Jeff Bezos wears a Starfleet uniform (and heavy makeup) in “Star Trek Beyond.” (Credit: Justin Lin)
You’d hardly recognize Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos in the super-heavy makeup he wears as an alien Starfleet official in “Star Trek Beyond,” the latest big-screen voyage of the Starship Enterprise.
But just to make sure you’re able to spot him, Bezos posted a Vine video in which you can see him getting a bite while waiting for his scene. “Cheers,” he says into the camera.
In a Twitter update, Bezos said the “Star Trek” appearance checked off an item on his bucket list. He also gave a shout-out to director Justin Lin, the cast and the crew.
The poster for “Voyage of Time” emphasizes the film’s cosmic subject matter. (Credit: IMAX)
The video trailer for “Voyage of Time” provides a trippy taste of a movie that’s been more than 30 years in the making – and tells the story of a universe that’s been billions of years in the making.
Make that two movies: The big-screen IMAX version of Terrence Malick’s film, narrated by Brad Pitt with a running time of 40 minutes, is due for release on Oct. 7. There’ll also be a 90-minute version narrated by Cate Blanchett.
What’s the difference? That’s not exactly clear. The longer version is described as a “poetic and provocative ride full of open questions,” while the IMAX experience “immerses audiences directly into the story of the universe and life itself.”
A model of the Starship Enterprise hangs from the EMP Museum’s ceiling. (GeekWire photo by Kevin Lisota)
From several yards away, the bridge of the Starship Enterprise looks as if it was beamed down from the 23rd century into the “Star Trek: Exploring New Worlds” exhibition that opens Saturday at Seattle’s EMP Museum.
But up close, you can tell it’s a 50-year-old movie prop, with rocker switches from the ’60s and bits of plastic peeling off the control console.
In a weird way, that’s a big part of the golden-anniversary exhibition’s appeal. When the TV show had its premiere in 1966, “Star Trek” was all about a bright and shiny future. It still is, but the exhibition also casts a spotlight on the social issues and foibles that have shaped the saga over the course of five decades.
“All these are ingredients that you can see get funneled into ‘Star Trek,’” museum curator Brooks Peck said today during a preview of the exhibit. And they’re funneled into the exhibition as well.
NASA astronaut Terry Virts aims his camera through the Cupola, the best window on the International Space Station. (Credit: NASA)
“A Beautiful Planet” is a 3-D visual feast for the eyes, but the astronauts who filmed the IMAX space extravaganza made sure that’s not all it is.
For example, NASA astronaut Terry Virts said he recalled the feeling of life on the International Space Station as he watched the movie today at Seattle’s Pacific Science Center. “When I was going down into the Soyuz to say goodbye, I can feel what that suit felt like. Just how to move in weightlessness,” he said.
His crewmate, Kjell Lindgren, was struck by the sounds of a spacewalk.
“The microphone captured the sound coming through the structure of the suit,” he told GeekWire. “The anchors banging around, the sound of the breathing, just the suit flexing, the joints slipping on each other. Just the sensation of what it’s like to move outside, and to see these guys moving around outside. That’s what it feels like. It’s very visceral.”
When a spacewalker’s tether pulled taut, the resulting twang drew a gasp from the audience – as if they were watching a “Gravity”-type thriller, not a real-life documentary about the space station and our planet below.
That’s the kind of scene that producer/director/editor Toni Myers, who’s been in on 10 IMAX movies, loves to spring on filmgoers. “There’s such a thing as a golden eight seconds, and that was one of them,” she said.
The announcement about Solanum watneyi made a splash, in part because it came just as the hype over the movie was reaching a crescendo.
Now there’s a second splash: The description of the plant is being published in the journal PhytoKeys – just as “The Martian” and Matt Damon, the actor who played Mark Watney, are basking in the glow of the Academy Awards spotlight.
Fox’s “Life in Space” series is aimed at stirring up interest in today’s release of “The Martian” on DVD and Blu-ray. And speaking of “stirring,” one of the key issues on the International Space Station has to do with getting sufficient shut-eye without floating into your crewmate’s bunk.
NASA astronaut Drew Feustel, a veteran of two space shuttle flights, handles the question in a 46-second clip. It turns out that the accommodations are cozier than you might think.
Daniel Craig and Lea Seydoux star in “SPECTRE,” the latest 007 movie. (MGM / Columbia Pictures)
Here’s a different kind of Bond index: In honor of the latest 007 movie, “SPECTRE,” Bloomberg Business tracked eight metrics across all 3,053 minutes and 33 seconds of the 24 James Bond films released over the past 53 years.
Among the highlights:
Bond is wearing a suit or a tuxedo for nearly 18 hours out of the total 51 hours.
He introduces himself as “Bond. James Bond” 26 times over the course of the 24 films.
He spends more than 5 percent of his on-screen time flirting, seducing or being “otherwise intimate.”
Pierce Brosnan’s Bond set the record for most gadgets used in a film. (16, in “Die Another Day”).
Bond or another character orders a total of 16 martinis for him in 24 films. That counts the controversial dirty vodka martini that Bond quaffs in “SPECTRE.”
James Bond (played by Daniel Craig) checks out an Aston Martin DB10 sports car as geekmaster Q (Ben Whishaw) looks on. (Credit: MGM Pictures / Columbia Pictures / Eon Productions)
What’s a James Bond movie without gadgets? “SPECTRE,” the latest film in the decades-long series, delivers way-out innovations that aren’t yet ready for real life, tributes to classic gee-whiz-ware and a couple of high-tech twists that are ripped from the headlines.
Here are seven technological tropes to watch for when Bond goes after the shadowy crime organization known as SPECTRE.
In “Back to the Future Part 2,” Marty McFly (played by Michael J. Fox) grabs a hoverboard to make his escape in 2015 – sparking a decades-long effort to invent hoverboards that actually work. (Credit: Universal Pictures)
One of the running gags in the Back to the Future movies is the Hollywood equivalent of a closed timelike curve – in which a time traveler brings an innovation back from the future and invents it in the past, so that it exists in the future. For example, there’s Michael J. Foxas Marty McFly, doing the “Johnny B. Goode” duckwalk that inspires Chuck Berry’s signature move, 30 years earlier in 1955.
This week marks the flip side of that record: In Back to the Future Part 2, Marty travels ahead from 1985 to Oct. 21, 2015 – and brings back glimpses of a weird future world where flying robots roam the skies and the Cubs are contenders. It’s one thing to talk about which technologies the movie got right (fingerprint recognition) or wrong (dog-walking drones). But what’s really interesting are the technologies that arguably take a page from the “BTTF” script and close the time loop, just in time for Marty’s arrival.
A picture from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows the area of Acidalia Planitia where the fictional Ares 3 mission landed in “The Martian.” (Credit: NASA / JPL / Univ. of Arizona)
Marooned astronaut Mark Watney takes a harrowing trek from Mars’ Acidalia Planitia to Schiaparelli Crater in “The Martian,” which took the top spot on last weekend’s box-office list with $55 million. But pictures of the actual terrain from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter suggest Watney’s trip would be even riskier in real life.
The science team behind the orbiter’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE, captured a series of images that correspond to scenes in the movie in response to requests from Andy Weir, who wrote the book on which “The Martian” is based.
