In honor of the upcoming release of Iron Man on DVD and Blu-ray on September 30, we here at Geeks of Doom have two (2) Iron Man prize packs for up for grabs!

Two (2) winners will each receive:
- an 18” x 27” Iron Man poster
- Stark Industries/Iron Man extendable poster case
- a 512 MB Stark Industries flash drive with behind-the-scenes videos

This summer’s first blockbuster, Iron Man, will be released by Paramount Home Entertainment on September 30, 2008, as a single-disc DVD, as well as 2-disc Ultimate Edition DVD and Blu-Ray sets.

The IRON MAN Ultimate Edition two-disc sets are super-charged with hours of explosive bonus features that take viewers inside the suit of self-made Super Hero Tony Stark and his invincible alter ego. The sets offer the ultimate IRON MAN experience with extensive explorations of the origins of the character in a six-part featurette, as well as a seven-part in-depth look at the making of the film, a revealing documentary on the stellar visual effects, Robert Downey Jr.’s original screen test, deleted and extended scenes, a photo gallery of concept art and behind-the-scenes images on the set and more.

Earlier this month, I spoke with The Forbidden Kingdom screenwriter John Fusco and his influences that helped forge the script. Now, I am lucky enough to speak with one of the film’s co-stars, Li Bing-Bing, who makes her Hollywood debut playing Ni Chang, better known as The Bride With White Hair.

Geeks Of Doom: Thank you for taking some time today to answer some questions about your current film, The Forbidden Kingdom which is your first English language film, after ten years of acting in Hong Kong cinema. Did you have any trouble adapting to an American production work schedule?

Li Bing-Bing: I was very lucky to be part of The Forbidden Kingdom. The Forbidden Kingdom has a fantastic filmmaking team with director Rob Minkoff, cinematographer Peter Pau, martial arts choreographer Yuen Woo-Ping, and Jet Li, and Jackie as world class martial artists and teachers. Everyone was very professional. The Forbidden Kingdom cast and crew also had a great team spirit attitude — they had high expectation for all cast members, no matter that their backgrounds maybe. Everyone had the same treatment and everyone was thoughtful as well. I quickly became accustomed to the U.S. filmmaking culture and learned a lot from the experience [...]

Access Hollywood has learned that Guy Ritchie has cast Rachel McAdams in the main female role for his version of Arthur Conan Doyle’s world of Sherlock Holmes.

For Sherlock Holmes, McAdams will be joining a great cast including Robert Downey Jr. as Holmes, Jude Law as Watson, and Mark Strong (Stardust, Syriana) as Lord Blackwood.

Oh happy day, it’s been “officialized”… Will Smith is in for a prequel to the incredibly inexplicable success that was I Am Legend with director Francis Lawrence. D.B. Weiss is the man currently working on the screenplay.

Naturally a sequel without the Fresh Prince was out of the question, so the prequel will follow Smith as Robert Neville when everything was still normal and then the transition to a virus-destroyed humanity [...]

Boom, Bang, Vroom, Huh?, Crash, Kablam = Eagle Eye. A true escapist movie, Eagle Eye is explosive fun, as long as you don’t think too much and you don’t mind commercials.

Jerry Shaw (Shia LaBeouf), an underachieving slacker, is blackmailed into a criminal situation, directed only by a woman over the phone that seems able to access all the electronics connected by some kind of network. Rachel Hollowman (Michelle Monaghan) is driven into the same situation with Jerry when her son is threatened. FBI Agent Thomas Morgan (Billy Bob Thorton) and Air Force Investigator Zoe Perez (Rosario Dawson) are assigned to investigate Shaw, and, as a consequence, Rachael. They all are led by the seat of their pants on the path the woman on the phone decides [...]

With two novels under her belt, writer Rebecca Donner recently wrote a graphic novel under the female driven comic imprint Minx. Geeks of Doom’s own JackBauerstein took some time out of her busy schedule to talk about her graphic novel, Burnout and her future novels.

Geeks of Doom: How did you first come up with the idea for Burnout?

