Teachers, parents and students cultivate creativity, resources and energy to present two co-curricular musical plays per year, including this fall's "Vacation On Mars." Scientists may be years away from placing humans on the surface of Mars. But Pleasanton's Walnut Grove Elementary School music specialist Sharolyn Borris and her students this week beat scientists to the punch. When she began working as music specialist at Walnut Grove nine years ago, the school's PTA gave her the opportunity to run two annual musical plays on a parent-funded stipend. “It’s become huge,” said Borris. “We had 115 second and third graders in this show.”

Academy Award nominated Ruairi Robinson (Fifty Percent Grey, Blinky) is set to direct his first feature film, the highly anticipated thriller The Last Days On Mars based on a script by acclaimed screenwriter Clive Dawson, with design talents including the extraordinary team at WETA (District 9, X-Men First Class and Avatar) behind the special effects. Qwerty Films’Michael Kuhn (The Duchess, Being John Malkovich) and Andrea Cornwell (The Scouting Book for Boys) will produce the film, with Focus Features International handling international sales and distribution. FFI will commence sales at the American Film Market in November. As their last day on Mars draws to a close, the astronaut crew is on the verge of a major breakthrough - collected rock specimens reveal microscopic evidence of life. Meanwhile, communication is underway with AURORA, the approaching spacecraft that will relieve the crew of their operations. In their last hours on the planet, two astronauts go back to SITE 9, a cavernous valley on the surface of Mars, to collect further evidence of their discovery. But a routine excavation turns deadly when one of them falls to his death and his body taken host and re-animated by the very life form they sought to discover.

The Mars Society is pleased to announce that ‘The Mars Underground’, a documentary film that became an instant classic among space enthusiasts, has been updated and revised by the director and released on DVD. Leading aerospace engineer and Mars Society President Dr. Robert Zubrin has a dream. He wants to get humans to the planet Mars in the next ten years. Now, with the advent of a revolutionary plan, Mars Direct, Dr. Zubrin shows how we can use present day technology and natural resources on Mars to make human settlement possible. But can he win over the skeptics at NASA and the wider world? ‘The Mars Underground’ is a landmark documentary that follows Dr. Zubrin and his team as they try to bring this incredible dream to life. Through spellbinding animation, the film takes us on a daring first journey to the Red Planet and envisions a future Mars teeming with life and terraformed into a blue world. A must-see experience for anyone concerned for our global future and the triumph of the human spirit.

When H.G. Wells’ classic novel “War of the Worlds” was adapted for radio in 1938, its news broadcast format famously fooled many listeners into believing Martians actually were invading Earth. That mistaken history is essentially what Brunswick filmmaker and artist Christian Matzke is running with. Matzke, his wife, Sarah, and Portland artist Graham Meyer are collaborating on the art exhibit “Forgotten Wars,” which opens at 6 p.m. Friday, Sept. 2, at Sanctuary Tattoo & Art Gallery at 31 Forest Ave. For the interplanetary portion of “Forgotten Wars,” Matzke built anti-Martian firearms, early 20th century-styled recruitment posters, a space-traveling soldier’s uniform and — the piece de resistance — a massive drop pod in which people can actually fit and imagine jettisoning to Mars. The pod, which took two years to piece together and four people to move from the back of a moving truck and into Sanctuary Tattoo on Thursday, is fashioned from an old medical capsule and festooned with brass dials and gaskets.

If you needed one more reason to be jealous of folks who live in Austin, TX, aside from having nearly unlimited access to the best barbecue on the planet, try this on for size: This weekend, Tiger Style's new game will be playable at Juegos Rancheros at The Highball. If that sentence doesn't hold much weight for you, allow me to explain. Tiger Style is the team of guys behind Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor [$2.99 / HD], which not only was our 2009 iPhone Game of the Year but also took home several other awards such as the Independent Games Festival's best iPhone game. Juegos Rancheros is an equally awesome monthly gathering of independent game developers that started as a casual thing and since turned into an event that even has attracted the attention of Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward.

Play as an aspiring astronaut in Astronaut:Moon, Mars and Beyond™, the official NASA MMO game. Set in the year 2035, you will embark on an adventure into space, Mars, the asteroid belt, and the outer planets.You will uncover secrets about a threat to civilization as we know it, and build you and your team a high-tech inventory of space gear including a home base, somewhere out there. Our small group of 20 developers have won a contest* held for the best idea for an official massively multi-player online game depicting the future, and signed a "Space Act Agreement" with NASA, who chose our pitch over all others, the start of a project conceived of at NASA Learning Technologies.

Coastal retreat or galatic getaway? If Mars was a place on earth, it would be Herne Bay. Filmmaker Damon Keen has turned the picturesque Sentinel Rd Reserve at Herne Bay into the planet Mars for his sci-fi flick, Last Flight. The Westmere graphic designer's 15-minute movie makes its debut at the New Zealand International Film Festival this weekend. The self-confessed techno-geek spent countless hours editing footage to turn sleepy Auckland reserves and North Island countrysides into harsh Martian landscapes.

