“All my smart friends liked ‘Star Trek.’ I preferred a more visceral experience,” he tells Entertainment Weekly in its latest issue, on newsstands Friday. Abrams took on the “Star Trek” project in hopes of creating a film “that grabbed me the way ‘Star Wars’ did,” he says.

He was also drawn to the franchise’s idealism, he says.

“I think a movie that shows people of various races working together and surviving hundreds of years from now is not a bad message to put out right now,” he says. “In a world where a movie as incredibly produced as ‘The Dark Knight’ is raking in gazillions of dollars, ‘Star Trek’ stands in stark contrast. It was important to me that optimism be cool again.”

“My only regret is that the movie can’t come out sooner,” says Leonard Nimoy, who will don his pointy ears to play an elder Spock. “I think the world could use it.”

The younger Spock, played by Zachary Quinto, says “Star Trek” is a franchise “that offers hope for unity.”

But don’t expect any unity with William Shatner. The actor won’t make a cameo as Capt. Kirk, Abrams says.

“I was such a huge fan of his, but we wrote a scene for him in the movie and it didn’t feel right,” Abrams says. “And he said to us – he said publicly – that doing a cameo didn’t interest him. Which I totally appreciate. But we did try.”

http://apnews.excite.com/article/20081016/D93RI7TG0.html

By Gregg Goldstein

NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) – Just in time for the next depression, Dominic Monaghan and Freddy Rodriguez will star in a horror thriller offering one potential solution to our economic problems.

Set in 2100, “Fortuna” envisions an Earth where a collapsed economy and climate crises have eliminated the middle class, leaving a few very wealthy and the teeming masses in severe poverty. To give hope and avoid revolt, the elite create Fortuna, a mysterious game where one in a thousand wins a big payday and joins the upper classes. But their hidden goal to “reduce poverty” by 30% over 50 years comes with a deadly price tag.

Monaghan, Rodriguez and “Fortuna” writer-director Barthelemy Grossmann will play desperate men who play the game in a nearby tower, despite apprehensions that none of its contestants are ever seen again. The privately financed film begins a six-week shoot in Bulgaria next month.

Monaghan is best known for his roles in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy and ABC’s “Lost.” Former “Six Feet Under” star Rodriguez will next be seen in the December 12 release “Nothing Like the Holidays.”

http://www.reuters.com/article/filmNews/idUSTRE49726K20081008

Evangeline Lilly has come to hate being seen as a bikini babe so much that she won’t set foot on a beach. The 29-year-old Canadian actress says her experience as a sexy castaway on hit show Lost and being constantly targeted by photographers near her Hawaii home means she’s now had to give up her love of the sun, sea and surf. “I’ve had to change my whole life,” says Lilly of the unwanted attention she gets. “For the last two years in Hawaii I won’t be caught dead on the beach. I can’t go because I’m tired of seeing myself in a bikini on the cover of a tabloid magazine and being that woman. I’m not that woman. If I was that woman then great I’d go down to the beach every day and would wear the cutest bikini anyone has ever seen. But in order to kind of represent myself in the public eye, I’ve stopped going to the beach.”

http://www.absolutenow.com/news/20080929.html

Entertainment Weekly has named DriveShaft as a part of their list of the Top 20 fake Television and Movie bands.

EW.com