Ratatouille's Bird Talks About Rats

Writer-director Brad Bird of the movie Ratatouille talked to Entertainment Weekly about why he gave a shot to this movie about a rat who can cook and a cook who can't. "When Jan Pinkava pitched the idea of a rat who wants to cook, everyone at Pixar immediately recognized it as having a sort of huge [dramatic] tension. Because a rat is death to a kitchen. I mean, they'll close a restaurant that has a rat in it. And a kitchen is death to a rat. So a rat that wants to move into that world? It's the most impossible goal any creature could have. Everybody was very entertained by that."

New Flash Gordon Star Not a Comic Book Fan

Eric Johnson (left), who plays the new Flash Gordon in the Sci Fi Channel says he wasn't a fan of comic books or super heroes when he was a kid. He says to Entertainment Weekly that he knew zero to nothing of the character. "When I was a kid, I never got into comic books. I was too lost in my own fantasy world to be reading about others. My wife, she's the comic book geek in our home. Like most people, I'd heard the name, but I wasn't familiar with the mythos. I watched a variety of things — of course, the movie from 1980, and I saw some of the original serials that were done in the '30s, and A&E actually did a biography of Flash Gordon, so they bought that online for me. Wikipedia helped. The Internet is full of information. He also had this to say about Queen's Flash Gordon theme which was used for the 1980 Dino De Laurentiis movie, "You know, I kind of wish that every time I stepped on set, that song would play. That'd be pretty cool." The picture on top gives a peek to Flash Gordon's car, which Johnson calls "The Flashmobile." Flash Gordon debuts August 10. Eric Johnson may also be seen as Whitney in Smallville.

Read more of the interview here.

Flashback stills from the 1987 movie version with Sam Jones and Ornella Muti: