Report: Natalie Portman May Star in Alien Prequel

Natalie Portman may be too mature to star in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies — the 29-year-old actress dropped out of that film last week — but she’s evidently not too old to kick some ass in Ridley Scott’s Alien prequel. Portman is reportedly the frontrunner for the lead female role in 20th Century Fox’s reboot-in-progress.

Natalie Portman stars in the upcoming Black Swan.
Image courtesy Fox Searchlight

According to Vulture, Portman has the inside track to portray a Colonial Marine general in the planned sci-fi movie. Her main competition: Swedish actress Noomi Rapace of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo fame.

If Portman wins the gig, it would represent a marked departure from her recent string of art-house dramas, including Brothers and the upcoming Black Swan, opening Dec. 1, in which she plays an anguished ballet dancer.

A script rewrite turned in earlier this week by Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof has fueled new momentum for the project, estimated to cost about $150 million.

The studio might shoot for a PG-13 for the movie, according to sources who said the original Alien might have gotten that rating if a few F-bombs were excised. “The later Aliens movies were action movies, but the original Alien was a horror-suspense film,” an unnamed insider told Vulture. “This returns the franchise to its roots.”

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South Park Beats Back Jersey Shore’s Tired Hordes

MTV’s Jersey Shore is everything that is wrong with reality and television. The merciless satirists of South Park accept this truth, which is why they’re barricading Colorado against the spawn of someone named The Situation.

Or something like that: South Park’s network Comedy Central is huddled under Viacom’s megamedia umbrella with MTV. So the long-running animated series’ Wednesday episode, titled “New Jersey,” is either a head-fake or an example of that timeless television trope, Biting the Hand Humor. Whichever it is, we seriously cannot wait until Jersey Shore’s 15 minutes (seasons?) are up.

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Wildest Exploitation Movies, as Picked by You

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'Tis the season to be gory, as modern exploitation movies like the remade I Spit on Your Grave and the unrated Hatchet II hit the cineplex during the annual run-up to Halloween mayhem.

Honoring the genre last month, Wired.com rounded up our favorite classic B movies and invited readers to reveal their favorites. The result? An avalanche of more than 100 titles, ranging from obscure goof-fests like Evil Bong and Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead to genre classics The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Blacula and Night of the Living Dead.

Here's a sampling of the freakiest exploitation films ever, as picked by you.

Above:

Two Thousand Maniacs!

The best exploitation flick of all time, without a doubt, has to be Two Thousand Maniacs!, directed by the great Herschell Gordon Lewis, the "Godfather of Gore." —fstrjon

I can remember my mom taking me to see Two Thousand Maniacs! I have only seen it one time, so I'd love to see it again. —jamesallan

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Trailer: Fair Game Thriller Revisits Valerie Plame Scandal

When the Bush administration revealed that Valerie Plame was a CIA operative, she was not pleased — and neither was her husband, Joseph Wilson. In Fair Game, director Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity) revisits the scandal that rocked Washington, D.C., in 2003.

Naomi Watts portrays Plame as a tough cookie, with Sean Penn in fine mettle as her protective spouse. Tensions run high in the Fair Game clip embedded above: A suburban neighbor, amazed to learn that Plame is a spy, asks: “You killed people?” Plame’s reply sounds like the stuff of a Robert Ludlum novel.

Fair Game opens Nov. 5.

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Video: Bittersweet Tune Bids Adieu to Dollhouse

When Dollhouse was good, it was very, very good. And when it was bad — oh never mind. Joss Whedon and Eliza Dushku’s mind-wiped-escorts-for-hire show is TV history, but the sci-fi series lives on in perpetuity thanks to the Dollhouse: The Complete Second Season DVD, released Tuesday.

To mark the occasion, Dollhouse writer Maurissa Tancharoen and tunesmith Jed Whedon came up with a melancholy ballad called “Remains.” Despite the somber melody, director Anton King’s music video (embedded above) culminates in a happy ending after two replicant housewives emerge from packing crates to seek their fates.

[via The Live Feed]

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Hear 90 Seconds of Daft Punk’s Tron: Legacy Soundtrack

For an aural glimpse of upcoming film Tron: Legacy, fill your ears with 90 seconds of the movie’s ominous soundtrack by Daft Punk. A snippet of the song “The Game Has Changed” can be heard on the Tron: Legacy Facebook page. The score, written by Daft Punk, will be released Dec. 7, 10 days before the movie’s release.

Want an actual sneak peek at the movie? Tickets are going fast but are still available in some cities for “Tron Night: An Imax 3D Experience,” a free showing of 20 minutes of the movie scheduled for Oct. 28.

