Ewan McGregor teams up again with Young Adam director David Mackenzie in The Last Word, an apocalyptic romance which will co-star Eva Green, Connie Nielsen, Ewan Bremner and Stephen Dillane. (Screen Daily)

The fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie has Johnny Depp on board and also a title: On Stranger Tides. The name appears to be based on the 1988 Locus Award winning novel by Tim Powers. The official description of Powers' book mentions undead pirates and the Fountain of Youth:

Puppeteer John Chandagnac, who was sailing to Jamaica to get revenge on the uncle who had stolen his father's inheritance, has no choice but to join the buccaneers who have taken him prisoner--and soon, known now as the pirate Jack Shandy, he finds himself learning to survive in a treacherous new world of cutlass-fights, sea-battles, and voodoo magic on sun-blinded tropical islands. The legendary Blackbeard is assembling a ruthless navy of pirates living and undead to voyage to the fabled Fountain of Youth, and Jack Shandy must use magic, swordsmanship, and even his puppeteer skills to free himself and the girl he has fallen in love with from Blackbeard's deadly supernatural domination.

The film is expected to hit cinemas Summer 2011. (Coming Soon and THR)

Sarah Polley (John Adams) will play a 17th century Swedish monarch in a dramatic feature, Kristina, to be directed by Mika Kaurismäki. Given the education of a boy, Christina of Sweden was a keen scholar of the sciences and arts, who never married, and abdicated from the throne after she secretly converted to Catholicism. (SlashFilm)

A new miniseries adaptation of Melville's Moby Dick is in the works. Already signed on are William Hurt as Ahab and Ethan Hawke as Starbuck. (THR)

Trailer for Solomon Kane, starring James Purefoy, Pete Postlethwaite, Rachel Hurd-Wood, Jason Flemyng, Max von Sydow, Alice Krige and Mackenzie Crook. I'm not quite sure what it's about, but there's some pretty amusing inappropriate chemistry between Purefoy and Hurd-Wood there. [imdb]

Trailer for Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day, ten years late, unfortunately. Sorry boys, but this sort of behaviour stops being charming when you've hit 40. [imdb]

The Sarah Connor Chronicles season two DVDs are out. Here's a deleted scene.

EW chats with Kristin Bauer, who plays the awesome Pam on True Blood.

Does it seem like every second post I'm making these days is concerning True Blood? Is anybody complaining?

I was in thinking of procrastinating for a little bit by doing the fannish5 list (five effective uses of songs in movies or tv shows; which I might still do), when I spotted this awesome NY Post interview with Kristin Bauer, who plays Pam:

( SPOILERS + Pam backstory, and the Blu-ray S2 DVDs )


ETA: Oh, and this is why (out of many reasons) I love Josh Friedman:

In the Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles season 2 finale "Born to Run," Cameron invites John Connor to get up on top of her and cut her open in order to check and see if her nuclear power source is leaking. This is what she says (although she never actually says it) but we can wonder whether this is what her plan actually is. Certainly she knows whether it's sound or not, so perhaps she's doing it for John's benefit. On the other hand, she's not exactly clinical about the way she makes him straddle her. Here's the conversation I had with one of my executives:

( I'm sure she has her reasons. )

Concerning SCC's cancellation: FUCK YOU FOX. You take your Dollhouse and shove it.

ETA: Although it won't make anyone feel much better about matters, David Hines at Strange Horizons has written a wonderful review for SCC season two.

Also, I'm dying here, not being able to watch the new Eric Northman solo promo that's been released by HBO. YouTube is currently blocked from China, and none of the embedded versions work either for me. Could I trouble anyone to keepvid it for me, and upload it to MU or Rapidfire? I'd be very grateful.

Terminator/SCC fans on the f-list, I would really appreciate you sparing just a few minutes to take this poll. I know that everybody has their own theories about how time travel works in the Terminator-verse, but for my next fic (still in the planning stage), I'd like to gauge roughly where the majority stands on certain issues.

( teh poll )

Personally, I've more or less tended towards the many-worlds hypothesis together with the observer effect - meaning that, unless John Connor himself actually time travels, he will never know what the effects in an alternate reality of his choices to send others back will be. Hence, my earlier musings about the problems of personal identity (John's and Skynet's, in alternate universes) and why time travel would be used at all in war when its effects could never be felt (except by the time traveler). On the other hand, I really don't like the idea of circular causation ("fate"), or the idea that there is only the one timeline, which is repeatedly destroyed and recreated again every time someone time travels.

Anyway, that's enough of me. What do you think?

...before sign-ups close for the SCC Back to the Future Ficathon. We may never get a third season, but if you want to write your own version of what happens after the finale of season two, you should join up!

I'm back from Xiamen, arriving back in Shanghai at 10:49 pm last night (after a 23 hour train trip in a carriage full of students in 3-level bunk-bed compartments of which I shall not speak of again), utterly exhausted and dying for a shower. This morning I had a early morning classes, so I'm still not recovered, having slept for only about 3 hours. You can blame part of that on the fact that I watched the latest Sarah Connor Chronicles before going to bed, despite how tired I was, because the f-list got me all excited about it.

And can I say WOW? What an amazing season (and possible series) finale that was. Writers, you should take a look at The Back to the Future Ficathon. ( *spoilery* )

Massive spoilers for The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

The plastic stopper on my 5mL mini-bottle of Penhaligon's Ellenisia just broke and I've have to decant it into one of those cheap purse-sized vaporisers from Sephora. Considering how I've only worn it about 5 times total since I bought it in December, this does not make me happy. Nor does having my fingers smell overpoweringly of gardenias. Lovely perfume, awful bottle!

What does make me happy: I just saw the Skins series three premiere. LOVE!!

Colin Farrell is set to star in an adaptation of Ken Bruen's neo noir novel London Boulevard for writer and first time director William Monahan (The Departed). He'll play an ex-con trying to stay out of trouble and working as a handyman for a faded movie actress. Keira Knightley will co-star. Bruen has an instantly recogniseable, pared down, poetic style which I love, and I'm curious to see how that'll be translated to the big screen. (Coming Soon) [imdb]

E!Online is reporting the rumour that Dakota Fanning (The Secret Life of Bees) is in talks to star in the Twilight sequel New Moon as the ancient vampire named Jane, a member of the Volturi. The sequel is being directed by Chris Weitz (The Golden Compass). [imdb]

Trailer for the horror thriller The Horsemen starring Dennis Quaid, Zhang Ziyi, Lou Taylor Pucci, Clifton Collins Jr., Patrick Fugit, Eric Balfour, and Peter Stormare. [imdb]

Ask Ausielle gives hints about a major spoiler for Sarah Connor Chronicles: ( SPOILER )

Interview with Jim Carrey, Ewan McGregor, producer Luc Besson and the directors Glenn Ficarra and John Renqua about their film I Love You Phillip Morris, which is based on the real-life story of con-artist and jailbreaker Steven Russell (Carrey) who fell in love with fellow inmate, Phillip Morris (McGregor). Trailer is embedded below. [imdb] [official site]

Apropos of my earlier post: You don't have to totally agree with the editors' thesis (I don't), but I think The Mind's I is an interesting collection of essays and dialogues for Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicle fans who are curious about the whole mind-as-computer analogy.

I have an idea for a SCC story that I want to write, but I'm not sure that I have enough background knowledge of cryptology to do it properly. I was reading about the Terminator Salvation prequel comic, and the synopsis raised an issue I'm very interest in: communication, transportation and connectivity post-JD. ( *spoilers* )

When I wrote "Deutero", I imagined Skynet, as in T3, being not a physical entity, but almost entirely virtual; a big fish filling a pond made up of zeroes and ones, and thus distinct from the Terminators and cyborgs (who can be "converted"/"reprogrammed") by the fact that Skynet has no physical "body" that can be destroyed; in its mature, metastasized form, it is everywhere and nowhere, wherever there are machines. Working from what we know about Skynet's long-term stratedy ("Vick's Chip") - the primacy of Skynet information and control across every network - I assumed that long-range communication would be one of the first things that Skynet would stop the resistance from getting use of. Keep them isolated, keep them ignorant; a human alone is never any threat. Which is why the whole issue of getting Cameron to hijack a Skynet-controlled satellite was such a big deal in "Deutero".

Now that they're bringing "radio transmitters, hacked satellite phones, and encrypted computer networks" into play, I'm feeling slightly cheated, because my instinct is that Skynet would never be so stupid, so impotent. It would be monitoring all the frequencies, checking up on every functioning satellite, it would be present on any sophisticated, wide-range computer network, break any encyption you can create. Technological weapons might work against a human opponent, but you're never going to win a war against a superintelligence that way.

Which brought me to the notion of codes, ciphers, cryptology. Mightn't it be possible in theory to invent a code that worked along such nonlinear, organic principles that it was impossible for a non-human to break it? One that got right to the heart of what separates human consciousness and Skynet's abstract analysis? What would such a code look (sound? taste? feel?) like?

At the root of the problem: against a perfectly rational, perfectly patient enemy, maybe the quickest way to lose is to adopt its way of thinking, because no human can ever out-calculate Skynet.