Rumor: Toy Story 3 screenwriter scripting Star Wars: Episode VII

Assuming Vulture is to be believed, the screenwriter for the upcoming Star Wars: Episode VII may very well be Michael Arndt, an Oscar winner best known for writing Pixar's Toy Story 3.

Ever since news broke that Disney had purchased Lucasfilm, and has plans to release three new live-action Star Wars movies over the course of the next decade, the geek masses have been alternately celebrating with abandon and racking their brains for any snippet of information that might reveal who exactly Disney will tap to work on this crucially important continuation of George Lucas’ world-famous sci-fi saga. To wit, this article published only yesterday which claims that Harrison Ford may return to reprise his role as Han Solo in Episode VII.

In reality of course, nobody outside of the expansive Disney family has any idea who might be tapped to work on this project, but that won’t stop journalists from clinging to anything that could possibly be construed as a hint. Thus, Vulture reports that Disney wants to hire Michael Arndt to script Episode VII. According to unnamed, “informed sources,” Arndt has already completed a “a 40- to 50-page treatment for the film and is likely to be at least one of the writers when the Disney/Lucasfilm project begins shooting in 2014.”

Though you may not be familiar with Arndt directly, you’ve certainly seen his work. He wrote the indie hit Little Miss Sunshine, and provided screenplays for both Toy Story 3 and the upcoming Hunger Games sequel, Catching Fire. Further, he’s also apparently penned screenplays for an upcoming film based on The Disney Channel’s Phineas and Ferb cartoon series, and a Pixar film that IMDB calls “The Untitled Pixar Movie That Takes You Inside the Mind.” Obviously we know nothing about that last project, but based on Pixar’s past efforts it’s likely to be delightful fun for the whole family.

With Arndt’s credentials established, we should probably mention the two other aspects of Vulture’s claims. While the Disney/Lucasfilm deal seemingly caught everyone by surprise, Vulture claims that talent agencies were hit hardest. Instead of using this as an opportunity to pitch their writer clients to Disney for the coveted script writing gig, these agencies were informed that Arndt had already been working on that aforementioned treatment for quite some time prior to Disney’s announcement. Intriguingly, now that the treatment is complete, Vulture believes it will shortly be sent out to a swath of big-name Hollywood directors to gauge their interest in helming this movie. Names listed in Vulture’s report include JJ Abrams, Brad Bird and Steven Spielberg.

As with all rumors, we caution you to take this news with a huge grain of salt. We have no reason to doubt any of Vulture’s claims, but without official confirmation, all of this will remain a rumor until such time as Disney sees fit to solidify some of these ethereal details. That said, if Vulture is entirely correct, Episode VII could be an even bigger event than we’d previously imagined. A new Star Wars film written by one of the guys behind Toy Story 3 and helmed by the beloved director who brought us Jaws, E.T. and Jurassic Park? If that doesn’t get you worked up into an excited lather, then your sense of whimsy has been dead for years.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Megaupload Faces Mega Problems Before Relaunch

Kim Dotcom leaves court in New Zealand. Michael Bradley/AFP/Getty Images.

What do you do when your once-thriving Internet company has the U.S. Justice Department breathing down your neck?

You relocate your site from the states to West Africa, naturally.

That’s exactly what the founder of Megaupload did when U.S. Feds shut down the popular site in January, charging that engaged in piracy — providing copyrighted material for free.

The seven-year-old website was once a well-known file sharing site with close to 150 million registered users, including Kim Kardashian, Diddy, and other high-profile celebs. In terms of megabytes transmitted, Megaupload accounted for about 4 percent of total Internet use.

Megaupload no longer has a .com domain in the U.S., but it continues to be involved in criminal court proceedings in Washington, D.C.

Earlier this year, a federal indictment charged that Megaupload, along with a shell company linked to it, caused an estimated half-billion dollars in copyright losses to others and made an estimated $175 million in proceeds.

Despite those allegations, Megaupload is pressing forward with the online file-sharing concept. Megaupload founder and New Zealand entrepreneur Kim Schmitz, who has been charged in the U.S. with fraud and money laundering, has appeared in photos online showing his opulent lifestyle. The indictment listed a Rolls Royce, Lamborghini, numbers electronic items, artwork, and televisions among his possessions.