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Eric Stoltz’s Marty McFly Gets Dissected in Back to the Future Reissue

For five weeks in the early ’80s, actor Eric Stoltz played skateboarding teenager Marty McFly in Back to the Future before being famously replaced by Michael J. Fox.

Director Robert Zemeckis and producer Steve Spielberg discuss Stoltz’s aborted attempt at sci-fi comedy in the video clip above, a bonus feature included on the Back to the Future: 25th Anniversary Trilogy, which teleports to the present day on Blu-ray and DVD come Oct. 26.

Stoltz, who now plays Cylon creator Daniel Graystone in Battlestar Galactica prequel Caprica, briefly appears in the previously unseen Back to the Future footage above as McFly. Stoltz was “a magnificent actor, but his comedy sensibilities were very different,” Zemeckis explains. “And he and I were never able to make that work.”

“[Zemeckis] said, ‘I don’t think we’re getting the laughs that I was hoping we would get,’” says Spielberg. “And I realized he was absolutely correct.”

It was a “horrific decision” to have to make, says Zemeckis, but the pressure was on. Ironically enough, Back to the Future was given a mandate to wrap by a particular date. Zemeckis convinced the studio to let him go back and reshoot five weeks of footage with Fox, and the rest is sci-fi film history.

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10 Things You Didn’t Know About The Empire Strikes Back

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By Charlie Jane Anders, io9

Here’s a slightly different version of the battle between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader at the end of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. It’s just one of many revelations in a new making-of book. More rare concept art below.

The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back by J.W. Rinzler comes out today, and it’s not just essential for fans of the classic film. It’s also a must-read for anybody who’s interested in the creative process, because it goes into excruciating detail, on a day-to-day basis, on the troubled genesis of an amazing film.

You get inside the heads of everybody involved with it, and you see how much pain went into every frame of this movie. In particular, there’s a 17-page section in which you get a transcript of director Irvin Kershner and the actors — especially Harrison Ford — agonize over every second of the crucial carbonite freezing chamber scene, trying to get as much emotional truth and reality out of it as possible. This was on set, after the screenplay had already been revised several times, and every moment of that sequence gets rehashed and debated until it’s (arguably) perfect. There’s tons and tons of eye-popping concept art, including tons of versions of the Luke/Vader fight.

What Rinzler’s book drives home is that Empire Strikes Back was as groundbreaking and daring, in its own way, as the original Star Wars. The film went way over schedule and massively over budget, and almost ran out of money a bunch of times. Everybody became sick on set, Mark Hamill broke his thumb doing one stunt, and there was an accident with the bacta tank that could have killed Hamill if he’d been inside. Also, the movie’s second unit director and its first screenwriter both died during the process.

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First Look: Tron: Original Movie Comic Boots Up

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Tron fans looking to scratch their burning Tron: Legacy itch can jack into a pulp rendition of the original movie Nov. 3. That’s when the first issue of Marvel Comics’ Tron: Original Movie Adaptation series powers up.

Writer Peter David and artist Mirco Pierfederici are the lucky talents tasked with rendering Tron’s neon gamerverse into a comic series. Click through our preview gallery above and let us know in the comments section below if the Tron: Original Movie Adaptation series is a geek must-have.

Images courtesy Marvel Comics

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Holy Sons’ Survivalist Tales Harnesses Sci-Fi for Introspection

In his Holy Sons solo project, Emil Amos releases introspective music with sci-fi underpinnings
Photo: Eliza Sohn

Holy Sons stakes out dystopian territory on Survivalist Tales, using sci-fi and psychedelia as a starting point for inner-space exploration. The futuristic music makes a suitable sonic complement for fans of The Twilight Zone, Fantastic Voyage and Pink Floyd’s operatic alienation.

Survivalist Tales, out Tuesday from Partisan Records, is the ninth release from Holy Sons, a solo project by Emil Amos (who plays drums with experimental rock heavies Grails and Om).

LISTEN: “Slow Days” by Holy Sons

“Holy Sons is a hermetic project based on the inner reality of one person, so it needs the traditional narrative ceiling to be removed in order to reflect the infinity that exists in a human being,” Amos told Wired.com in an e-mail interview.

“I think the most famous example of exploiting sci-fi’s flexible scenarios to suit an artist’s selfish narratives was the way Rod Serling created The Twilight Zone in order to talk about issues that his editors usually wouldn’t allow,” he said. “I also imagined Survivalist Tales being like the film Fantastic Voyage, but if it had been a journey into the human mind instead of the body. It was also built to be a blustery hi-fi record in the tradition of the sonic pretension of albums like The Wall.”

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