geekosystem

This trailer for the new Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost movie The World's End looks like exactly the kind of thing these three do really well together. It sort of appears to be a cross between Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, but with aliens instead of zombies and the same creepy-small-town vibe. Basically, we're pretty pumped for it.

Probably one of the best comedy shows to ever hit television, Spaced is now available on Netflix Instant. From Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Edgar Wright, and Jessica Hynes, most of the people that brought you Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, Spaced is where the team really found their footing, and is perhaps even funnier and more clever than Shaun and Fuzz.

When you die and potentially go wherever it is that people go when they’re dead — be it in the ground or some type of heaven or whatever — chances are you won’t be pleased with everyone that has been given a pass. Some people just rub folks the wrong way; it’s a fact of life. There is one bright side to this, however: If you’re going to this theorized place, it’s safe to assume that people similar to you are going to be going there as well. That means that all those geeky actors will be chatting it up in the geek afterlife, hopefully. But where do they draw the line? Clearly, some are more worthy than others. Some actors have been in multiple works that were seminal in their own right. So, here it is, finally, a list of the actors that are most worthy of being admitted to the geek equivalent of heaven.

This weekend Brad Bird was given one of the highest honors that can be bestowed upon an american animator: the Windsor McCay Award for lifetime achievement in the field of animation.  He now stands alongside such animation greats as the Fleischer Brothers, Tex Avery, Hanna and Barbera, Mel Blanc, Walt Disney, Bob Clampett, Don Bluth, Genndy Tartakovsky, John Lasseter, and Bruce Timm. Too bad he's quitting animation.  Ok, not really.  He explains, in his acceptance video, which had to be filmed in advance due to Bird being too busy filming the next Mission Impossible movie with Simon Pegg and Tom Cruise to attend the ceremony. (via Bleeding Cool.)

We know our President is a little bit of a geek, having admitted to once collecting comics, and threading Superman jokes into a speech at the Alfred E. Smith Dinner. But he's not this much of a geek. He's not actually reading Mark Millar's Superior. That's a photoshop. A photoshop that seems to be the weapon of a badly managed unsubtle grab at attention from somebody. As Bleeding Cool points out, if Mark Millar is behind the 'shop, it wouldn't be the first time.

This movie has Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Sigourney Weaver, Seth Rogan, and Gilbert Gottfreid in it. It looks more than solid, but we're looking forward to the movie's attempts to convince us that Jason Bateman is a man in black. (via Blastr.)

This past weekend, Sir Ian McKellen attended an event in Hyde Park to protest the policies of Pope Benedict XVI on the Pope's very first state visit to the UK. Shortly thereafter, the photo to the above left began to make its way around the tubes, wherein McKellen wears a shirt that says "I'm Gandalf and Magneto. Get over it!" The Internet being the Internet, it "went viral," as the kids say, with the picture getting more than 250,000 views on Twitpic, close to 200,000 more when it was ripped to Imgur, and who knows how many more via blogs and other third-party sources.

Indeed, it is a pretty awesome shirt. However, it is not the shirt that McKellen actually wore to the anti-pope rally: Rather, he wore the shirt to the above right ("Some people are gay. Get over it!") which actually makes a lot more sense considering 1) that the typeface changes in the Gandalf shirt, but is consistent in the real thing; 2) that the protester behind him is wearing the same shirt in both instances; and 3) that as mind-blowing as is the Gandalf-Magneto singularity presented by McKellen, the Church's positions with respect to homosexuals are a bit easier to protest. All good Photoshop fun, maybe, but it apparently actually fooled a lot of people; The Advocate ran the shopped McKellen shirt on their website before correcting it, and lots of social media sharing of the picture takes it at face value. As The Daily What wrote when they debunked the 'shoop earlier today: "Before this goes so far that it gets picked up by the Times ... right - real; left - fake." It's instructive how this happened:

Nick Frost and Simon Pegg are in Secret of the Unicorn? As Thomson and Thompson?

Excuse us as we get out the 10-foot pole and raise our expectations. Remind us again why we were ever worried about Steven Spielberg making an all-ages period action movie?

Oh yeah... motion capture.

Video with charming anecdotes below.

Dark Bunny Tees' Alex Chenery is good at making stuff with Play-Doh. (See: His Play-Doh Homer Simpson.*) We're really digging this Shaun of the Dead-inspired work of Doh, which recalls the classic scene in the film when Simon Pegg and Nick Frost realize that throwing Dire Straits albums at zombies just isn't going to cut it, and smash the undead with a cricket bat and a shovel, respectively. Blood-splattering ensues.