After watching the awesomely amazing Batman Begins I was completely under the impression that Katie Holmes‘s character Rachel Dawes would not be returning in the next movie. Not for contractual reasons or anything like, that but rather simply because they seemed to insinuate that her relationship with Bruce as we had known it was not possible anymore, and that she was moving on with her life without him. For more on this see the last 5 minutes of Batman Begins.

Well as various sources are reporting Katie Holmes was offered 2 million dollars to reprise the role and turned it down, presumably to star in an intellectually devoid comedy starring Queen Latifa, and on top of that the studio is still looking to cast someone else as the character as Rachel Dawes.

It’s nearly impossible to tell where fact starts and speculation begins in all this. The fact that Katie was offered 2 million to star in the Batman Begins sequel Dark Knight, and turned the role down due to “scheduling conflicts” seems all we can be sure of. The question of whether her doing this retarded Queen Latifa movie is the source of her conflict could be mainly speculation as could the talk of there still being a desire to cast someone else as Rachel Dawes instead of simply working around the charcter not being in the film, as there is no reason for a sequel not to be able to work if she weren’t returning.

[Read the rest of this entry…]

BBC news brings us news of a new animated series called “The Infinite Quest” starring none other than The Doctor himself, Doctor Who. Currently planned to be a 13 episode series it will feature the Doctor and his new sidekick traveling through many worlds to find an ancient spaceship.

Anthony Stewart Head, best known as Giles the Watcher in Buffy: The Vampire Slaver, will voice the vilain of the series, Balthazar. No confirmation of whether David Tennant and other stars of the live action series will be featured as the voices of their respective characters has been made at this time.

While I fully realise that none of our readers seem to care about Day Break I still feel the need to report on this amazing show in the hopes that someone will actually watch it.

Plans to release the episodes online have been finalised and this coming Monday, January 29th 2007, all 4 remaining episodes of the show will be available for download according to this episode guide on ABC.com.

As a follow up to my post from earlier this month my brother has some bad news. This week instead of Day Break NTV played 24. The Rogers Digital Cable listing, up to and including the time when the show played, showed that Day Break would play. Next week Day Break is shown as playing again with the description of the same episode that was meant to play yesterday.

So best case we get the new episodes one week later, starting February 8th, and worst case we won’t be getting them at all. This isn’t a big deal considering the episodes will be available online at ABC.com but is still relevant as the quality and convenience of a TV broadcast makes it worth keeping an eye out for.

Thanks again to Togast for this news.

Update!

Canadian viewers, along with all other non US viewers, will likely not be able to view new episodes of Day Break as they are released on ABC.com. Eager viewers will instead be greated by a message stating that Only viewers within the United States can watch these full-length episodes.

I’ll see if I can find a work around…

Numerous sources confirm that the unattractive and untalented Gwyneth Paltrow will star as Iron Man’s love interest Virginia “Pepper” Potts opposite on again off again drug addict Robert Downey Jr. Some people consider this stain on the film industry to be talented since winning an Academy Award for her performance in the unforgiveably bad Shakespeare In Love. This does not change the simple fact that with nearly 40 sub par film performances under her belt she has only managed to make a single good movie.

Here’s hoping for #2!

Who the hell calls their kid Apple? Seriously?

In this review Batman himself talks about the Batman Begins HD DVD as well as some features of HD DVDs in general.

Day Break may be returning to Canadian TV February 1st 2007.

Fans of ABC’s Day Break, starring Taye Diggs, were disappointed to learn of the show’s early cancelation last month. This show was slated to run its 13 episode course during Lost’s hiatus but was canceled after a mere 6 episodes due to poor ratings. As all episodes of this show have already been made there are plans still in the works for ABC to release the show online. Apparent problems with rights to music have hindered this process and it now seems they may be released online in late February.

The Canadian channel that played the show, Global TV, was even less forgiving than ABC and stopped airing the show 2 weeks earlier than ABC did. [Read the rest of this entry…]

R2-D2 seems capable of so much with his rockets and all that stuff. Well what if someone configured him to be used as a home theatre system? Just your luck! The fine people at Nikko Home Electornics have done just that.

The R2-D2 Communication System, a 1/5 scale version of the droid, is a complex audio communication device equiped with radio, sounds effects, phone, webcam and is controled by a Light Saber remote! All this for a somewhat affordable $350.

The larger 1/2 scale R2-D2 Mobile Entertainment System is quite a bit more elaborate. He is equiped with a 2D projector (no crappy hologram?!), can play DVDs, CDs and many file types, has a dock for an iPod, has USB slots, memory card inputs for viewing photos, a number of audio/video inputs, radio and sound effects. And this is controled by a Millenium Falcon remote. This one will cost you quite a bit more at $2500.

Check out this clip of the larger MES model in action at CES courtesy of Shiny Media:

News from CES 2007 is showing that many major porn studios are now leaning towards HD-DVD over Blu-Ray for a variety of reasons. A trend I’ve noticed while browsing in stores is that a lot more family oriented films seem to be going Blu-Ray with studios like Sony, Fox and Disney having a lot to offer that demographic, while HD-DVD has a larger selection of adult oriented titles, which is a phenomenon which will only be encouraged by this trend in the industry.

The high cost of Blu-Ray seems to be a major deterent of the format. A representative for the studio Bangbros mentions that the HD-DVD player is felt to have had better market penetration when compared to Blu-Ray largely due to the HD-DVD add on available for the XBox 360.

The number of XBox 360 consoles on the market surpasses PS3s by a considerable factor but PS3 has the advantage of it’s Blu-Ray technology being built in, while the HD-DVD add on for the XBox 360 is a seperate upgrade, which has on it’s own sold less units than the PS3. It goes without saying that anyone who buys an HD-DVD drive is actively interested in playing high definition movies with it though the same can’t be said about everyone who buys a PS3 or rather for those people who bought a system with the intention of ebaying it only to learn the market had been saturated.

Thanks to Matt of BoNR fame for the heads up.

2006-01-13 – Update!

According to this article it’s not only the industry that chose to go HD-DVD. Sony also doesn’t want porn on Blu-Ray and doesn’t allow distributors to make porn discs. I guess they’re trying pretty hard to maintain a certain family friendly image.