Gawker: defamer, battlestar galactica

Shia LaBeouf To Receive Legal Ball-Thwacking In 'The Associate'

Seth — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 14:24:53 EST

· Shia LaBeouf will star in an adaptation of John Grisham's The Associate, which is about a Yale Law School undergrad who takes a job at a shady law firm, gets in over his head, then ends up getting chased down a long stretch of abandoned highway by a single car for some reason. We understand they are writing his mangled pinkie nail into the plot, the result of a gavel mishap in moot court. [Variety]
· Courtney B. Vance and Jack Davenport will star in Flash Forward, the ABC pilot in which the world blacks out for 2 minutes and 17 seconds, and slowly learns it slept with the cankled girl from accounts receivable in the parking garage after the Christmas party. [THR]
· What if you threw a big, sweeping, historical epic and not even the people it's about bothered to show up? We hate to say this, but we're beginning to think Baz Lurhmann should have added Australian pop classics and made it a musical. The whole thing is based on that Men at Work song, anyway. ("I met a strange lady, she made me nervous / She took me in and gave me breakfast" etc...) [Variety]

After the jump: A trip to the resurrection chamber!

· Sci Fi channel has greenlit Caprica, the Battlestar Galactica prequel set 50 years prior. Eric Stoltz, Esai Morales, and Polly Walker will star. [Variety]
· Blockbuster has now restyled itself as a box office for Live Nation concert tickets, hoping it can supplement whatever modest surcharge revenue the venture generates by charging exorbitant late fees if you fail to bring your stubs back in time. [THR]

Everything Must Go in NBCU's 'Galactica' Fire Sale

STV — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 13:20:36 EST

What's a struggling network to do when faced with last-place ratings, corporate inertia and a few dozen mouldering costumes from a hit going off the air? If you're NBC Universal, you invite the world to a yard sale, as it's planning to do Jan. 16 in order to cash in on the final season of Battlestar Galactica. The geek gold rush is on, and its nervous hosts in Pasadena are stocking up on canned goods and bottled water as we speak.

NBCU has been plotting a Battlestar prop auction since the summer, trickling out such must-sorta-haves as Cylon War-era flight suits and War Room chalkboards on a Web site ranking right below asthma inhalers among fanboy essentials. The network has hosted such events before, previously cashing in at last year's Heroes/Office/30 Rock sale. But the international interest in Battlestar sparked a recent run on hotel rooms in and around the Pasadena Convention Center, we hear, with the artifacts' online clearing house now offering a handy guide to making the most of that slavering southern pilgrimage.

Which, in the end, is fine with us; anything that helps pay off NBC's Olympics debt and keeps us in Jeff Zucker profiles is a true public service in the long run.

'Battlestar Galactica' Props and Costumes [Propworx via TLF]

Free to Good Home: IMDb yesterday uncorked...

STV — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 15:10:00 EDT

Free to Good Home: IMDb yesterday uncorked about 6,000 movie and TV titles available for free viewing via Hulu, including recent episodes of The Office, 24 and Battlestar Galactica; site officials also noted that new episodes of some series — 30 Rock among them — will be available in advance of their airdates this fall. Not so with the site's full-length features, however, which, beyond classics like The Night of the Hunter and Some Like it Hot, include Dude, Where's My Car?, Liar Liar and The Scorpion King, finally testing the critical consensus that their makers can't give these films away. We shall see! [IMDb via NYT]

Why Battlestar Galactica is the Best Political Drama on TV

Annalee Newitz — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 17:15:15 EDT

This exclusive new preview clip for Battlestar Galactica season 4 reminds us why the science fiction series' violent moral ambiguity has made it the most compelling political drama on TV. Sure the show is about humans fleeing for their lives from cyborgs in space, but it has a realistic, ripped-from-the-headlines urgency that 24 could only dream of. Even the basic BSG premise sounds familiar: Separatists with a burning desire for religious purity have launched a coordinated nuclear attack on our heroes, who are themselves struggling in a mire of corrupt political leadership and a military gone mad with power. It just so happens that the separatists are cyborgs called Cylon and the heroes are from a star system halfway across the galaxy from us.

What pleases about BSG, for a mainstream audience not necessarily inclined to freak out over spaceships, is the careful way the show's creators David Eick and Ronald Moore have created an entire political system for the characters to inhabit. We aren't just motoring from battle to battle. Instead, we watch as the human president fights with political pretenders and the military for power over the few thousand people left after the Cylon attack. There are press conferences and elections, worker strikes and Cylon sympathizers. The humans even become suicide bombers at one point.

This isn't a show that gives us a simple, Star Wars-style good vs. evil fairy tale. Everyone, even the steely Cylon, are ambivalent and ethically fungible. With next season concluding the epic tale of the human and Cylon battle to reach Earth and colonize it first, the action is sure to be intense. But don't expect the meaty political allegory to fall by the wayside. Things are just starting to get interesting.

We'll be watching characters dealing with a legal battle over who is to blame for last season's witchhunts, where accused Cylon collaborators were summarily executed without trial. And the Cylons have started having children with humans, raising the question of whether the us vs. them, human vs. machine binary really makes sense at all.

It's possible that what allows BSG to be so overtly political, complete with subplots about suicide bombing, is precisely the fact that it's set in a science fictional world. There is a narrative comfort zone for audiences: We don't have to worry that what we're watching is about ourselves because it takes place in a fantasy world. And yet there's no mistaking the fact that the characters in BSG are us. And I don't just mean the humans. We are the Cylon too.

The new season of BSG starts airing Friday, April 4 on the Sci Fi Channel.

Writer-Supporting, Semiclothed 'Battlestar' Fans To Fight For Jamie Bamber's Used Towel

Mark — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 16:25:41 EST

In support of United Hollywood's Pencils2MediaMoguls campaign, in which fans can demonstrate their solidarity with the striking writers of their beloved shows by bombarding their favorite entertainment conglomerate executives with pallet-loads of unwanted writing implements, several showrunners have tried to stoke additional interest in the stunt by offering prizes for participation, such as signed scripts or personal phone calls from appreciative cast members. (Imagine: 5 minutes chatting with Lost's Matthew Fox, who answers your every question about the series' mysteries by explaining, "To be honest, I have no fucking idea what's going on. They've kept us all so drugged up since the beginning of season two so we won't give anything away that we can't remember our lines five minutes after we finish a scene.")

But the reward sure to be most coveted comes from the producers of Battlestar Galactica, who are donating three autographed pieces of fabric that have touched the private parts of star Jamie Bamber to the cause:

Instead of a phone call, Jamie has offered to sign and donate three worn (as in actually worn, not threadbare) towels to the Pencils campaign. The first two will go to the fans who buy the most pencils in Jamie's name, while the third will be raffled off at random. The towels will be yours to do with as you wish (insert your joke here) but any and all cloning will be subject to the appropriate international treaty restrictions.

As you can see in the above video (and here and here), some particularly proactive fans have already picked up the terrycloth gauntlet and started a parallel YouTube effort to encourage participation in the pencil-based assault; so far, no "Bamber Bunnies" have dropped their towels, but should the campaign reach viral popularity in the Galactica fan community, it probably wont be long before viewers of both sexes—and all shapes and sizes—start try to one-up each other, selflessly exposing their goodies on behalf of Captain Apollo and the gang if that's what it takes to save the TV universe.

Bamber Bunnies Support WGA [YouTube]
Pencils2MediaMoguls Fan Raffle Madness! [United Hollywood]