Your Highness (which hits theaters Friday, April 8th) is the new fantasy comedy starring the Oscar winning Natalie Portman, and the Oscar nominated James Franco in roles that were definitely shot before their Oscar nods.  The film is directed by David Gordon Green who you might know better as the director of Pineapple Express. The film looks to be a really fun and raunchy romp through the the middle-ages.

I first saw the trailer for this at the beginning of Paul and it definitely got my attention. The plot goes something like this: Thadeous (Danny McBride) is a lazy, arrogant prince who, with his brother Fabious (James Franco), must go on an epic quest in order to save their father’s kingdom. Add Natalie Portman as a warrior princess and Zooey Deschanel as Fabious’ bride how can you not want to see this?

We have 30 passes for a screening Tuesday April 5th at the Ritz Five. Wanna check it out? Simply comment with your favorite sword and sorcery film by April 3rd and the top entries will be checking out this film on Geekadelphia. In the meantime check out the trailer below.

Summer is upon us and for any self respecting comic book reader that means one thing: crossovers! Almost every year Marvel and DC bring out the big guns and unleash their line wide events which promise “lasting change” and “nothing will ever be the same again.”

Yeah, right.

Now, sometimes they do manage to get it right and the readers get a great story, outstanding art and a truly changed universe. The bar I measure any comic book event to is Crisis On Infinite Earths, still the best event comic ever that delivered on its promise. Unfortunately, it is the exception, not the rule. Most of the time we get weak stories, mediocre art and nonsensical crossover titles meant to separate you from your money.

This summer DC Comics has Flashpoint and Marvel has Fear Itself both vying for your attention and dollars. It’s too early to tell if either of these will be worth reading, but I thought this would be the perfect time to look back and revisit five of the all time worst comic book events ever.

5. Anything from Rob Liefeld’s Extreme Studios

Extreme Prejudice. Supreme Madness. Extreme Destroyer. And last but certainly not least, Babewatch. The names alone are cringe worthy and the stories were just as bad as they sound. At least once a year Liefeld would announce a new crossover for all the books under his Extreme Studios imprint, at the time was published by Image, and without fail, they would somehow be released out of order. Either a book would ship late, or not at all and the reader was left to figure out what was going on as they went along. Not that there was much of a plot to begin with…

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SyFy’s upcoming made-for-TV movie, Almighty Thor, hits the network on May 7th. Produced by The Asylum, as major fans of the SyFy network and their awesome programming (what up Battlestar Galactica), we were psyched to hear about the new TV flick. We sat down to chat with the star, Cody Deal. He’ll be playing, as you’ve probably guessed, Thor.

Scope out the Q&A, and tune in to SyFy on May 7th.

1. You’ve got the lead as Thor in SyFy’s “Almighty Thor”, but you’re also in a more comedic short film, “Louder Than Words”. What’d you enjoy most about each of those projects?

The growth in each one. Just like in life, you develop with steps. I remember shooting Louder Than Words, the first short film I had ever shot, and how unready I felt. The exact same thing with Thor. There were many moments in production where I felt I just wasn’t quite capable. But I acted in spite of that fear and ended up on top. I am happy to be doing this for a living.

2. When you nailed the lead in “Almighty Thor”, it was after you had auditioned for the lead role not just in “Conan the Barbarian” and Starz’s “Spartacus” series, but also Marvel’s “Thor” movie – did you see your Thor as a combination of the three, or was there a single, particularly strong influence on your performance?

Every hero is different, because they come from different backgrounds, places, and sometimes eras. My ultimate objective was to make Thor relatable to an audience, so I gave him many weaknesses and many obstacles. I didn’t want to see a god with no challenges. I wanted to see a god who doubted himself, doubted his greatness, felt love, lost love, gets hope, loses hope, and so on. I wanted to create a character that had many colors.

How do you make a god relatable to an audience? By making him experience what we experience… we, too, doubt our greatest abilities, and I feel Thor’s story runs parallel with our own stories. We all are trying to reach out and become our greatest selves. Thor’s story gives us hope – that is my goal anyway.

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I love genre films… and it was inevitable that someday I’d try to make one of my own. I decided I wanted to start small by doing a 9-12 minute short and thanks to some of the great films I saw at the Philadelphia Film Festival I thought, how hard could that be?

So I came up with an idea, wrote a script (which I sent to my friends to make sure it didn’t suck), and started pitching the film to people. I also started asking for favors, a lot of them. Luckily I know a lot of bored film geeks with nothing better to do.

I wanted to wait until the project had congealed into something a bit more substantial to start talking about it here on Geek, since Eric offered me the chance to share my experiences in this endeavor of mine with our readers.

So we cast the film and we shot a trailer to put on Kickstarter.com (to help raise funds) during our preproduction. Making films, even short ones, isn’t cheap. So even though we did make our goal, I am still accepting donations up until we begin principal production Saturday April 2nd.

