 wonderful deaths, he sees something different – a female entity known as The Bitch of War. It’s based off of the Hiroshi Sakurazaka manga, and, as it turns out, there’s something appropriate about placing Cruise in a movie about death and rebirth.

This past summer I was surprisingly blown away by the Steven Spielberg produced alien-invasion drama Falling Skies. Part of the surprise came from the fact that my anticipation for the series was extremely low. All I had known prior to watching the first episode was whatever information was in the trailer that dropped from TNT a month before it began airing. That case is the exact opposite when it comes to the much, much more high profile sci-fi show from camp Spielberg, Terra Nova. Especially now that Falling Skies cemented Spielberg’s return television (and the first time since ER that he has put out a series that’s been widely praised across the board), all eyes are on Terra Nova to see if lightning can strike twice. But unlike Falling Skies whose behind the camera talent is mostly full of non-names (outside of the offices of studio heads and agent assistants), Terra Nova boasts some heavy hitter talent such as Craig Silverstein (who created the new iteration of Nikita on The CW), 24 heavy-hitter Jon Cassar and Brannon Braga whose credits include Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager and the highly under-rated FlashForward. The point being that there are a lot of hands in the pot of a show that is either the next LOST or this season’s The Event. So it’s time to figure out which one it is.

A beam of light threatens the poor, hungover eyeballs of Julio (Julián Villagrán) who wakes up in a bed he’s never been in before. That bed belongs to Julia (Michelle Jenner) who slinks around her apartment cleaning up from a night of drinking and random sex with a stranger. Up in the sky, a UFO has appeared floating above the city. In fact, they’re all over the place. Overnight, while two people were blacked out drunk, at least thirty have appeared over Spain. Who knows how many more all over the world. However, writer/director Nacho Vigalondo is less concerned about the ship and more concerned about the play-like humor and drama to be mined from a tangled relationship because, as it turns out, Julia is in high demand (especially by her boyfriend).

By now, most fans credit Steve Wang and Matt Rose for the creation of the Predator. However, in my conversations with Steve, in particular, he feels that an unfair amount of credit has been given to him; it was a team effort bringing the Predator to life, and he couldn’t be more correct. During Monster Squad, Matt and Steve, who had been responsible for the Gillman, had worked through the weekend, grabbing precious few hours of sleep, while they established and painted the final suit. On Monday morning, it stood in the middle of Stan Winston’s satellite shop in all of its amphibian beauty. Stan saw it and his jaw bounced onto his chest. He had NEVER seen anything like it. It impressed him so much, that he, literally, stopped the work in the studio, gathered all of his employees around it and heaped praise upon these two kids (Matt was roughly 21 and Steve 20…maybe?). He said it was the best thing he had seen in his career thus far. Probably not the best strategy in the world. Months earlier, he was in England with his crew working on the Queen Alien, and now he was recognizing these two studio newcomers as the best. Where most of us in the shop agreed with Stan, there was some dissension.

A sharp twist to the concept of getting together for a boys’ weekend (and the ultimate bizarre response to the influx of Dude Bro movies), The Corridor opts for rounded, deeply complicated characters who have the kind of shared history that is as likely to cause an outbreak of hugs as it is a burst of heated words and violent threats. The whole messy pile then gets an eyebrow-raising element right out of The Outer Limits dropped on top, and it’s off to the races. The film opens with a frantic confrontation where Tyler (Stephen Chambers) hides in a closet while his mother (Mary-Colin Chisholm) lies dead on the ground ostensibly by her own handful of pills. A brick wall named Bobcat (Matthew Amyotte), pretty boy named Lee (Nigel Bennett), and Brad Cooper look-a-like named Everett (James Gilbert) bust into the house only to be confronted by a maniacal Tyler who takes a swipe at Everett’s face and stabs Lee in the hand. Months later, they find themselves at a funeral/reunion at Tyler’s mom’s house in the woods with another childhood friend (Glen Matthews) in tow, trying to reconcile their relationship and deal with a supernatural force that threatens their existence.

Why Watch? With the destructive bliss of Fantastic Fest slamming down on us like a thousand pounds of salmon (which is why the Short Film Of The Day won’t be so quite “Of The Day” for a bit), I thought it would be fitting to feature some wonderful short films that have played this fest and lived to tell the tale. This first one is a funny (slightly philosophical) jab at what we’re all made of. Based on the short story by Terry Bisson, it features Tom Noonan (with whom you can’t go wrong) and Ben Bailey (who you may recognize as the driver of the Cash Cab). It’s quirky, light, and a lot of fun. Without further ado, two aliens walk into a diner… What does it cost? Just 7 minutes of your time. Check out They’re Made Out of Meat for yourself:

With the entire original run of The Twilight Zone available to watch instantly, we’re partnering with Twitch Film to cover all of the show’s 156 episodes. Are you brave enough to watch them all with us? The Twilight Zone (Episode #78): “Once Upon a Time” (airdate 12/15/61) The Plot:  A cranky man of 1890 uses a time machine to head for 1962 to find out that things got a lot louder, faster, and more dangerous. The Goods: The absolute guts of this show continue to astound. Imagine if a modern seriesdecided to do half of an episode as a silent film. Black and white they already have, but it’s still a bold step. Rod Serling beamed an antique directly into the living rooms of his fans. That’s right. Not only is this a story where a man from the late 19th century hops into the middle of the 20th, it’s a time travel story for its audience by using modern television filming techniques alongside the earliest methods. And who do you get to guest star when half your episode is done as a silent film? Buster Keaton. Not a bad choice.

With the entire original run of The Twilight Zone available to watch instantly, we’re partnering with Twitch Film to cover all of the show’s 156 episodes. Are you brave enough to watch them all with us? The Twilight Zone (Episode #77): “The Jungle” (airdate 12/1/61) The Plot:  A businessman on a company committee that’s developing in Africa warns of the natives bewitching threats and falls victim to them himself. The Goods: The exotic nature of the episode is not lost even today where our view of Africa is a bit more well-rounded. Alan Richards (John Dehner) has recently returned from the continent and his first order of business is to get rid of a few knick-knacks that his wife has held onto. When she loses it at the thought of losing them in a fire, he scoffs, but the paranoia of a witch doctor’s threats still crawl underneath his skin. As it turns out, she probably shouldn’t have brought them home at all.

It’s hard to say how many words have been written over the course of Internet history about the Star Wars movies. I can’t say for certain what the first site ever constructed for the web was, but I imagine it was either a photo gallery of Cindy Crawford bikini pics or a fansite dedicated to Boba Fett. So I imagine that ranking the Star Wars films has happened at least a dozen times before. Maybe a few more. All of the movies recently got released on Blu-ray, however, and Lucas’s babies seem to once again be a popular topic of conversation, so I figure what’s one more time gonna hurt? Plus there has always been one popular opinion long held by the Internet faithful that has stuck in my craw. The original Star Wars (now titled A New Hope) is universally viewed as being a watershed moment in modern culture, a groundbreaking film that launched one of the most successful franchises of all time and changed the way that people make movies. Return of the Jedi though, it’s often mentioned as being the weakest of the original trilogy. People say that it’s where Lucas lost his way and started making action figure movies with toy stores more in mind than movie theaters. Though we can all agree that The Empire Strikes Back is the strongest of the original Star Wars films (can’t we??), I’ve always felt like Jedi was my second favorite, and a more than satisfying way to end [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

This past March, the Mark Gordon-produced, Ben Ripley-written, Duncan Jones-directed science fiction thriller Source Code hit theaters to both critical and commercial success. So much commercial success apparently that the film is being commissioned by Gordon and CBS for a TV adaptation without Jones or Ripley involved. According to EW, the series will focus on “three former federal agents who are part of a top-secret program. Each week, they’ll use “Source Code” technology to jump into the consciousness of people involved in tragic events.” Clearly that’s a fairly big leap from the film where the main protagonist (Jake Gyllenhaal) had no clue that he was inside the Source Code. The series will mark the first time ABC Studios will produce an off-network show. But as this will clearly be more of a procedural, it will fit right in at CBS who has actually been taking stabs lately at more high concept versions of the genre (like Person of Interest).

