Director Bong Joon-ho, is one of those rare directors that have managed to create a movie that made tons at the box office but was also listed as one of the better movies made in that year. His movie, The Host, expertly melded the creature feature with that of a very touching story about family.

Three years after the release of that film, Bong Joon-ho is back with a movie with Mother. This is movie is a return to his earlier roots – specifically, his old movie Memories of Murder. The story deals with an old woman whose dim-witted son was accused of murdering a girl. The mother goes on a quest to find out what happened so she can get her son back. Mother has parallelisms with Memories of Murder in that a murder and memories pay pivotal roles in developing the story.

This is a movie that’s really worth checking out.

? !

Now he is reportedly rumored to be near bagging a role that could catapult him to official movie stardom.

According to reports, he is getting closer to landing the role of Captain America in Marvel Studios’ The First Avenger: Captain America.

Krasinski has reportedly been meeting with the producers since the start of 2010 and  has read for the role and even done some screen tests. He allegedly read for the role four times and has done two screen tests.

He is reportedly also reading with different actresses who are up for the female leads. The final decision for the casting might be announced in a just a few weeks.

? !

Corey Haim, the troubled teen idol, died from a possible drug overdose last Wednesday. Haim was brought to Providence St.  Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, California in order to perform attempts to revive him and save his life. But the efforts were unsuccessful and he was pronounced dead at 3:30 am. He was 38 years old.

Haim gained popularity starring in many 80s movies, his most popular being the Joel Schumacher directed The Lost Boys where he starred opposite Corey Feldman. Both Haim and Feldman appeared together and separately in many 80s movies and both have also struggled with drug addiction. The two got reunited when they did the reality show The Two Coreys in 2007, but it was canceled.

Haim was born in Toronto in December 23, 1971.

? !

And since a successful reboot is very important at this stage, it was mentioned that Christopher Nolan, who helmed and reinvigorated the Batman franchise with Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, will be spearheading the Supes reboot because of his experience.

Nolan, in an interview, said that his involvement in the Superman reboot came about because of an “impasse” that has happened while talking about the third Batman film. Writer David Goyer brought out an idea (which he didn’t mention) for Superman that Nolan immediately loved.

There is speculation that the new Superman movie, will be like that of the new Batman movie, in that Superman will be the only superhero in his world, so any speculations about a crossover between the two is already out of the question.

Speaking of Batman, Nolan also said that the impasse he mentioned has already been fixed. He and Goyer are now moving forward with the third film, though he is still mum about who the next villain will be. He did say that they want to finish their story as opposed to blowing it up infinitely and expanding the story they’ve created.

I’m betting on Catwoman.

? !

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Imagine Entertainment, which is operated by both Brian Grazer and Ron Howard, will be producing the movie.

For those of you who don’t know Hoover, he was the first director of the FBI. He was actually one of the leading lights in the founding of the Agency and he remained its director until his death in 1972. He was credited for many of the advances that made the FBI such a formidable law enforcement agency. But he was also a very controversial figure because he was seen as a man who tried to exceed the reach and jurisdiction of the FBI. He is also reportedly a closet homosexual.

Dustin Lance Black, who wrote Milk, will write the biopic’s script.

? !

Shadow Locked, a sci-fi site from the UK, was able to interview Roger Christian, the art director who worked on Star Wars and Alien. Christian is in a good position to talk about the prequel because he has met with Scott about the movie and there’s talk that he could possibly work on it again with Scott. He did confirm that it is going to be shot in 3D. He also shared Scott has a clear vision of where he wants the movie to go and hinted that with the whole concept “had legs to go on”, there is a possibility that a new trilogy may be in the offing.

I’m certainly looking forward to this. I think Scott’s Alien is one of the best sci-fi horror movies ever made. And I even think that it blows Cameron’s Aliens out of the water.

? !

Harris is going to star in the Smurfs movie. This Smurfs movie is reportedly going to be a mix of both live action and animation. This means Harris is not just going to be voicing one of the Smurfs. He is reported to be playing the lead live action character.

Filming for the movie will commence this coming April, which will coincide with the end of the filming for Harris’ hit CBS sitcom “How I Met Your Mother.” The movie is expected to be released on July 29, 2011. Raja Gosnell will be directing the movie.

? !

My name is DB Ferguson, and I run NoFactZone.net, a blog which many consider to be the best independent Stephen Colbert fan site on the web. We’ve been blogging about Stephen Colbert since July 17, 2006, so close to 4 years. We have an all-volunteer staff of 13 Completists, who blog 7 days a week to bring the Colbert Nation the most up to date news about Stephen Colbert and the ‘Colbert Report’. We receive on average over 60,000 unique visits a month and over 100,000 page views. We’ve had over 2.5 million unique hits over the course of our blog, and every one of those hits was free to readers and positively biased towards Stephen Colbert.