Schmitz — better known as Kim Dotcom — has now announced he will launch a brand-new site called Me.ga that would supersede Megaupload in both speed and storage space while giving users direct control and responsibility over their files. Me.ga would go live at the beginning of the new year. Two months later, the German-born Schmitz will face a scheduled extradition hearing to the U.S.

Me.ga will live under the domain .ga, which is used in Gabon, the country on the west coast of Central Africa.

Kim Dotcom believes this move will allow the new site to thrive because it will not be under the jurisdiction of the U.S. and therefore protected from legal action in the states.

“It’s a little bit like a nightmare, I would say, unexpected, horrifying for my family,” Kim Dotcom revealed in an interview on Campbell Live, a current affairs program hosted by John Campbell based out of New Zealand.

“My wife is pregnant with twins has nightmares and is feeling miserable and I’m facing a very interesting situation.”

Interesting might be an understatement. Kim Dotcom’s new site may be blocked even before its 2013 launch.

Gabon Communications Minister Blaise Louembe suspended Me.ga, according to Business Insider, saying the site cannot “serve as a platform or screen for committing acts aimed at violating copyrights, nor be used by unscrupulous people.”

Shortly after the announcement, Kim Dotcom tweeted he already had plans to find another domain. A statement from his attorney Ira Rothken proclaims his innocence.

“It sounds like a lack of net neutrality in Gabon,” said the statement. “We’re just going to use a different domain.”

When Campbell asked whether he used the business to make a profit for himself, Kim Dotcom replied those claims were “complete nonsense.”

“I’m an innovator, I create software, I create solutions. I create a website that is popular and that people want to use.”

Source : abcnews[dot]go[dot]com

Sea Level Rising Toward Washington and Other Cities

(Raymond Boyd/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

How soon could ocean waters lap at Jefferson’s Feet?

Manila already flooded regularly by the ocean; St. Petersburg, Russia, has immense new sea wall

Nature’s Edge Notebook #36

Observation, Analysis, Reflection, New Questions

How soon could ocean waters be lapping at Thomas Jefferson’s memorial on the edge of the Washington Mall?

City planners in Washington, D.C. — and in most major coastal cities around the world — are asking such questions as sea level rise, which the world’s climate scientists agree is being caused by manmade global warming, accelerates.

Recently, the world’s climate experts have reported that global sea level rise is speeding up much faster than they expected only a few years ago.

They now calculate there could well be a rise of another one to two meters before the end of the century.

This would mean serious flooding in many sea level cities before mid century — within 40 years.

The Jefferson Memorial (as well as the FDR and MLK memorials) are on the famous Washington sea level Tidal Basin, so named because ocean tides rise and help fill it every day. It is connected directly to the Potomac River and thus the Chesapeake Bay, an arm of the sea.

In some other sea level capitals, the question “How soon?” is especially urgent, or already too late.

In the Philippines, parts of Manila are just below sea level  but not protected by huge dikes like those in Holland (see link to Manila sea level flood maps  below) and are already flooded frequently by ocean waters.

Russia’s St. Petersburg Already Ringed By Extensive New Sea Wall

A few sea level cities, like St. Petersburg Russia, and some in Holland, already have one solution, though experts say it is not necessarily the best: extensive sea walls that were begun for historical reasons long before the threat from manmade sea level rise was understood.

Astronauts in the International Space Station can even see St. Petersburg’s extensive “flood barrier” with the naked eye from outer space – as can anyone who goes to Google Earth and enters “St. Petersburg, Russia” in the search bar.

There it is — a giant sea wall around Russia’s great cultural capital, arcing out through the Gulf of Finland and circling back around the city — and with a new ring road on top of it.

The creation of this ring road also helped ease urban traffic congestion, and the immense flood barrier project had provided many jobs by the time its construction neared completion in 2010.

Russian history set this solution in motion more than 300 years ago.

St. Petersburg was built by Peter The Great on coastal swamps and flooded regularly — a central factor in one of Russia’s most famous poems, “The Bronze Horseman,” (you can find a statue there)  in which a grief-crazed protagonist, whose beloved has drowned in one such flood, loses his mind and believes himself chased through the watery city by a demonic Peter the Great bearing down on horseback.

But building sea walls may not necessarily be the best way for a city to go, say many experts around the world who are now studying this encroaching challenge.

