Dear Hollywood: Please start hiring the folks who make fan trailers. They’re starting to get a leg up on you, as exemplified by this wonderful new John Carter megaclip.

Hot on the heels of last week’s amazing Avengers fan trailer, the new video uses footage we’ve already seen before, pulled from fan site The John Carter Files. But it’s far more engrossing than the actual studio trailers we’ve seen to date — right down to the “epic tale that inspired 100 years of filmmaking” tag line.

OK, now we’re excited about John Carter (the fan trailer’s friendly reminder that John Carter director Andrew Stanton made Wall-E and Finding Nemo helps, too). All it takes is two solid minutes of action, suspense and shirtless Taylor Kitsch to get folks excited about the movie, which is based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ classic character.

Disney’s John Carter hits theaters March 9. Some of those attending midnight screenings of the film in Imax will receive very cool, very cosmic Mondo posters for the film (check them out over at Hero Complex). Hit the comments and let us know if you’ll be among the first in line.

[via Blastr]

In order for a technology to take off these days, it has to be simple. Twitter, Facebook, iTunes, Spotify — each can be summed up in a sentence or so and readily understood from the very first time you use it.

Tomahawk is more complicated, but if you’re a music fan who listens to music on a laptop or desktop — and has friends who do, too — it warrants a try, and possibly a place in your quiver of favorite music apps.

First if not foremost, Tomahawk is a media player along the lines of iTunes or Winamp, which can play the music stored on your computer. The fun starts when you install Tomahawk’s content resolvers, which are basically plug-ins that can find music to play in a bunch of other different streaming services, using their search APIs (application programming interfaces) — Spotify, Official.fm, YouTube, Bandcamp, Grooveshark and others.

Whenever you try to play a song, Tomahawk might use any combination of these sources to provide the audio. For playing your own locally stored music, that’s a fairly useless feature. You already have the song, so why would you want to play it in Spotify instead? However, Tomahawk gets more useful when you’re trying to play stuff you don’t already have — for example, a playlist from a Tomahawk-using friend.

“When I want to play a song, or somebody sends me a song, they’re not sending me a song — they’re sending me the metadata about that song — artist, track, possibly the album,” explained Tomahawk open source contributor Jason Herskowitz. “Then, on my side, Tomahawk says, ‘OK, out of all the content sources that you have access to, what’s the best match?’”

Within the same playlist, Tomahawk might grab one track from your local machine, another from your friend’s machine, a third from YouTube and a fourth from Spotify. After all, you don’t care where that music lives; you just want to hear it.

Note that Tomahawk can play tracks from your Tomahawk friends’ computers, which makes Tomahawk a P2P streaming client with which you can listen to your friends’ collections, tap into your work computer’s music from your home computer, and so on.

Tomahawk is much easier to use now than it was back when we wrote our lengthy tutorial on how to use it, but it still requires a small degree of technical sophistication. The main hurdle: installing the content resolvers, which are the plug-ins that let Tomahawk hook in to YouTube, Spotify and the rest.

It’s easy enough. You can either go to the Tomahawk page and choose the resolvers you want from the list, pictured to the right — or (this is easier) just go to Tomahawk > Preferences > Resolvers and install them from there. (In the case of Grooveshark, Spotify and any other unlimited music subscriptions, you’ll need to be a premium subscriber in order for it to work.)

“Local network” lets you play songs from other computers on your own home network, the same way you can in iTunes. “Extended network” lets you tap into your friends’ collections on their computers, so that if you don’t have a song on a given playlist, it plays from their machine. (They need to be running Tomahawk at the time.)

The latest version of Tomahawk (0.3.3) includes the ability to listen along in real time with your friends and make radio stations that resolve to any sources to which you have access. (The latter uses technology from The Echo Nest, publisher of Evolver.fm.) It also includes nice extras like the ability to choose only high-quality music from YouTube.

Now for the $64 million question.

“How does Tomahawk plan to make money?” asked an audience member at NY MusicTech Meetup.

Herskowitz replied, “We don’t.”

Audience member: “So, why do you….”

