Movies

Could the co-creator of The Matrix's real life truly be stranger than fiction?

It's tempting to see "Cars," the seventh movie from Pixar Animation Studios, as a parable about the future of Walt Disney Co.

Early in the film, which opened Friday, a cocky race car named Lightning McQueen declares, "I'm a one-man show." But by the time the credits roll, McQueen realizes he's nothing without a great pit crew behind him.

It's a lesson that Ed Catmull, Pixar's co-founder and the new president of Disney Feature Animation, has built his career on.

John Lasseter and his merry band of animators have a way with blockbusters. The master storyteller explains how he does it -- and how he plans to sprinkle some of that Pixar dust at Disney.

If Mattel thought that its "Cars" Hot Wheels line was good enough, John Lasseter, the animated film's director, had a different message for the toy line's designers: At Pixar Animation Studios, good enough doesn't quite cut it.

Suddenly, John Lasseter is Walt Disney Co.'s $7.4-billion man.

Returning to the company where he worked more than 20 years ago as a low-level artist, computer animation's master storyteller faces a daunting task: how to merge his community of hit-making mavericks at Pixar Animation Studios with a more staid Disney animation group that has struggled for much of the last decade to regain its stride.

The inside story of how Dreamworks beat Pixar to the screen

12. Specifications are for the weak and timid!

11. This machine is a piece of gagh! I need dual processors if I am to do battle with this code!

10. You cannot really appreciate Dilbert unless you've read it in the original Klingon.

I found this online: the stange and evil tale of the production of Superman V. It spans decades, $50,000,000 is spent before they even have even settled on a writer or director. It's so horrible. It's out of date as it stops in the middle of 2004, but it's so horrible, you have to read it.

A ten-year theater manager explains why they charge $6 for a bucket of popcorn, why running a theater is a losing proposition, and why buying an overpriced soda gets you much more respect.

How the pixel-packing upstart became an animation superpower and left Disney in the dust.

Only someone ignorant of the fundamentals of psychiatry and the psychopathology of sex can fail to realize a subtle atmosphere of homoeroticism which pervades the adventure of the mature 'Batman' and his young friend 'Robin.'

-- Frederic Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent

Transformers, the long-planned, live-action movie based on the robot-morphing cartoon, comic and toy franchise, will roll into theaters July 4, 2007, DreamWorks and Paramount Pictures announced Wednesday. Michael Bay (The Island, The Rock) will direct; Steven Spielberg will executive produce.

Contrary to what most history books say, the U.S. military did not drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima simply to end World War 2, but mainly to destroy Japan's secret weapons -- Godzilla and Rodan!

Merhan Karimi Nasseri has lived in a Paris airport for 15 years, and now Hollywood is knocking.

A comprehensive interview with Steve Jobs by The Computerworld Smithsonian Awards Program

• The Enterprise encounters a mysterious energy field of a type that it has encountered before.
• The Enterprise is sent to check up on a remote outpost of scientists who are perfectly all right.

How Star Wars Ruined American Movies

Way back in August of 1997, Top5 did a list of "The Top 15 Chinese Translations of English Movie Titles."

Sometime later, an unknown denizen of cyberspace stripped the credits from that list and attached it to the bottom of a legitimate Wall Street Journal article on poorly-translated movie titles, and tossed it back into the cyber-sea.

As sung by master Yoda, on meeting Luke Skywalker

Director Roger Nygard Dared to Go Where No Man Has Gone Before, Immersing Himself in the Kookiest Cult in Pop Culture.