Three Ways to Deal With Sea Level Rise

There are three general ways for city planners to think about dealing with this accelerating sea level rise, according to a comprehensive climate impacts report from the U.S Global Change Research Program, published by Cambridge University Press and entitled “Global Climate Change Impacts in the U.S.” — GCCIUS — available online.

The three approaches are described (on p. 152) under the heading “Adaptation: Coping with Sea-Level Rise:”

“Adaptation to sea-level rise is already taking place in three main categories:

• “…protecting the coastline by building hard structures such as levees and seawalls (although hard structures can, in some cases, actually increase risks and worsen beach erosion and wetland retreat)”
• “…accommodating rising water by elevating or redesigning structures, enhancing wetlands, or adding sand from elsewhere to beaches (the latter is not a permanent solution, and can encourage development in vulnerable locations)”

In fact, New York City planners have looked at similar ideas, including one which foresees low-lying Wall Street being turned into a sort of Venice with new streets designed to absorb flood waters, and another based on bringing the native surge-resistant oyster beds back to New York Harbor.

…as we have reported on ABC’s Nature’s Edge here:

• “…planned retreat from the coastline as sea level rises.”

Obviously, moving an entire huge city would take an great deal of time, planning, long range financial commitment, and overall political agreement.

The above online GCCIUS report is notable for its illuminating, solidly sourced explanations and its clear and user-friendly color graphics on many aspects of how manmade global warming is impacting the United States.

Illuminating and bracing as this report is, it should be noted that it was published in 2009. The next edition will incorporate the more worrisome news about the acceleration of the warming’s impacts that has come from the world’s climate scientists since then.  It is due out by the end of 2013.

Exactly how will half a meter of sea level rise affect Washington, D.C. — or any of the world’s great sea level cities?

Interactive map websites are proliferating on the WorldWideWeb for many of these cities, showing how and where each additional foot of sea level rise would flood inland.

However, the greatest immediate danger feared by city planners comes not from the steady rise of average sea level but from the far greater flooding — as much as 20 or more feet greater — that occurs when, on top of the steadily rising sea level, a major storm happens to arrive during high tide.

One such interactive website purports to show how the region around Washington DC would be affected … as you add in each additional foot of sea level rise.

You can find a sea level flood map of Philippines capital Manila here.

Similar sites for various cities can be found on the internet.

The Basic Facts of Manmade Sea Level Rise

The World’s Climate scientists report that…

• 1.  About 100 years ago, after millennia of no significant change, sea level started rising, and at a fairly steady rate. Then, about 20 years ago, that rate accelerated sharply.

The above-linked  GCCIUS report states (p.18, with additional map graphics on p. 37) : “After at least 2000 years of little change, sea level rose by about 8 inches over the past century…”

It then goes on to say that “satellite data available over the past 15 years [that was in 2009] show sea level rising at a rate roughly double the rate observed over the past century.”

This was after the sea level rise that followed the warming which had ended the last Ice Age some ten thousand years earlier and melted all but three of the great ice-sheets back into the oceans — those covering Greenland, West Antarctica and East Antarctica, and which are up to two miles thick.

The causes for the sudden rise in sea level 100 years ago are now felt to be well understood by the world’s climate scientists:

The Industrial Revolution, which had begun in England around 1800, was burning large amounts of coal, which emitted increasingly great pulses of the invisible greenhouse gas, CO2.

They calculate that the new, post-1900 sea level rise is due largely to two factors:  “thermal expansion” (water expands as it warms, so sea levels in “the global bathtub” rose) and to water from the melting of both land based glaciers and from the huge ice sheets covering Greenland and parts of Antarctica.

• 2. About 20 years ago, when sea level rise began to accelerate (after being relatively steady as it added those eight inches to the pre-industrial level), scientists wondered if an increase in melt-water from the immense ice sheets had begun to add even more water volume far sooner than they had expected.

•  3. In 2007, an admittedly inadequate calculation, based mostly on thermal expansion, from the 4th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, estimated only half a foot additional rise by the year 2100.
• 4. A number of more recent peer-reviewed studies and measurements — several  including satellite readings that show accelerating loss in the mass the Greenland and West Antarctica ice sheets — report those ice sheets now losing their frozen water at a rate far greater than predicted by the scientists only a few years ago — caused apparently by the rising temperatures of both the air above the ice sheets the ocean currents sweeping around their edges.