The short is very Dario Argento Italian Giallo. I haven’t really directed anything substantial, which is why I am riding shotgun on this film, co-directing with my Cinedork.com podcast partner in crime Steve Denisevicz. So check out the trailer below after the jump and visit the Kickstarter here.

Readers will also recognize the very lovely and talented Jo in the trailer, who also is a writer here on Geek too. She was kind enough to get suckered into this project as well.

Warning the trailer is NSFW. Leave a comment and let me know what you think!

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I am a huge fan of the Saw franchise, especially the first film. It was like nothing I had seen before. It was a fresh spin on the tired slasher sub-genre, and in the end it gave you a twist ending that made even M. Night wet his pants.

Last month in support of Insidious, which hits theaters April 1st, I got to sit down with both the director of the original Saw James Wan and its writer and co-star as well Leigh Whannell; both preforming the same roles on their new foray into the haunted house sub-genre Insidious.

It was a true fan-boy moment for me to speak with these guys and talk about how they scare people in their own films, and what films have scared them as well. Enjoy!

Was this film an opportunity to do something different that you hadn’t done before? Not only with the PG-13 rating, but making an old-school haunted house film.

James Wan: I think partially, but more importantly Leigh and I just wanted to make a scary movie. It really doesn’t matter what sub-genre it falls into. [We] just wanted to make the kind of scary movie we loved, and the sub-genre of haunted house films is one we truly love.

When we came into it we realized this particular sub-genre had been pretty much done to death, so we wanted to see if we could put a new spin on it.

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Do secret agents see this little action all the time? You would certainly hope so, for their sake, but in a videogame surrounding the idea of undercover spies crossing paths some conflict is welcome. Secret Agents!, published by Chillingo of Angry Birds fame and developed by Clickgamer (how fitting), has so much potential on Mac. However, this simply is a high-resolution port of the iPhone game, which isn’t exactly the type of game you would play on a Mac much less an iPhone.

The game presents a novel concept: sneak around a miscellaneous (the story isn’t important) facility for three documents while avoiding or neutralizing guards and other agents during your escape. Sounds pretty cool, right? It’s too bad that searching for information boils down to clicking on sparkling cabinets and killing enemies is done with a single click. If secret agents are supposed to be of the utmost intelligence, in fighting shape and ready for anything, why is it that the only thing you do is click?

The game features a tutorial mode, but with such a simple premise and intuitive controls to boot, why would you need a crash course in clicking things? Avoiding enemies is as simple as tracking their position on your radar, but you can also lay booby traps. However, much of the time you won’t be in the same room to see the results—you’ll be too busy clicking on shiny water coolers.

It seems that Secret Agents! is an attempt to explore the cerebral, sneaky sides of being undercover. But clicking on shiny objects and paying attention to radar is far from brainy.

Want to give Secret Agents! a shot on your Mac? Leave us a comment detailing a moment when you had to act in secret (if it involves clicking, it better be good) and in a week we’ll choose one of you to toss a free game code.

Skyline by Britt Miller

The folks at Drink Philly are good peoples. They have an awesome website, they throw some seriously fantastic parties, and their First Friday events never disappoint. This coming First Friday, they are stepping it up yet again, dishing out all their proceeds from art purchases towards earthquake relief.

You can expect the usual. Free beverages from a local vendor, tasty nibbles from someone close by, art, music, and no cover charge. Though you will have to bring a valid ID, and this is 21+.

Featured artists include:

• Britt Miller (painting featured above)

• Tom Gabor

• Megan Coonelly

• Brad Hosbach

• Matthew Reid

• Chris Clark

• Rich Hundley

So stop by and support a good cause by buying some stuff. Do it.

Drink Philly Intergalactic Headquarters
239 Chestnut St. Second Floor, Philadelphia, PA
www.drinkphilly.com

This week in the Comic Roundup we review the first chapter of The Death of Spider-Man, check out the new direction for the FF and revisit our childhood with G.I.Joe: A Real American Hero.

FF #1
By Jonathan Hickman and Steve Epting

When I reviewed the first collection of Hickman’s run on Fantastic Four, I finished by saying that the new direction had potential, but it just wasn’t there yet for me. Now that the first part of his master plan for the Fantastic Four has finished, I’m still waiting to be impressed. The whole “death” of the Human Torch and bagged issue were so 1992 and screamed of gimmicks and cheap theatrics. Do things improve with the launch of the newly retitled FF? Well…

With the passing of Johnny Storm, the Fantastic Four have morphed into the Future Foundation and added Spider-Man their ranks. I’ll give Hickman this; it’s a dramatic new direction, something that other writers have been unable or unwilling to do. Unfortunately, the book still has the same problems for me; the dialogue sounds wooden and the characters show almost no emotion. The book is just missing… something. And while Epting is a more than competent artist, his style just does not fit a book like FF. The title needs an Alan Davis or John Byrne to make the characters really shine.

If you have enjoyed Hickman’s Fantastic Four run so far, FF will give you more of the same. Unfortunately, for those of us who have been less than impressed by the book, that is really not such a good thing.

Final Grade: C

G.I.Joe: A Real American Hero #164
By Larry Hama and S.L. Gallant

In my neighborhood growing up, you were either a G.I.Joe fan or a Transformers fan. Me, I was a G.I.Joe fan and the highlight of my month was when the new issue of the Marvel G.I.Joe series hit the local pharmacy spinner rack. I still have my (almost) complete run and would never part with them. Now while the Devil’s Due and, later, IDW revivals were fun, they were missing one crucial component: Larry Hama. Well, last May, IDW announced Hama was finally returning to G.I.Joe and picking up right where he left off. How does the comic hold up? Beautifully.

Much like how Hama wrote the old Marvel series, there are no arcs or series within a series. This is one continuing soap opera with guns and ninjas. In #164, Cobra attacks the new Pit and we get a Snake-Eyes/Storm Shadow fight to boot. Reading this issue, it’s like I’m 12 years old again. Hama has lost none of his affinity for the cast and what makes a good G.I.Joe comic book. The pencils by Gallant are nothing special, but the art was never the selling point of G.I.Joe; Hama was.

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An outdoor pillow fight in NYC

Alas, it is unlikely that this pillow fight will look anything like this infamous Slave Leia photo from Dragoncon in 2006, but hey, a guy can dream.

This Saturday, Urban Playground is hosting an epic pillow fight in Washington Square Park in honor of International Pillow Fight Day. Yes, that’s a thing… and it’s a serious event. Last year 200 people showed up.

You can RSVP to the event on Facebook. Folks will be battling from 3pm to 6pm. Let ‘em know you’re coming.

Pillow Fight Day in Washington Square Park
Saturday, April 2nd, 3pm – 6pm
www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=177642478948254

This isn’t even remotely Photoshopped.

Philly Tech Week isn’t all just speaker series’ and innovation demos… there’s beer too! Independents Hall will host a Beer Pong Tournament that’s sure to bring out the geeks and hardcore beer pong enthusiasts alike.

Taking place on Thursday, April 28th, the tourney will start at 6pm and go until a winner is crowned. Whether your style is the “bounce shot,” the “fastball” or the “arc,” you’ll have a chance to show off your old frat house skills while discussing technique and the science behind the perfect shot with fellow Techies.

Word on the street is that PhillyCocoa.org will be will be holding a “Made in Philly Software Showcase” during the Beer Pong event, spotlighting a mix of iPhone, Android and Nintendo DS developers as they present games and utility apps. Come for the beer, stay for the tech! See you there.

IndyHall
20 North 3rd Street (19106)
(267) 702-4865
www.indyhall.org

You might recognize Limitless as that film that was shot in Center City a few months ago, starring Robert De Niro and Bradley Cooper. You know, the one where they disguised our fair city as New York of all places. Well the film based on the novel The Dark Fields finally hit the multiplexes last week, and save for a few plot issues, the film is a strong start to the Spring film season.

Limitless tells the story of a struggling writer, Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper) who has been signed to a book contract for a quite some time and has spent way more time talking about his novel than actually writing it. His girlfriend (Abbie Cornish), tired of his procrastination and lack of progress, dumps him… and that is where the story begins.

After being unceremoniously dumped, he runs into his ex-wife’s brother from his first marriage. The ex-drug dealer then offers him up the chance to use 100% of his brain with the magic miracle drug that he is in possession of; that will soon be FDA approved NZT. He reluctantly accepts the pill and of course, things are never as easy as they seem.

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There’s a lot going on here in Philadelphia during the Spring. We’ve got the Technically Philly boys and their Philly Tech Week, there’s the Philadelphia Science Festival, the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts… yeah. Here, the fun never stops.

During all this, the American Philosophical Society is launching a new exhibition about French natural science. Entitled Of Elephants and Roses: Encounters with French Natural History, 1790-1830. The exhibit launches on March 25th.

According to the APS, “this period was the golden era of French science. The exhibition explores how fascinating new plants and what seemed like outlandish animals–such as elephants and giraffes–propelled French science and animated French culture.”

Guests can look forward to scoping out “mastodon teeth and bird specimens… Sevrés porcelains, Redouté botanical illustrations, etchings, watercolors and even a fashion illustration.”

We’ll be scoping it out the exhibit in the coming weeks. For more info on the exhibit, visit the APS’ official website.

American Philosophical Society
105 South 5th Street (19106)
www.amphilsoc.org