Herskowitz: “Tomahawk is an open source project that we work at out of the goodness of our hearts and a passion to solve this problem: All of the media players that have been around for 10 years were built to solve problems of 10 years ago. We don’t need [CD-R] label-makers, we don’t need to print CD cases, we don’t need to worry about a lot of things that old players like Winamp, which I worked on back in the day, has to worry about.

“The problems that you need to solve today are, you’ve got silos of music everywhere. I’ve got my library of music in Exfm, which I love, I’ve got stuff on Spotify, I’ve got stuff everywhere else, and I’m forced as the user to bounce between interface to interface to interface, and there’s no way on earth that I can listen to a playlist that goes from the Beatles to my cousin’s band to my favorite stuff at home to some live recording that I found. This basically solves that problem. It’s a very user-centric view.”

Indeed. Still, Tomahawk doesn’t have it all. For sending music to Apple AirPlay speakers, for instance, you’ll need to use AirFoil software (at least until OS X adds native AirPlay support later this year).

As for Android and iPhone versions, Herskowitz said, “not yet.”

Imagine a teenage girl told you she’d decided to undergo female circumcision, and you couldn’t talk her out of it. What would you do? That’s the scenario presented by Robin Hobb in her short story “Cut.”

“At what point is a person old enough to say, ‘I own my body and I get to do what I want with it’?” says Hobb in this week’s edition of The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.

Hobb, best known as the author of such fantasy epics as the Farseer trilogy and the Rain Wilds Chronicles, also writes urban fantasy and science fiction under the name Megan Lindholm. Her recent book The Inheritance & Other Stories collects fiction published as both Hobb and Lindholm, including “Cut,” a finalist for the Nebula Award.

The teen in the story, Patsy, is smart and articulate, and knows exactly what she’s doing. She argues that circumcision is an ancient tradition, will serve as a bonding experience for her and her friends, is fashionable among celebrities, and will decrease her sex drive in a beneficial way. The story does what science fiction does best — it makes us question our beliefs by presenting a hypothetical scenario that seems all too real.

“There’s this whole hazy area of, who owns the body and at what point does that ownership of a body kick in?” Hobb says. “It’s not an area in which I have any answers; I just have a tremendous number of questions, and when I have a question about something, one of the things I do is I sit down and I toss the question up in the air with some other factors, and usually what comes out is a short story.”

Read our complete interview with Hobb below, in which she talks about the personalities of sailing ships, why putting roadkill in your mouth might be good for you, and whether Alaska is a writerly utopia. Or listen to the interview in Episode 54 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which also includes a discussion about the epic fantasy genre with guest geek Saladin Ahmed, author of Throne of the Crescent Moon. (Warning: Podcast contains some NSFW language.)

Wired: You started out publishing fiction under the name “Megan Lindholm,” but your given name is actually “Margaret.” So how did you become a “Megan”?

Robin Hobb: One of my first professionally published stories was in an anthology called Amazons!, of which Jessica Amanda Salmonson was the editor. Prior to that I had been publishing as “M. Lindholm,” and when it came time to put the anthology together, Jessica said that she really wanted to use full names on the stories, as she felt that for many years female writers had been forced to hide behind a single initial — or a male name — in order to get published. My response was that the “M” was something that I used because I had no particular attachment to my given name of Margaret — or Peggy, or Maggie, or Meg — and I said, “Well, Megan’s not too bad. But none of those names really resonate with me, so I’ve always just left it as M. Lindholm.”

Well, when the anthology came out and I opened my copy, I saw that my byline was now “Megan Lindholm.” There had been a misunderstanding, and Jessica had thought that was the name that I was actually choosing as a first name for my pseudonym.

Wired: You recently released a book called The Inheritance & Other Stories, featuring short fiction from throughout your career — as both Megan Lindholm and Robin Hobb. Many of those stories deal with characters living in poverty. Why do you think that’s such a recurring theme in your work?

Hobb: Well, they say, “Write what you know.” [Laughs] I will not claim to have lived in poverty. I have seen true poverty, and I know what it looks like, but I’ve certainly lived at the lower level of income. I would say that many of the characters in my stories do not live in true poverty — they are not out on the street, they are not wondering if there will be anything to eat in the next week. They are people who are at the lower echelons of the economic strata.

