Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

It seems like the news front of Guillermo del Toro and Peter Jackson's upcoming The Hobbit film adaptation keeps getting slower and slower, and slightly worrisome with the news of MGM's possible bankruptcy in the horizon. Still, Empire has given us a tiny morsel to quench our thirst for the time being with an interview popping up with Gandalf himself, one of the great actors of our time, Sir Ian McKellen. Among the things McKellen indulges us is his expected timeline of what is to come, that filming is expected to go 383 days, that he has serious doubts about the rumors of Viggo Mortensen and Orlando Bloom making cameos and almost a confirmation that Andy Serkis will be back to play Gollum. He also talks about the similarities between del Toro and Jackson, and defines both of their styles as "artistic autism". The article continues along to inquire about the long rumored X-Men Origins: Magneto, in which McKellen says he has yet to read a script.

In other news, the drama between Michael Bay and Megan Fox continues ever on, as PopCrunch covers a story that has been circulating around more on the celebrity gossip circuit than the blogs of cinephiles like myself, as many reports are saying that Bay wants to kill off Fox's character in the third Transformers in the first few minutes, via a gory death scene to get back at the actress for comparing him to Hitler. Why is this bogus? Fox will be paid millions, so regardless how much killing her character off in a floundering movie franchise, in what would surely be the best scene of the flick, would hurt emotionally, Fox would probably reap more benefits than the director, known largely to everyone as a douchebag, could.

A bizarre article on Cinematical that jumps in on the argument of children's films of the past few years carrying too left-wing of a message was posted today. One of the films covered is WALL-E (I suppose for the environmentalist mentality?). The article's author, Jette Kernion, sums up pretty much all of my thoughts, albeit a little cleaner, of how ridiculous it is to insinuate that WALL-E is pumping out the wrong message. Is it just me, or is Republicans getting crazier than ever lately? Then again, free health care, and family friendly cartoon-endorsed anti-littering and anti-laziness is how the Third Reich began also.

Every three days, I make it a point to read Cracked's top Internet picks, I would suggest everyone else that would find themselves bored enough to read my ramblings on cinematic happenings to do the same. Anyhow, pertaining to my blog, a great countdown from AskMen on the top 10 legendary movie guns is up, including Cherry Darling's prosthetic in Planet Terror, Ash's Boomstick from Army of Darkness and the .44 magnums toted by Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry.