Giant Freakin Robot

With the exception of Speed Racer, any project from the Wachowski siblings is going to get a rise out of me, for their storytelling skills manage to take viewers to places that no other filmmakers do, for better or worse. Their next project, Jupiter Ascending, already sounds like some kind of a modern epic fairy tale, and now another of the most notorious modern storytellers will make an appearance in the film, proving that trying to predict anything about a Wachowski project is just silly.

Usually, our sources are places like The Hollywood Reporter or Space.com, but today’s news comes to us from director Terry Gilliam’s Facebook page. He recently let fans know that he would be appearing in Jupiter Ascending, posting the set photo seen below with the following caption:

“Off at dawn tomorrow to pretend to be an actor in the new Wachowski’s film, Jupiter Ascending. It’s a small but vital part (or so I’m told). Apparently, these guys are in the film as well. I can’t wait to meet my hairdresser.”

Star Trek Into Darkness is finally out, letting everyone judge it for themselves after being the subject of rampant speculation, debate, and name-calling for over a year. Now we can all move on to arguing about the future of the Star Trek franchise. After all, it’s very much unwritten at this point. Director J.J. Abams has signed on to helm Star Wars: Episode VII, and it’s anybody’s guess whether he will also be able to handle Trek 3. So where Trek 3 will go from here is anybody’s guess.

Into Darkness improved over Abrams’ first Trek in every way, but it also skewed the new timeline even further from the Original Series. At this point, it’s clearly a straight-up alternate universe where pretty much anything can happen. And while we’d love to see Trek 3 actually serve up a whole new story and villain, there are also some classic Trek races and enemies we’d love to see enter the new Trek-verse

If I were to tell you all the ways in which I’ve actively noticed Einstein’s Theory of Relativity changing my life, it would take relatively no time at all. I’m not well versed in physics…or anything. But I know something amazing when I hear about it, and this is it.

By focusing on predictions made within the Theory of Relativity, astronomers have discovered the plainly named Kepler-76b — nicknamed “Einstein’s planet” — which orbits a star in the Cygnus constellation, about 2,000 light-years away from us. It’s classified as a “hot Jupiter” due to its massive size; it’s 25 percent larger than Jupiter and weighs twice as much. Incidentally, I tried to give my wife a Hot Jupiter last weekend and I’m still putting make-up on the bruises.

“This is the first time that this aspect of Einstein’s theory of relativity has been used to discover a planet,” said Tel Aviv University team member Tsevi Mazeh. The team didn’t follow the usual transit method of finding planets, which involves looking for dimming patterns on stars as planets pass in front of them. Instead, they looked for effects predicted by Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.

When you write a movie that brings in roughly two-thirds of a billion dollars, you gain a certain amount of leeway in your career, and new doors and pathways open up in front of you like magic. For example, take the case of Billy Ray, one of the writers who adapted Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games. He just got the nod to direct a movie of his very own, the sci-fi romance Departure.

Departure is “inspired” by Martin Caidin’s book Ghosts of the Air, and, as you may have inferred from one or both of these titles, it involves airplanes. According to Variety, the story centers on an investigator for the Federal Aviation Administration. Based out of Miami, this particular fellow becomes obsessed with discovering how an entire 727 can disappear, then reappear in the exact same spot 10 minutes later. This drive becomes increasingly intense as similar strange happenings continue to take place in Florida skies, and things ramp up even more when his wife is on one of the planes. All in all, this sounds like an episode of Twilight Zone, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see the Bermuda Triangle come into play at some point.

Ray has worked on airplane movies before — he wrote the Jodie Foster vehicle Flightplan, which is set exclusively on a jumbo jet. Nor is this his first directorial rodeo. He helmed the political drama Shattered Glass, as well as the biographical crime narrative Breach. Since both of those are fact based, and Caidin’s book boasts the tagline “True Stories of Aerial Hauntings,” it doesn’t look like he’s straying too far from previous turf.