Why do the stories happen there? Well, because they do. It’s not as if I sat down and said, “I’m going to write a series of stories about people at the lower economic strata.” It’s simply that I get a story idea and I say, “Where is this set, and who are these characters?” And that’s how it comes out. I think if you look at the full strata there, they are people who are mostly working blue-collar, and sometimes in the spectrum of fantasy, people who actually work every day for a living and have a tight budget can seem like they’re poor, when actually for most of us that’s a reality.

Wired: One of the stories in the book is about gaining immortality by sticking roadkill in your mouth. How did you come up with that idea?

Hobb: If you read a number of the older books about doing magic, and what people believed you could magically do, there is supposed magic whereby if you take the correct bone of a cat and put it under your tongue, you could become invisible. From there it was a short step to say, “What if, instead of that, it simply conferred this wonderful, huge rush of — not necessarily immortality — but renewed youth and vigor, and you didn’t need anything else except that? How would that work? What would you be willing to give up for that? Would you actually be giving up anything?”

That cross-referenced with an idea that I’ve often had, which is, “Who does magic work for?” In many of the stories that we read there is somebody who, by dint of their genetic heritage, or because they are going to be the rightful king, or whatever … magic descends upon them, and they can do magic. And I thought, “What about the person who doesn’t get that?” When you take those two ideas and put them in a bag and shake them up, then you get something like “The Fifth Squashed Cat.”

Wired: Your short story “Cut” is about a near-future in which female circumcision becomes a fad among teenage girls. Where did that idea come from?

Hobb: That was written a number of years back, and tattoos were, at that point, becoming more and more popular, and the issue [arose] of, how old should a kid be before a kid is allowed to walk into a tattoo parlor and say, “I want six piercings in my ear”? Or “I want my belly button pierced”? Or any kind of a tattoo? At what point is a person old enough to say, “I own my body and I get to do what I want with it”?

The flip side of that is, at what point does a parent’s decision of what to do with their child’s body become valid? You know, male circumcision is still very commonly practiced in the U.S., and yet we throw up our hands in horror when we talk about female circumcision, or genital mutilation, yet I’m sure that the parents who commonly practice this on their children are doing it with the same attitude that we see in male circumcision, or in having a child’s teeth straightened or whatever.

There’s this whole hazy area of, who owns the body and at what point does that ownership of a body kick in? It’s not an area in which I have any answers. I just have a tremendous number of questions. And when I have a question about something, one of the things that I do is I sit down and I toss the question up in the air with some other factors, and usually what comes out is a short story.

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I am pretty darn pleased to share a new behind the scenes red-band clip for the action-thriller Act of Valor, opening in theaters on Friday, February 24th.

The film combines stunning combat sequences, up-to-the-minute battlefield technology, and heart-pumping emotion for the ultimate action adventure film–showcasing the skills, training and tenacity of the greatest action heroes of them all — real Navy SEALs.

Go behind the scenes with the new red-band featurette on IGN website to take in the featurette and trailers for the movie.

Directed by “Mouse” McCoy and Scott Waugh, the movie includes performances by active duty Navy SEALs, Roselyn Sanchez, Alex Veadov, Jason Cottle and Nester Serrano.

An unprecedented blend of real-life heroism and original filmmaking, Act of Valor stars a group of active-duty U.S. Navy SEALs in a film like no other in Hollywood’s history. A fictionalized account of real life Navy SEAL operations, the movie features a gripping story that takes audiences on an adrenaline-fueled, edge-of-their-seat journey.

When a mission to recover a kidnapped CIA operative unexpectedly results in the discovery of an imminent, terrifying global threat, an elite team of highly trained Navy SEALs must immediately embark on a heart-stopping secret operation, the outcome of which will determine the fate of us all.

