June 30, 2008
Whiz of the Web: Monday Meat Slices
The best of the internet, chopped into tiny bits and grilled for your enjoyment.

- Cinematical's review of Hellboy II is encouragingly positive. You can check out the new, third trailer for the film right here (via).
- Two Greek mythology movies are on their way and are likely to end up fighting it out at the box office. One is a remake of Clash of the Titans, to be directed by Louis Leterrier and written by Lawrence Kasdan, and the other is called War of Gods, to be directed by Tarsem Singh. We can't wait to see them both.
- Some pictures of the actor who's going to play the young Voldemort in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Apparently he's actually related to Ralph Fiennes, which is a nice touch. (Via)
- Check out the trailer for Universal's first computer-animated feature, The Tale of Despereaux. It's an adaptation of a Newbury Award-winning novel and tells the story of a cute, courageous little mouse whose name is not Mickey. (Via)
- For those of you out there who for some reason shelled out the cash to buy a PS3 (you poor lost souls), you might be interested to know the features of the upcoming firmware update, so here's Joystiq's detailed run-down, and their explanation of the new trophy system.
- Speaking of trailers, Cinematical's Trailer Park feature has a couple of interesting ones, including Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead and Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. And while we're talking Dr. Horrible, Joss Whedon has announced that the musical web series will be released in three parts, with the first one going up on July 15, the second one on July 17, and the third on July 19. All three parts will stream for free on DrHorrible.com until midnight July 20.
- Blizzard recently officially announced that they're working on Diablo 3. Joystiq talked to lead designer Jay Wilson about the game, and revealed what Blizzard had to say about the game's design, and its lore and art, at the Worldwide Invitational in Paris. Of course, World of Warcraft also got some attention at the WWI. And don't forget the costume and dance contest!
- Another not at all surprising recent game announcement was that of Rock Band 2. Details are scarce at this point, but we are told to expect improvements for band and character customization as well as the navigation system and Band World Tour. The lead designer says it has "the best set list I've ever seen in a music game," but of course, he would say that. The game is set to debut at E3 next month.
- As of last Friday, June 27, Bill Gates has officially left Microsoft, although he's staying on as non-executive chairman.
- RealNetworks has launched a DRM-free MP3 music store called the Rhapsody MP3 store. It has over 5 million tracks available for download, from all four major labels, most priced at 99 cents. Most albums cost $9.99. (Via)
- We're not sure why you'd use Yahoo! Mail when GMail is available, but if you do, the new version has a pretty cool feature, especially for those of us who often have a hard time coming up with something to put in the subject field of an email. Click the subject button and Yahoo! will fill in that field with a quote or other funny phrase of some kind.
- Check out the trailer, and a slideshow of behind-the-scenes images, for Hayao Miyazaki's next film, Ponyo on a Cliff by the Sea. Unfortunately the trailer is marred by some annoying people who hang out in a box in the bottom right corner and provide commentary through the whole thing.
- Reporters got a little more information out of Seth Rogen about his upcoming film adaptation of The Green Hornet. Apparently he and writing partner Evan Goldberg had been wanting to do a film about a hero and his sidekick for years, and this seemed like the perfect property to use as a vehicle for that story. It will be both a relationship story, and a big crazy action movie, but apparently we won't have to worry about Kato going around calling everybody cocksuckers. Here's hoping it turns out well...
- Gary Oldman will be playing Jacob Marley, Bob Cratchit, and Tiny Tim in Robert Zemeckis' upcoming motion-capture animated A Christmas Carol. Here's hoping those characters won't all have Gary's face. Because that would be creepy. We'd forgotten Jim Carrey was going to play Scrooge, too. Ugh. We're really not sure how this can be a good movie, but we'll try to keep our hopes up.
- Guillermo del Toro told reporters he won't necessarily shoot the two Hobbit films back-to-back—and even strongly suggested he might not shoot a second movie at all. "We believe there is a second movie. If there isn't, there will not be. If we find it, we will shoot it, but by God, if we do not find it, we will not shoot it."
- Plans for a sequel to Cloverfield have been put on hold until the filmmakers can come up with an idea as interesting as the original. Wow. That's actually pretty impressive. We thought the usual method was to just put out any old crap with the number "2" after the title.
- The Movie Blog has an extremely positive review of the big box office winner this past weekend, Wall-E, and Slash Film has a list of the Easter Eggs in the film (via).
- Oops. We missed our chance to see the early roll-out of the trailer for Quantum of Solace this morning, but we can still catch it in front of Hancock this weekend, or on TV and online next week.
Image Credit: Flickr user ericskiff