Rebecca Donner: I had been hiking, and afterwards I couldn’t shake this image in my head of a mountain burning – these terrible yet beautiful saffron flames leaping against the backdrop of a midnight sky. The book basically works toward that image from the very first page, and it becomes a pivotal, culminating scene. Coupled with that was an idea I’d been kicking around for a while about…er,…a quasi-incest situation. Ah, I’ll stop right there — I’ve given away too much already!…

The Hunt for Red October is hands-down the best film in the Jack Ryan series for a number of reasons, but first and foremost is the lack of a major villain. Instead the conflict is provided by the cryptic world of international politics and tense foreign relations that are all too real. Obviously there are villainous characters, but their roles are minor and are often interjected to give the plot a single push when needed.
A young Alec Baldwin plays a Jack Ryan who believes in others more than he believes in himself, but whose dedication to doing the right thing is unwavering.

Sean Connery play the mysterious submarine Captain Marko Ramius, whose internal conflict creates an international crisis. Ramius is perhaps the most interesting character in any of the Ryan films. His own dreams surpass any nationalism that may be ingrained into him through years of military service. Despite the fact that we see him commit treason, desertion, murder and conspiracy, viewers will find it near impossible not to sympathize with Ramius’ cause.

But if you own this film on DVD already, is it worth buying again [...]

After going back to re-watch Season 1, and finding myself pleasantly surprised at how well it held up, I also went back and watched the second season of Heroes. You may call me an apologist, but I enjoyed season 2 almost as much as the first one. Did the season have its problems? Sure. A lot of the new characters were dumb and annoying, and their introduction caused characters the audience had grown attached to in the first season to be cast aside. It also didn’t help the show that the writer’s strike occurred just as the story was gaining some speed and becoming more interesting. Having seen some of what the creators had planned for the second half of the season, I’m sad that we didn’t get the story as planned. Still, we get 11 solid episodes on this set, and while they may not be quite as good as the first season, they still have their moments, and are more enjoyable than a lot of other crap on TV.

The episodes on this set cover the entire second season, which saw Hiro (Masi Oka) sent to the past to inspire his childhood hero. We also got Peter’s (Milo Ventimiglia) trip to Ireland, then his trip to the future, followed by his journey to Texas. We got Claire (Hayden Panettiere) and her annoying new boyfriend, the “death” of HRG (Jack Coleman), and then we got to meet Claire’s birth mother [...]

A funny thing happened about halfway through this movie, the Minotaur showed up, and suddenly I realized that I was watching an episode of Hercules: The Legendary Journey. This is not to say I was ever a fan of Hercules, but I was just very much reminded of that series. The dimly lit sets, the goofy comic relief, the bad CG monsters, yes it had it all. And like Hercules, Scorpion King 2: Rise of a Warrior had a simple charm to it, and I found myself starting to appreciate it.

Now let’s get this out of the way. This is NOT a good movie. It looks about as good as you would expect a direct-to-DVD movie to look. The dialogue is pretty wooden, as are a lot of the actors. I mean, you don’t even get to make fun of The Rock, or ogle Kelly Hu’s magnificent figure, which is pretty much the only reason to watch the first Scorpion King film.

My biggest problem with Scorpion King 2 is that it contains none of the fun, dumb action movie sensibilities of the Mummy movies that it is a spin-off of. This movie takes itself way too seriously, and if it had even a little of the Mummy’s tongue-in-cheek humor, I could handle it, but it’s just not there [...]

Nothing is 100% official here yet, but DreamWorks has Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Supremacy, The Bourne Ultimatum) at the top of their short list of directors to take on their version of Blackbeard, about Edward Teach, who went on to become Blackbeard the pirate.

One thing that is known is that this is going to be a lot more violent, gritty, and real than the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, looking to get an R-rating.

The film is being produced by Barry Josephson and the script is being written by David Franzoni (Gladiator, Amistad).

Below is a plot description from Mania, who got the exclusive on Greengrass [...]

It was Disney day today and in an event held at the Kodak Theater, the company announced some of its gigantic upcoming projects including Cars 2, Alice in Wonderland, and The Lone Ranger, and what Johnny Depp has to do with most of them.

