8 Ways to Sunday

Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean are continuing their long collaboration with a new motion picture.

“MirrorMask” — written by Gaiman, directed by McKean, and produced by the Jim Henson Company — tells the story of 15 year-old girl raised by a family of circus performers who must struggle through a bizarre dreamworld one night in order to save her ailing mother. The Independent Film Channel’s web site described it thusly: “Think ‘Alice in Wonderland’ meets ‘Time Bandits’ on an upside down street in a parallel universe.”

The film premiered at the Sundance festival, and should make its way to theaters soon.

Neil has more on “MirrorMask,” including links to IGN Filmforce interviews with himself and McKean, in his online journal. The movie’s official site has a preview trailer.

Variety reports that Microsoft is working to bring their popular video game franchise to the multiplex masses. The really tasty bit of gossip, however, is that the Redmond giant is trying to dodge the studio system:

Bestselling vidgame franchise “Halo” has taken its first major step toward the bigscreen, but without the studio system that has ruined so many of its brethren. Microsoft has quietly put the finishing touches on a million-dollar deal to hire Alex Garland to adapt the games into one movie.

That’s the most info you can get without being a Variety subscriber, which I’m not. A tantalizing tidbit, however. An article in The Seattle Times has more:

According to Variety, Microsoft is planning to develop the script on its own and take it to movie studios only after it is complete. Such a move in Hollywood is unusual for a tech company, the report said.

Microsoft likely wants to make sure that the “Halo” brand isn’t diluted, said Matt Rosoff, an analyst covering the company at Directions on Microsoft, a Kirkland-based independent research firm.

Alex Garland — the screenwriter retained by Microsoft — was the scribe behind the zombie-epidemic hit (there’s those zombies again) 28 Days.

(Props: Gamespot for the original scoop, Peter O’Kelly’s Reality Check for pointing me to the Times article)

Updates

• 11/5/2006 @ 2:10 PM — Studio backing for the Halo movie project has collapsed and all work on the movie has stopped for the moment. If this happens at all, it’s going to be a while. (via Binary Bonsai and GameSpot)

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy will finally be coming to movie theaters this May. Visit the official web site and click on “larger trailer” to see a big beautiful QuickTime version of the hilarious teaser.

Yet another new CG animated movie from the Toy Story people, due in 2005. Apple.com has the trailer.

(Props: Kottke)

A group calling itself “Internets Vets for Truth” is offering scads of video for download that incriminates George W. Bush & Co. and boosts John Kerry. Kerry’s congresional testimony at the age of 27, full versions of Fahrenheit 9/11 and Going Upriver, the John Stewart / Crossfire smackdown, music videos, and more more more…

From the “About” page:

The Internets Veterans For Truth are a group of long-time bloggers, designers, and techies who decided (in slackerly fashion, around the end of last week) that some of the clips that’ve been floating around online needed to be seen by everybody.

A few catchy slogans, registered domains, and a mess of volunteered hours of encoding, design, dev, and server wrangling later…

Also, we served alongside George W. Bush in the hot, dry Texan jungles of the Internets Deltas.

Full of stuff that is very worth watching before you cast your vote on Tuesday, this is a must-visit site. Pass the link around via e-mail and weblog to help make sure that as many people as possible see these vids!

Some choice samples:

• Representative Tim Ryan (D - OH) speaks out against accusations of a left-wing conspiracy to frighten young Americans about a draft. It’s Bush’s foreign policy and record of lies that are doing the frightening, he says.
• A chronicle of the Bush administration’s flip-flops on whether or not Saddam had wheapons of mass destruction
• A Viet Nam veteran who threw his medals away during the same veteran’s protest where Kerry tossed his ribbons discusses the reasons behind the protesters’ actions — “For each one of us it was a terribly difficult thing to do. The decorations… represented a very intense and difficult period of our life, but it was vitally important to do something visually symbolic showing our rejection of this war.”
• The infamous John Stewart Crossfire smackdown, and Stewart’s own post-smackdown spin on The Daily Show.

All videos in QuickTime format.

(Hat Tip: Photomatt, who lead me there)