Month: September 2012

This year, Quentin Tarantino’s Christmas present to the world is “Django Unchained,” the violent story of a slave (Jamie Foxx) on a mission to free his wife (Kerry Washington) from the plantation of the man who owns her (Leonardo DiCaprio). Tarantino’s biggest influences for the film, he says, were not movies about American slavery but the spaghetti westerns of the Italian director Sergio Corbucci. Here Tarantino explains how Corbucci’s movies — including “Django,” which lent its name to Tarantino’s title character — became the inspiration for his own spaghetti southern.

via Quentin Tarantino Tackles Old Dixie by Way of the Old West (by Way of Italy) – NYTimes.com.

I like that it’s modern looking and retro all at the same time.

Due out next month.

The bright futurism of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the award-winning sci-fi series that warps into its 25th anniversary Friday, was so unique that the show probably wouldn’t get the command to engage today.

“There is not a new hopeful, optimistic vision of the future that I am currently aware of,” veteran Star Trek: The Next Generation writer and Battlestar Galactica rebooter Ronald Moore told Wired by phone. That shiny outlook, on display throughout seven alternately brilliant and bombed seasons, powered the show into our collective consciousness.

“I’d argue that in the last few decades in America, when people are asked what they hope the future will look like, they still turn to Star Trek,” Moore said. “They hope we put aside our differences and come together as humanity, that we rise above war, poverty, racism and other problems that have beset us. They hope that there’s a future where we set off into the galaxy to have peaceful relations with other worlds.”

via The Best and Worst of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Sci-Fi Optimism | Underwire | Wired.com.