Yeah, you’d just managed to forget that Warner Bros. was developing a live action Akira movie removed entirely from its context of postwar, post-nuclear horror Japan and set instead in New York with white American actors in the leading roles. Now that you’ve remembered, you might as well feed that anger this concept art.

Marjane Satrapi‘s Persepolis, if you haven’t read it (and I highly recommend you do, perhaps after borrowing it from your local library) is a memoir of growing up in a secular and feminist family during the first decade of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, a family that eventually decided that in order to keep their daughter safe without going against everything they’d already taught her about confidence and morality was to get her out of the country. Its two part narrative touches on religion, self-confidence and self-discovery, morality, femininity, justice, and protest, among many other issues.

So I can understand why many librarians in Chicago were puzzled by a direct order to remove the book, which is actually part of the curriculum in some classrooms, from libraries, classrooms, and even the hands of student borrowers.

I love The Simpsons, really I do, and we don’t normally post things on the site to knock them but I figured some people might get a kick out of this. The show creators decided to do their own take on the Harlem Shake, called “The Homer Shake,” for their couch gag this week. It doesn’t quite work. But I do give them credit for trying to be relevant, they aren’t know for being able to pull together current items like this because of their animation schedules, and because Lisa is reading a book titled, “Last to the Party.”

I guess this means this whole thing is done now, right?

(via The Harlem Shake)

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Excuse us while we Reichenbach Cry. 

Writer George R.R. Martin is known for more than just his A Song of Ice and Fire series. For years he’s been involved with a science fiction and superhero fantasy anthology called Wild Cards. We found out last year around this time it was going to be made into a film by Syfy and Universal, and while we have no word on the progress of that project, we did hear some interesting tidbits concerning the original anthology. Turns out, Martin was keen on getting Watchmen creator Alan Moore involved. He didn’t want anything to do with it but someone else did. Martin described him as “a skinny british kid dressed all in black.” Yup, a young Neil Gaiman wanted to create a character for Wild Cards but since he had no credits to his name at that point, Martin turned him down. He’s obviously kicking himself now. Hit the jump to watch him tell the entire story because Gaiman chimes in near the end to tell his side of things and it’s even worse than you can imagine.

When last we heard about Indiana Jones 5, producer Frank Marshall said George Lucas wasn’t writing it and that it wasn’t likely to happen at all. Marion Ravenwood begs to differ. I mean, actress Karen Allen does. And if you think she’s talking out of her ear, think again. She checked with Steven Spielberg first. 

I’d describe my feelings towards 3D in feature film as a big on the negative side of neutral. While I don’t think I will ever want to see a 3D movie where I’d actually like to invest myself in the characters and plot for the first time, I’m all in favor of 3D rereleases. There’s something magical about seeing a movie on a big screen in a dark theater full of other folks who love it, and I feel like 3D is a small price to pay, even it means I have to wear two sets of glasses. Case in point: I haven’t seen the original Star Wars on a big screen since I was eleven. And there are even some cases, like Tron: Legacy, where I feel that 3D enhanced (even if slightly) my experience of an otherwise (okay, perhaps “even still”) forgettable movie.

But my sympathy for 3D ends at it being applied to movies against the wishes of the director, and particularly with 3D post conversion, the laziest way of making 3D movies.

The geek world was rocked last night when a story broke that Ben Affleck might be directing Warner Bros.’ Justice League film project. My first reaction when I saw the news? “Stop it.” I’m not sure why I had that reaction, perhaps Affleck’s Daredevil turn still lingers in the recesses of my mind, but whatever the reason, I was automatically against it. So, is this actually happening and what will you do if it does? 

Up until a week ago, TV Tropes had a very handy trope index called Rape Tropes. (Note: all TVT rape trope pages in this article link, ironically, to Google caches.) This page also linked to other iterations of rape tropes in popular culture such as Rape as Backstory, Rape and Switch, Rape as Drama, Rape as Redemption, and other rape tropes common in the pop culture idiom.

Today when you access any of these pages, you’re informed, “We do not want a page on this topic. It does not meet our content policy.”

Recently on the discussion thread for combining the “Victim falls for Rapist” trope with the “Rape as Stockholm Syndrome” trope under the standard Rape Is Love cliche, Wiki owner and admin Fast Eddie explained that all tropes related to rape had been wiped off the site because it was getting the site “in trouble with Google.”

Apparently that meant any trope containing the word “rape” had to go.

I don’t know how many of you have seen The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episode that spoofs Stephen King’s The Shining but this news hit me like a go-crazy-Homer-with-an-ax this morning. King has apparently been working on a sequel to what is probably his most famous book. It’s going to be called Doctor Sleep. Hit the jump to read the synopsis. If you dare.