“Once again, we’re ahead of schedule,” says widely respected climate scientist Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University.

Mann tells ABC News that satellite measurements also show that the land may be absorbing at least some of the excess water newly lost from the ice-sheets, but that even if that is true, with the temperature only expected to rise steadily for the coming decades, such absorption by the land would at best only be masking an inevitable jump in sea level rise.

Mann points out that some of the world’s low lying countries, including island nations in the great oceans, are already experiencing the rise of salt water in their groundwater and in the center of some of their fields and a rapidly advancing coastal erosion.

A Most Poignant Interview

Sea Level Rise obliterating ancient cultures and paradises

What the world might agree to do, or should do?

One of the more poignant interviews this reporter has experienced was about such manmade sea level rise.

“The world has written us off,” an Ambassador from the sea level nation of The Federated States of Micronesia in the Western Pacific, comprising approximately 607 islands, told  me in New York shortly before the 2009 global climate summit in Copenhagen.

Ambassador Masao Nakayama told ABC News he was referring to the general agreement by the world’s nations to try to limit manmade global warming to 2 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial temperatures – a goal the world’s nations have still not acted adequately to meet.

He seems sadly resigned in this interview as he refers to the 1 1/2 (1.5) degree centigrade goal scientists were telling him was necessary if sea level rise was to be slowed enough to give his ancient culture, more than 3000 years old, a fighting chance of surviving on its Pacific islands – many of which are already beginning to give way already to rising waters.

He asks why the world is focusing on, as he puts it, what it might agree to do instead of on what it should do.

We are keeping two short video segments of this interview at the top of our Nature’s Edge page at www.abcnews.com/naturesedge.

—————-

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Find more on our Nature’s Edge website at www.abcnews.com/naturesedge

Source : abcnews[dot]go[dot]com

Michael Jai White finally gets his own action movie franchise

After years of paying his dues, inarguably awesome action movie star Michael Jai White has been given his own franchise.

Officially speaking, we write these stories about the movie business to impart important news. All those stories we’ve written over the past few months about Joss Whedon’s blockbuster hit The Avengers were driven purely by your collective interest in that film. The movie pulled in nearly $1.5 billion worldwide, so it seems a pretty safe bet that our readers have some interest in hearing news related to the film and its possible future implications.

That said, we also have a bit of an ulterior motive in mind when we sit down to write one of these things. Ideally we’d like you to walk away from our work having learned something, or with a newfound desire to seek out entertainment that perhaps you had never heard of before.

Why the above disclaimer? Well, it’s great news for fans of Michael Jai White that the man will finally be given the sort of full-featured action movie franchise he has so obviously deserved for years, but it’s also an opportunity to expose White’s work to a larger audience. Many of you have likely never heard of the man, and that’s a shame given that he’s the closest living, youthful analogue we currently have to the larger-than-life badass action heroes of the late 1980s and early ’90s. Imagine a more athletic, martial arts-focused Sylvester Stallone, who can actually act quite well, and you’ve got a decent idea of what Michael Jai White brings to the table.

Alright, proselytizing is momentarily over. Let’s get right to the news. Courtesy Indiewire:

White has signed on to star in what is expected to be an action movie franchise from Moonstone Entertainment, titled Codename: Falcon. The franchise will revolve around a former marine named John ”Falcon” Chapman, described as a “dark anti-hero driven by guilt, who will destroy himself unless given something else to destroy,” making him “a useful weapon-of-last-resort for the foreign ministry.”

The first film in the franchise, titled Favela, is currently in pre-production.

As for the plot behind Favela, Moonstone Entertainment offers the following, PR-approved synopsis blurb:

… Favela sees Chapman traveling to Brazil to hunt down his sister’s killers, in the process discovering an underground world of drugs, prostitution, and police corruption ruled by the Japanese mafia.

That sounds like a pretty standard action movie plot. Something like a hybrid of Commando and any number of John Woo’s Hong Kong classics. Normally that wouldn’t reach out and grab our attention, but again, we’re big fans of Michael Jai White’s work, and his being given a franchise to lead is long overdue.

