All-Purpose Omni-Post: Giant Frogs, Black Hole, Akira, Firefly, GoW2

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— once upon a time there was a really big frog

— David Fincher — Alien3, Zodiac — is going to direct a movie of Charles Burns’ fascinating, incredibly disturbing graphic novel Black Hole, about a bunch of teenagers who contract a sexually transmitted disease that causes them to become deformed in various ways. Yes — finally Maximilian gets his sex scene! (What, it’s my running gag.) (I notice on Fincher’s IMDB page that he’s also signed up to do Arthur C. Clarke’s golden-age classic Rendezvous with Rama, with Morgan Freeman apparently playing all roles.)

— also Leonardo DiCaprio is involved in a live-action Akira

— Steven Brust has written a novel set in Joss Whedon’s Firefly universe. It’s called My Own Kind of Freedom, and he’s releasing it for free as a download. Sample paragraph, from the first page:

Inside the vessel, even as her landing gear settled onto the rich dirt and
plumes of smoke were blown away from the side-thrusters on the outside, a
voice came over the intercom: “We’re down. We have landed safely. Yes,
through a hailstorm of fire, once more, we have achieved landfall in spite of all
the obstacles of the heavens. We are delivered. We must kiss the ground. Yes, I
say, the ground, the holy ground we must, uh, kiss.”

It’s good to have Wash back.

— in closing: geek out on this mini-lecture by a man with a slight speech impediment about the new improved graphics engine for Gears of War 2: