Accord­ing to Eric Lem­pel, direc­tor of PlaySta­tion Net­work Oper­a­tions, the new PS3 firmware update will be made avail­able very soon. Ver­sion 2.30 will include the revamped PLAYSTATION Store which – I have to say – looks really nice. There a video avail­able fea­tur­ing Grace Chen, Senior Man­ager of the PLAYSTATION Store, who will walk the viewer through the new store. The most impor­tant news here is that the new store won’t be web-based any­more. This will make it more fluid and eas­ier to nav­i­gate, accord­ing to Chen. Well, have a look for yourself.

If you don’t want to watch a video or if you just don’t have time right now, here are a few screen­shots depict­ing the inter­face of the new PLAYSTATION Store.

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I don’t know exactly how it hap­pened but the Ice Age 3 teaser man­aged to slip under the radar. Any­way, now that I got a note I’m rec­ti­fy­ing this mis­take. Accord­ing to IMDB, the third install­ment of the very pop­u­lar Ice Age fran­chise will be named Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs and it will come to a the­ater near you on July 1st, 2009. Cur­rently, there is no infor­ma­tion avail­able regard­ing the plot. Still, it may help to check out the offi­cial web­site now and then. Mean­while, enjoy the teaser:

Not a lot of time has gone by since the last Iron Man trailer was released on Feb­ru­ary 28. Now two new clips are avail­able for your view­ing plea­sure. The first one can be watched exclu­sively at SciFi.com and fea­tures some flight action where Iron Man is being pur­sued and shot at by a fighter air­craft. This one is flash-based. The sec­ond clip can be watched in HD over at Apple. It is named “Run before you can walk” and it shows Stark test­ing the flight capa­bil­i­ties from the Mrk II model for the first time.

I don’t think watch­ing these clips will spoil the movie, so it is safe to go ahead. If you chose to stay away, never mind – the wait­ing is almost over. Iron Man is sched­uled for a release on May 2nd, 2008.

When a friend sent me the link to this hilar­i­ous clip, I just couldn’t resist. I absolutely had to post this. It is so funny, every Star Wars fan should have seen this. It’s well made too, so lean back and enjoy this bru­tal gangsta rap. I only hope it won’t mess with my head when I’m going to watch a Star Wars movie next time.

Well, the reign of the stars is over. That’s not spec­u­la­tion on my part but a sim­ple fact every­body can see. Just take a look at the top 20 movies (box office) on IMDB. What do we have there? There are quite a few ani­mated movies there as well as films which wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t for the con­sid­er­able amount of spe­cial effects in them. And that’s where the trend is going: CGI. The need for overly expen­sive actors is rapidly declin­ing and that is a good thing. I could never stand this my-smile-is-worth-20-million-bucks-attitude.

Unfor­tu­nately, there’s a dark side too. Isn’t there always? Well, the suc­cess of a movie isn’t deter­mined by it’s playa­bil­ity but rather by it’s mar­ketabil­ity. In other words: It is more impor­tant to get the peo­ple into the the­aters on the open­ing week­end rather than secur­ing a steady stream of movie-goers. In short: The open­ing week­end is the sig­nif­i­cant fac­tor that decides the fate of a film. That’s before the major­ity of the movie-goers pick up the gos­sip about the movie.

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The good news first: The pop­u­lar TV show Heroes will return to NBC on Sep­tem­ber 15 and accord­ing to SciFi.com it will return big. Ben Sil­ver­man, co-chairman of NBC Enter­tain­ment and Uni­ver­sal Media Stu­dios, said that it will be a three-hour event. They will kick off with a one-hour “clip show” to bring the audi­ence up to date and then they will air “a mas­sive two-hour Heroes film”. Chap­ter Three will be sub­ti­tled “Vil­lains”. If you can’t wait until fall, never fear: NBC is plan­ning to offer up Heroes webisodes in July.

Now let’s move on to the bad news: Heroes: Ori­gins is offi­cially dead. For now. Sil­ver­man explained that they were tax­ing their cre­ative team to do too much around that and so they decided to drop the idea. He went on: “We wanted 35 Heroes [episodes] and 12 Heroes: Ori­gins, each of which was sup­posed to be a mini-movie and back­door pilot. We reached far and chal­lenged our peo­ple, and we decided it was bet­ter to focus on keep­ing the Heroes moth­er­ship as strong as possible.”