Listen, we don’t have all day to impress upon you the idea that Michael Jai White should be standing alongside Tony Jaa in your mental roster of our modern world’s most entertaining celluloid heroes, so instead we’ll do this the quick way. When you next fire up Netflix, stream the film Blood And Bone. Many will claim that Michael Jai White’s best work was in the 2009 blaxploitation spoof Black Dynamite, and they’d be absolutely correct, but Blood And Bone is a perfect depiction of the man’s acting talents alongside his inarguable skill at making on-screen violence look both spectacular and horrifically visceral. Blood And Bone fits neatly into the B-movie subgenre, but it’s amazing how many modern big-budget action movies are annihilated by comparison to this flick. If nothing else, it should offer ample evidence that Michael Jai White is a fellow to keep your eyes on.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Michael Keaton tapped for RoboCop villain role

Who will take Hugh Laurie's antagonist role in the upcoming RoboCop remake? Apparently the answer is "Michael Keaton."

Despite the eternal machinations of the Internet, we’d like to assume that you haven’t yet had the entirety of your attention span sucked from your inquisitive little head. Thus, we also assume you recall an article we published last week that both revealed Hugh Laurie’s departure from the upcoming, in-production RoboCop remake, as well as the rumor that Clive Owen might be taking his place. This morning however, we received word that Laurie’s villain role will instead be played by Michael Keaton.

/Film reports:

Keaton will play the ultra-wealthy CEO of the greedy Omni Corp, which turns Detroit cop Alex Murphy (Kinnaman) into an unstoppable law enforcement cyborg for its own means. Director José Padilha announced the casting via a statement, saying “Michael is the final addition to the amazing cast we have assembled for this film and it is so great to have the last puzzle piece in place.”

Those of you who adore the original, 1987 version of RoboCop will likely know that this is more or less the same role portrayed by Ronny Cox. Presumably, you’ll also agree that Cox was excellent in the role. His performance blends moral flexibility, a politician’s practiced faux emotionality and an unapologetic, mile-long streak of intense greed. Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop, despite its gore and massive body count, is first and foremost a satire of 1980s American culture, and as such Cox’s character was something of a jab at the megalomaniacal suits who spent the decade accumulating frankly obscene wealth by exploiting every resource and person available to them. Granted, Michael Milken wasn’t sent to jail for attempting to privatize a major metropolitan police force via resurrected cybernetic Christ allegories, but then again, Verhoeven’s version is far more entertaining and thought provoking than the depressing reality that spawned it.

As far as Keaton’s casting in the role, we see this as a positive. Though he saw greatest acclaim in family-friendly films like Batman and Beetlejuice, Keaton is an excellent dramatic actor with an undeniable smirking charm. If you haven’t seen his work in 1989′s The Dream Team, you really ought to seek it out. Though it’s a comedy, Keaton shifts gears from humor to pathos often, and proves that he’s much more than just a pretty face. Actually, if you can set up a double bill with Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, you’ll get a pretty solid perspective on Keaton’s capabilities, and as far as we’re concerned “scenery chewing evil rich dude” is well within Keaton’s range.

Despite Keaton’s casting effectively completing the list of actors lined up for the RoboCop remake, we still don’t have much solid information on how this film is shaping up. We can speculate on actors, and compare them to their analogues in the original RoboCop, but until we hear some official information from this project we’re going to have to wait and wonder how well director Jose Padilha can match the efforts of Paul Verhoeven. Even if Padilha isn’t going to attempt to make his RoboCop a sweeping, razor-sharp satire of modern American values (read: violence, greed, reality TV — sadly, not much has changed since the 80s) he’s got a very high bar to reach with this film. And, needless to say, if he does attempt to ape Verhoeven entirely, Padilha had better be ready to bring his absolute best to the table. He hasn’t done anything to date that would definitely convince us that this remake will be awesome, so while we’re tentatively optimistic about this film, we aren’t about to take bets on how well Padilha may fare. 

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

VIDEO: Humpback Whales Appear Near California Coast

A small pod of humpback whales along the coast of California  gave some onlookers quite a surprise this weekend.

Image credit: Courtesy Michael Brink

Several boaters, paddlers and kayakers who were in the water Saturday narrowly missed becoming whale food when the marine mammals burst through the surface to lunge-feed.

Bill Bouton, a retired biology instructor who was photographing birds off San Luis Obispo, snapped the whales’ rare close encounter with people that day.

“I was sitting in my car, parked along the shoulder of the road overlooking the beach. Got to use my tripod, thank goodness,” he  said on his Flickr page, where he’d posted the shots.

Source : abcnews[dot]go[dot]com