From the second half of the twentieth century onward, our view of NASA and its associated lore in movies have been inseparable. The astronaut, a uniquely American frontier hero whose myth and iconography made them the cowboy of the second half of the 20th century, has a position in our cultural memory that is inseparable from cinematic imagination. From pre-moon landing science fiction that dreamed of potential encounters with distant worlds through an organized space program (Planet of the Apes, 2001: A Space Odyssey) to reenactments of history celebrating the space program and the individuals involved (The Right Stuff, Apollo 13) to NASA/moon landing documentaries (For All Mankind, In the Shadow of the Moon) to later, more divergent science-fiction films that have emerged since the prominence of NASA has lessened (Armageddon and so on), NASA, space exploration, the moon landing, and its imagined associations have retained a prominent place in cinematic mythmaking prompted by continued fascination with the frontier of space and humanity’s place in it. Hell, we’ve wondered about the moon since the beginning of cinema. That our collective experience of space in both fiction (i.e., narrative cinema) and non-fiction has been via the moving image (i.e., watching the moon landing on TV) is perhaps what most thoroughly cements this porous association between NASA and its cinematic myth.

Today is the 91st birthday of a man who will live forever. Ray Bradbury had a profound effect on science fiction, on fantasy, on film, and on the future. Had he not become a writer, Bradbury would have been a magician, but in a lot of ways, he got to do both. Fortunately, some of his most iconic movies are available to stream right into your eyeballs using the wonders of technology (that Bradbury probably predicted). In case you want to discover the writer’s work or want to enjoy them all over again, here are five of those films and where to see them.

Stephen King has been a pop culture icon for several decades now, but it’s starting to look like in 2011 he’s heating up hotter than ever. Even though the world of Stephen King film adaptations took a bit of a hit when Ron Howard’s proposed Dark Tower movies got nixed, just recently it was announced that the Harry Potter super-team of David Yates and Steve Kloves are going to be doing a series of films adapting King’s post apocalyptic tale The Stand. And now comes the news that The Silence of the Lambs director Jonathan Demme is making a deal to adapt a King novel that hasn’t even been published yet.

Duncan Jones is a movie-making treasure. These days, saying that you’re going to go see a science fiction film pretty much means you’re going to watch a movie about space ships blowing up the Earth, and that’s about it. There aren’t many people making science fiction that’s based heavily on ideas rather than action, like the greats of the genre used to in pulp magazines like “Astounding Science Fiction,” these days. But with his first two directorial efforts Moon and Source Code, Jones proved himself to be a strong voice capable of making sci-fi the way it should be; full of forward thinking ideas and philosophical quandaries. The good news coming out of an interview that Jones did with DIY is that he’s currently readying his third science fiction project. The bad news is that it could potentially be his last. When talking about what will make his third film different from his first two, Jones said “Moon was done at a tiny budget and we really squeezed everything we could out of it. Source Code was a chance to work on a bigger budget with name actors, but on a project that wasn’t my own. Hopefully, this third film will be the kind of sci-fi I want to make, on a budget where I can afford to do it as I see it in my head,” he then added, “After that, I’ll change genres.” Jones paired with a hefty budget and creative freedom sounds great to me, but if [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

With the entire original run of The Twilight Zone available to watch instantly, we’re partnering with Twitch Film to cover all of the show’s 156 episodes. Are you brave enough to watch them all with us? The Twilight Zone (Episode #49): “Back There” (airdate 1/13/61) The Plot: A man steps out of his fancy Washington, DC men’s club onto the streets of Washington, DC. So what’s the twist? It’s DC in 1865, and President Lincoln is about to be shot. The Goods: It’s odd that a story featuring such a dramatic base idea would end up being little more than a fun thought experiment, but the only thing heavy about Back There is the acting. Russell Johnson (who everyone should remember from It Came From Outer Space) plays a not-yet-white-bearded man named Pete Corrigan with enough money and respect to belong to an exclusive club where men go to read in plush chairs, smoke cigars, and play Bridge like old maids. The topic of conversation turns to the idea of changing history by means of time travel – a cockeyed concept that Corrigan dismisses outright as he gets up to head on home. He’s deep in thought when a steward accidentally spills coffee on him, but it’s a small matter, and Corrigan heads outside to find himself getting fuzzy and the lightbulbs inside the street lamps turning to flame. He’s, somehow, stepped back in time to the balmy night in April when President Lincoln was assassinated.