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This is now the future.

Sexually Frustrated Female Supremacists Turn To Lava Lamps [NSFW] [Found Footage]Today

In the bleak future world of the year 2500, women have eliminated male aggression and taken over the world. Men's only job is to look pretty and pleasure the womenfolk in harems, as you can see from this awesome clip from Last Exit To Earth. But then these too-pretty men become sterile, and suddenly all the fun goes out of sex. Good thing there's still lava lamps. Click through for another clip. (First clip may be NSFW.)

Roger Corman produced Last Exit To Earth for Showtime in 1996, and it's about as racy as an episode of Red Shoe Diaries. (Although in the far future, women no longer have nipples.) Despite being written and directed by women, it clings pretty closely to the traditional SF storyline, where a female dominated world is really just waiting for a strong manly man to come and fix things. The women travel back to the year 2100, and collect a real man:

[IMDB]

Can Tim Burton Convert Over 1000 Hours of TV into One "Dark Shadows" Movie? [Dark Shadows]Yesterday

One of the weirdest soaps ever to hit the airwaves is Dark Shadows, a late-1960s daily story that spent 6 months as a typical gothic melodrama and then surprised viewers by abruptly introducing ghosts, ancient gods, a sexy vamp named Barnabas (pictured), time travel, and parallel universes. Dan Curtis' iconic series aired for 5 years on ABC, racking up almost 1100 hours of television packed with monstery goodness. And now Tim Burton is set to make a movie version of it, with Johnny Depp as Barnabas. Can it really be done?

The soap-opera lovers over at Collider yesterday managed to get producer Richard D. Zanuck to confirm that Dark Shadows is Burton's next project, filming next year in England. Depp, who owns the rights to the series, has said many times that his greatest fantasy as a kid was to become Barnabas.

But how will the team that brought you Sweeney Todd manage to cut down all that TV into a digestible chunk? Obviously they'll have to choose one of the mini-arcs from the show to focus on (let's hope it's from the sequence where Barnabas travels back in time to an alternate nineteenth century). Or maybe they'll just come up with a brand-new plot arc involving Barnabas. That might be the best way to go, with just a few nods to the original thrown in

Nicholas Cage Wants To Show Jay Baruchel His Magic Wand [Sorcerer's Apprentice]Yesterday

This whole Seth Rogen phenomenon has yielded one good result: more exposure for sassy Jay Baruchel. Now Baruchel is in line to star in the modernized version of Disney's Sorcerer's Apprentice playing, erm, Mickey, I guess. Playing the wizard is omnipresent cheesemaster Nicholas Cage.

Jay Baruchel (who will be in the "Flash If You Love Wookies" movie Fanboys) is in talks to play this role for Disney, and they would be mad to pass on it.

The story is set in present day New York City, and Nicolas Cage plays a creepy old wizard looking for an apprentice. It's being directed by Jon Turteltaub (who worked with Cage on National Treasure) and has been written by Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal (Planet of the Apes) and later re-written by Matt Lopez (Bedtime Stories).

Side note: why are all modern day spins on fantastical stuff set in New York City, and when did this start?

Sadly, no word yet on Jay and Seth vs. the Apocalypse.

Plagues, Hidden Cities, and Harbingers of Doom at the Bookstore This Month [December Books]Yesterday

Nothing is better than curling up during the holidays with a good book, and December brings a lot of terrific options. Dark urban fantasy dominates, with The Engine's Child and Knights of the Cornerstone, but there's also some good space opera from Mike Resnick and Karen Miller - and a whole lot of apocalypse with a new Wild Cards novel and Scott Sigler's latest "virus ate the world" book. Check out what's coming to your local bookstore in the next few weeks, below.

Knights of the Cornerstone, by James P. Blaylock (Ace Books)
A classic work of urban fantasy about what happens when a writer goes to visit his family in California and discovers that a modern-day branch of the Knights Templar has set up shop in their town. He quickly becomes embroiled in a plot to protect the "Veil of Veronica," a holy relic that the "Knights of the Cornerstone" (AKA Templar dudes) want to keep out of the hands of the bad guys. Blaylock is an inventive writer who often blurs history into the present, and he'll certainly do justice to a tale of the mysterious Knights Templar. It makes perfect whimsical sense that after hundreds of years of hiding out they would come to sunny Calif

Dubai Got It Wrong: Hill-Shaped Green Buildings Are The Future [Design]Yesterday

Whenever you see pictures of futuristic buildings in places like Dubai, they always look blue and metallic, with tons of crazy lights. But here's the real future of architecture: a new city in South Korea, Gwanggyo, will feature hill-shaped buildings, with hedges planted on the terraces and roofs, to improve ventilation and reduce energy use. Gallery below.

Dutch architects MVRDV won a contest to design the futuristic city in Korea. It'll be a self-sufficient city of 77,000 inhabitants, 35 km from Seoul. [Dezeen]