In Tim Burton‘s upcoming CGI/3D/live-action (I’m not sure if anyone really knows WHAT it will actually be) take on the classic Alice in Wonderland story, Johnny Depp was long-rumored to be playing the Mad Hatter. Considering that he is now to Tim Burton what John Ratzenberger is to Pixar, we all knew this was likely and Disney confirmed today that Depp would indeed be taking on the role for his pal.

From what sounds like quite a spectacle, apparently the University of Southern California’s marching and came out, playing the Lone Ranger theme song [...]

Between 1976 and 1977, David Berkowitz murdered six people and wounded seven others in a series of attacks that terrorized New York City. He was dubbed the .44 Caliber Killer by newspapers and was self-titled the Son of Sam in a letter found near one of the shooting victims. After Berkowitz was finally arrested, in part due to an unpaid parking ticket, he cited both a Satanic cult he was supposedly a member of and his next door neighbor’s dog that was possessed by a demon who commanded him to go out and kill. This is Berkowitz’s story, as recounted through the imagination of Ulli Lommel.

Lommel, who has been making movies since the early 1970s, has seemingly made his post-2000 career out of writing and directing low budget direct-to-video tales about true-life serial killers or knockoffs of Hollywood fare. One would guess that after a handful of misses he’d finally get one right, but Son of Sam is not that film. Here, Lommel takes broad strokes with the most generic information about Berkowitz to paint a clearly unnecessary fictionalized account of the Son of Sam murders. Truth is always stranger than fiction [...]

As many of the episodes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia as I have seen, and as many of them as I have reviewed for this site, I have always enjoyed them with bated breath. They are generally pretty funny in their own right but I can’t help that little whispering voice in the back of my head warning me that the other shoe is bound to drop. For a show with no real direction that can be described as controlled chaos at best, I have complained in previous reviews that the show was beginning to rely too much on a shock and awe approach rather than creating their own mythology that could carry the show through weaker episodes. I went back and watched a handful of old episodes on DVD before I previewed the first two episodes of season four: ‘Mac & Dennis: Manhunters’ and ‘The Gang Solves the Gas Crisis’. What I found out was that in their avoidance of being stuck with a label, they have created that mythology by default. They have taken Seinfeld’s mantra — “Nobody learns, nobody hugs” — to unforeseen heights [...]

Star of 10 seasons of Stargate SG-1 and two direct-to-DVD Stargate movies, Amanda Tapping is definitely one of geekdoms greatest stars. Spending a season on base at Stargate Atlantis, Tapping decided to then move on to her next project, a project she had started first on the internet.

Set almost entirely in front of virtual sets, the show stars Amanda Tapping as Dr. Helen Magnus, as she seeks out other mysterious creatures. Magnus is the first female doctor in the Royal College, her fiancé, played by Christopher Heyerdahl — also from Stargate Atlantis — manipulates time and space, allowing him to teleport. But each teleport trip manipulates his DNA, making him display more and more homicidal tendencies. He, of course, soon becomes known as Jack the Ripper [...]

If you’re like me, you were really looking forward to yesterday’s premiere of the third season of Heroes. Like a lot of people, I wasn’t so impressed with the second season, so it was nice to go back and re-watch the first season, which still holds up as one of the best set of episodes of the last few years. Watching these episodes again has reminded me why I enjoyed this show so much when it first started.

Of course, if you’ve seen the show before, you know all about the story. Various people around the world discover that they have extraordinary powers. They quickly learn that not only are they not alone, but that there are evil people who want to use their powers for nefarious deeds. Predictably, they save the cheerleader, they stop the exploding man, and they set up the beginning of the second season. What struck me most about these episodes is how well they hold up. Sure, I didn’t get the big surprises anymore, but I found myself really enjoying the performances and how all the story bits fit together. Little touches like Linderman’s name being mentioned in the first episode, the evolution of Mr. Bennet from villain to hero, and the build up and eventual reveal of series villain Syler. You can tell in the first season that the creators of the show had a plan of how the story would go and it made for really compelling TV [...]