Jai Courtney Signed to Play John McClane Jr. in ‘Die Hard’ Sequel

by Ethan Anderton
February 22, 2012

Just last year it was reported that Bruce Willis would return again as John McClane in A Good Day to Die Hard, set for a Valentine’s Day release next year. At the time, it was revealed that the story would follow McClane trying to save his son somewhere in Russia where “nothing is what it seems.” Some pretty big names were up to play John McClane, Jr. but a press release from Fox has revealed that “Spartacus: Blood and Sand” star Jai Courtney has landed the coveted role instead, and they’ve included a snapshot of the actor from a screen test alongside Willis, each with guns in hand, which you can see in its entirety below.

Here’s Jai Courtney alongside Bruce Willis screentesting for A Good Day to Die Hard:

Names like Ben Foster (The Mechanic), Paul Dano (Knight & Day), Aaron Paul (“Breaking Bad”), Paul Walker (Fast and Furious) and Milo Ventimiglia (“Heroes”) were all in consideration, but I guess Courtney outdid them all. Combine this role with Courtney also nabbing a role alongside Tom Cruise in One Shot, and this guy’s career is about to skyrocket. The press release has John McClane, Jr. (who goes by Jack) described as “an apple that has not fallen far from the tree” and “may even be more of a hardass than his father.” But despite their differences the two are forced to work together in order to stay alive in Moscow and keep “the world safe for democracy,” whatever the hell that means. Max Payne director John Moore is directing the film which is slated to begin production in April, hopefully with an R-rating in mind this time around.

Related categories: Casting, Development, Movie News

Check Out This Vibrant New Poster for Pixar’s Animated Epic ‘Brave’

by Ethan Anderton
February 22, 2012
Source: Apple

Later this week a brand new trailer for Pixar’s first venture into the medieval epic will debut online, but in the meantime, we have a vibrant new poster for the anticipated summer release of Brave. Hopefully it’s a film that will help audiences forget that Pixar missed the Oscar boat this year with Cars 2 getting left out of the Academy Award nominations for Best Animated Film. Princess Merida (voiced by “Boardwalk Empire” regular Kelly Macdonald) is front and center on the poster, and in the film she’ll be joined by characters voiced by Emma Thompson, Craig Ferguson, Billy Connolly, Robbie Coltrane and more. Look!

Here’s the poster for Pixar and Mark Andrews’ animated epic Brave from Apple:

Brave is set in the mystical Scottish Highlands, where Merida is the princess of a kingdom ruled by King Fergus (Connolly) and Queen Elinor (Thompson). An unruly daughter and accomplished archer, Merida one day defies a sacred custom of the land and inadvertently brings turmoil to the kingdom. This was originally being helmed by Pixar’s first female director, Brenda Chapman (of Prince of Egypt), but they have since brought in co-director Mark Andrews (of the short One Man Band) to take over and finish up the movie. Disney has already scheduled Pixar’s Brave for release next summer on June 22nd, 2012. Looking good?

Related categories: Hype, Pixar, Posters

Watch: First Trailer for Sundance Fave ‘The Imposter’ Documentary

by Alex Billington
February 22, 2012
Source: YouTube

“From as long as I remember, I wanted to be someone else.” Time to take a look and get an introduction to The Imposter, Bart Layton’s documentary about Frédéric Bourdin, which premiered at Sundance to rave reviews, including my own. Bourdin is a French criminal who deceived authorities and convinced them that he was a 16-year-old missing child from Texas found in Spain. It’s a nearly unbelievable true story, and these are the first glimpses at what they have and where they go in this, with the family and Frederic’s side of it. Now you know what we are all talking about and why this looks so good. Fire up the first trailer below!

Watch the first trailer for Bart Layton’s documentary The Imposter, from YouTube via AETV.com:

From the Sundance guide: “Like his canny subject, gifted filmmaker Bart Layton (who we interviewed here) pulls off an astonishing coup. Buoyed by eye-catching dramatizations and an enthralling structure that crisscrosses time and place, The Imposter unfolds as a gripping thriller that leaves us dizzy, yet certain that truth is, indeed, stranger than fiction.” The Imposter is one of my standouts from Sundance this year. The doc will also be playing at the SXSW Film Festival coming up, and was acquired by Indomina for release. For more, visit the official website or AETV.com. Stay tuned for release info and trailers to come. Intrigued?