Before I go any further, I would like to praise the access to videos that you have given through ColbertNation.com. I’ve been a fan for a very long time, and I remember the horrid shape of the official ‘Colbert Nation’ site and the videos for the first couple of years of the show. I remember struggling to even watch a video, and there was no way that a video was getting embedded. We at No Fact Zone mostly linked to YouTube videos, until they were taken down, not because we wanted to make money off of the videos, but because we wanted to share the greatness that is Stephen Colbert with anyone who would listen. In the fall of 2008, ColbertNation.com made a game changing move. They started streaming both full videos as well as embeddable clips. And the way that the new media department tagged the videos and the way that the videos were searchable was so amazingly wonderful. I still visit the official ‘Colbert Nation’ site almost every day, and when I do, I almost always stop to watch a video or two. Sometimes it’s something recent, but often it’s something from the vaults, something I haven’t seen in years, but I just have a hankering to watch. I’m quite grateful for the fact that Viacom listened to their viewers and gave them access to videos. I will be the first to admit that there are processes in the video experience that should be upgraded, but all in all, it’s head and shoulders over what was being offered for a very long time.

That being said, I was a bit distressed when I read at the Hollywood Reporter that Viacom will start suing bloggers who use unauthorized clips of the ‘Daily Show’. From the tone of the interview, it sounds like this edict applies to all Comedy Central shows, including the main topic of our blog, the ‘Colbert Report’. Now, I use authorized clips of the ‘Colbert Report’ and the ‘Daily Show’, with the rare exception of fanvids (virtually all of which have been removed from the original servers and are no longer available). I do screencaps sometimes, I’ll admit to that. And we often post the videos of the shows without the embed frame, as I prefer to feature the video as large as it will go on my site. But I’m using video that streams directly from Viacom and ColbertNation.com, ads and all.

You said in your interview with the Hollywood Reporter that “My feeling is if (websites) are making money on our copyrighted content, then that is a problem.” When I tell people I am the webmaster of a very popular web site, the first thing people ask is “How much money do you make?” And I can say, in all honesty, not a dime. I take pride in the fact that I do this site not because I am making money, but I do it simply for the love and the passion of blogging about a man and a show that I have grown to respect and admire. We’re more than a news site, we’re a community.

To further alleviate any concern you may have about us profiting off of Viacom’s intellectual property, let me be perfectly transparent about our finances here at No Fact Zone. Our server costs run us $129 a month. Our host graciously manages our box for free. You see that ad in the far right corner? That’s our lone ad on the site. Wanna know how much I made in February 2010 from that ad? $1.62. No, seriously. $1.62. We’ve received donations for our server, which sit in a fund that our host keeps and uses to pay our server fees. But the blogging staff doesn’t see a dime; the donations go straight to the server fees. Our staff gets no pay, no perks, nothing except the satisfaction that what we are doing is producing something we as a fan community can be proud of.

Look, I understand that you don’t want blogs profiting from your content. I know of quite a few high profile blogs that take clips and post them under their own frame. Those sites have lots of ads, and paid staff, and make lots and lots of money. I can see how that would irk you. Our site is just a simple fan blog, with some of the hardest core ‘Colbert Report’ fans on the net, whose sole mission is to praise Stephen Colbert, all glory to his name, peace be upon him. We are one shiny, happy lovefest here, a 100% biased constantly updated ad for your show that we sustain at our own expense. If you have a problem with something we’ve posted, please, shoot me an e-mail. I’ll be more than happy to take it down if you feel that somehow, for example, a screencap of Stephen Colbert in a cute outfit is going to financially hurt Viacom in some way. We want to make this work. We want to praise, and we want to blog, and we want to be a community that does not live in fear of the people who also bring us what we so very much enjoy and love.

Thank you for listening to the fans.

Sincerely,
DB Ferguson
Webmaster and founder, NoFactZone.net

Being the hopeless bookworm that I am, I immediately let out a thoughtless “whoo hoo!” in my office, because I’d been reading this book during my morning commute over the last week. I just finished it yesterday, and it’s outstanding. The New York Times ran several reviews of the book last month, and DB and I had actually emailed each other at the time to express our hopes that Ms. Skloot would show up on The Colbert Report.

For those of you who might be interested, I strongly recommend you read the various reviews and articles from The New York Times (try this one or this one). Ms. Skloot’s book asks hard but incredibly timely questions about race, class, privacy, consent and medical ethics. Henrietta was a black woman from an uneducated family whose cells were obtained in an era when “informed consent” was not required. The development of HeLa was invaluable in fighting diseases like polio, but the historical context (although a different type of research, it took place at the same time as the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study) underscores questions about how scientific discoveries were and are made. Who currently benefits — and who should — from medical research (particularly with respect to the increasingly-common pharmaceutical practice of patenting genes)? How do you balance the need to keep access to research open while respecting the rights of individuals to control their own cells? There’s so much food for thought in this book.

I have no idea how the interview will turn out and what they’ll have time for on the show, but I’m over the moon about seeing this author on the guest list.