At first glance, it looks like a charming independent bookstore, a West Village gem with a window display featuring artful stacks of gleaming hardcovers. But, wait a minute. Is that one book? Like, many, many copies of the same book? Selection isn’t the strong suit of Ed’s Martian Book, on Hudson Street, where you can’t buy “Water for Elephants” or anything by Mary Higgins Clark, but 3,000 or so copies of “Martian Summer: Robot Arms, Cowboy Spacemen, and My 90 Days With the Phoenix Mars Mission” (Pegasus, 2011), by a 32-year-old Brooklyn author named Andrew Kessler, are available for $27.95 each. The book is Mr. Kessler’s account of NASA’s 2008 Phoenix Mars Lander mission, reported during 90 days inside mission control, in Tucson, alongside 130 leading scientists and engineers. Publishers Weekly calls the book a “slightly offbeat firsthand account of scientific determination and stubborn intellect” that “delivers a fascinating journey of discovery peppered with humor.”

The latest motion-capture film from Robert Zemeckis’ ImageMovers studio, “Mars Needs Moms” is an ambitious film that provides impressive visual landscapes at the cost of an interesting or even engaging story. “Mars Needs Moms” has most of the components necessary for a good film, but curiously never finds the rhythm it needs to deliver a truly entertaining final product.

In addition to its fluency in contemporary indie American cinema's styles of storytelling and dialog, Geoff Marslett's Mars is a throwback to the innumerable and often indistinguishable space-race B movies of the 50s and 60s that analogized journeys to distant planets and the iconography of Western settler narratives. The casting of Kinky Friedman as an actual cowboy president and repeated requests that the mission's mostly symbolic leader Charlie Brownsville (Mark Duplass), in his custom-embroidered NASA onesie, behave more like John Wayne, acknowledge the self-conscious Cold War rhetoric of this near-future space rom-com. Propelled by a fictionalized account of 2003's real launch and loss of a Mars rover, we jet forward to 2014, when the Europeans are sending a new robot, A.R.T., while NASA puts together a manned mission with the once heroic Charlie as media figurehead along with kiwi Casey Cook (Zoe Simpson) and pilot Hank Morrison (Paul Gordon).

Today, Disney unveiled the trailer for its new CG-animated family comedy Mars Needs Moms! The film is based on a novel of the same name by Berkeley Breathed and tells of a young boy named Milo who comes to appreciate his mother a lot more after Martians invade Earth and come to take her away. Produced by Robert Zemeckis through his ImageMovers Digital banner (which was responsible for past hits including The Polar Express and A Christmas Carol), the adventure hits theaters on March 11th 2011.

Two years in the making, "Packing for Mars" necessitated visits to aeronautic institutions in various countries, as well as the sipping of her own recycled urine. For research. Asked if it was difficult to get NASA's American astronauts to confess about vomiting or mid-orbit existential crises, she simply says: "Why do you think I went all the way to Russia?" During her Russian trip, it should be noted, she describes touring a museum dedicated to Soviet rocketry, discusses head lice and takes shots of whiskey with retired cosmonauts. All by 11 a.m., Moscow time.

One hundred years ago the first movie about Mars awed audiences. Produced in 1910 by Thomas Edison, A Trip To Mars was a 4 minute sojourn to the red planet. It involved a scientist, magic powders and a giant. Hey, it was 1910. One hundred years later our fascination with Mars remains, although interest in films about the planet waxes and wanes. Much like the moon. But not so frequently.

In conducting research into the physiology of astronauts in space, Mary Roach found out that one man on a Space Shuttle flight wore a sound monitor on his belly for the duration of his voyage. It is Ms. Roach’s style to be less interested in the belly-noise findings than in the freaky-deaky part of the story. “Don’t feel bad for him,” she writes in “Packing for Mars” about that awkwardly wired astronaut. “Feel bad for the Air Force security guy assigned to listen to two weeks of bowel sounds to be sure no conversations including classified information had been inadvertently recorded.” Ms. Roach has already written zealously nosy books about corpses (“Stiff”), copulation (“Bonk”) and charlatans (“Spook”). Each time, what has interested her most is the fringe material: exotic footnotes, smart one-liners, bizarre quasi-scientific phenomena. Yet her fluffily lightweight style is at its most substantial — and most hilarious — in the zero-gravity realm that “Packing for Mars” explores. Here’s why: The topic of astronauts’ bodily functions provides as good an excuse to ask rude questions as you’ll find on this planet or any other.

John Carter of Mars is scheduled to hit theaters on June 8, 2012, one full month after The Avengers arrives courtesy of Paramount, Marvel Studios and, by extension, Disney itself. The first live-action Pixar movie faces some stiff competition in the form of Men in Black 3 at the end of May and the Star Trek sequel later in June.