Related categories: Hype, Indies, To Watch, Trailers

“Todd Loren, First Amendment advocate or lying sack of shit?” asks The Comics Journal publisher Gary Groth in the trailer for Unauthorized: The Story of Rock ‘N’ Roll Comics.

It’s not Shakespeare, but it is the existential question behind director Ilko Davidov’s 2005 documentary, out April 24 on DVD. It’s also the enduring query surrounding the mysteriously murdered Loren‘s infamously unauthorized Revolutionary Comics, which contained biographies of groundbreaking bands like The Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd (who liked his work) and lessers like Guns N’ Roses and Bon Jovi (who eventually sued).

With input from Alice Cooper, Mojo Nixon and more, Unauthorized: The Story of Rock ‘N’ Roll Comics examines the California Supreme Court ruling that supported Loren’s controversial comics. The documentary also looks into Loren’s fatal 1992 stabbing, possibly committed by Gianni Versace’s killer Andrew Cunanan.

Unauthorized is a quirky, creepy peek into what Nixon calls the shared “underground, weirdo, nutjob subculture” of comics and rock. Screen the reel above and let us know your take on Revolutionary Comics’ free-speech fandom in the comments section below.

Deep in production on futuristic sci-fi epic Pacific Rim, fantastical multitasker Guillermo Del Toro has also signed up to produce a CGI-animated feature tentatively titled Day of the Dead.

Described as a Romeo-and-Juliet adventure set in Mexico, the film will be directed by Jorge R. Gutierrez, who earlier created animated show El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera for Nickelodeon.

With that Emmy-winning series, which centered on a claw-bearing 13-year-old superhero, Gutierrez earned a reputation for creating funny action scenarios emboldened with zippy graphics. (See a sampling of Gutierrez’s style in the El Tigre clip below.)

In a statement, Del Toro described himself as a longtime Gutierrez fan. “Jorge has a unique aesthetic and sense of humor,” Del Toro said. “Day of the Dead is a colorful, vibrant, vital fable…. The object of the tale is not only to talk about life but to jolt us — into living to the fullest.”

The Reel FX production of Day of the Dead is slated for a fall 2014 release.

A handy web app called the Gendered Advertising Remixer mashes toy commercials together, tweaking the concept of “girls’ stuff” and “boys’ stuff” — with often-hilarious results.

“I think a remix video can be a simple and humorous way to expose the completely absurd levels of gender stereotyping found in many television commercials,” said Jonathan McIntosh, the 32-year-old San Francisco “pop culture hacker” who created the app.

The Gendered Advertising Remixer, which comes in Flash and HTML5 versions, is a simple tool that allows users to pair audio from a commercial for a toy made for girls with video from an ad spot aimed at boys (or vice versa). The results are intended to help people break down “regressive embedded gender messages” in the advertising, McIntosh said in an e-mail to Wired.

McIntosh posted a beta version of the Gendered Advertising Remixer last year, but has since made improvements. The tool currently boasts 40 commercials that can be remixed into some 800 combinations. There’s even a specialized Lego version, released earlier this month, that allows the Pepto-colored, geared-for-girls Lego Friends commercials to be remixed with ads for Lego collections aimed at dudes (Star Wars, Atlantis, etc.).

The latest iteration of the Gendered Advertising Remixer couldn’t come at a better time. Lego has been coming under serious fire for its Lego Friends line’s stereotypical targeting of young girls. After a video of a young girl saying toy companies were trying to “trick girls into buying the pink stuff” went viral around the holidays, the topic has been in the air (although McIntosh notes he hasn’t “seen this criticism translate into any real change in advertising practices”).

Jeffrey Hall, a communications professor at the University of Kansas whose research focuses on gender, said the Gendered Advertising Remixer could get the attention of parents who might not be thinking too much about what the commercials their kids watch are implanting in their brains. Even if the mashup maker is never seen by the people who could benefit from it most — kids, ages 5 and up — it can provide media literacy in an entertaining way, Hall said.

“Until you actually see these two things mapped onto one another, you don’t see how much gender segregation happens in advertising, and in children’s media,” Hall said.

Check out all three of the Gendered Advertising Remixer apps here, then hit the comments and let us know which toy mashup is your favorite.