Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

There was a time (1985's Back to the Future - 1994's Forrest Gump) when Robert Zemeckis was a respected director. Now he takes another step at desecrating the beloved Beatles love song to hallucinogens, Yellow Submarine. The Hollywood Reporter announced the voice cast lineup for the motion capture animated film today, with the closest thing to excitement for me being the Dread Pirate Roberts himself, Cary Elwes, will take on the role of George Harrison. Joining Elwes is Peter Serafinowicz, best known as Pete in Shaun of the Dead, the popular Beatles cover band The Fab Four will provide the singing voices and from the BBC's Robin Hood series, Dean Lennox Kelly, will portray John Lennon. The most negative part of this bit of casting, other than the entire premise of remaking the movie in the first place, is that Adam Campbell will be playing Ringo Starr, whose prior credits include Epic Movie and Date Movie.

I think I let it slide a while back when it was announced that James Vanderbilt, scribe of Zodiac and the upcoming The Losers, was signed on to pen the screenplays for Spider-Man 5 and 6, which after yesterday's announcement of the cancellation of Sam Raimi's franchise of the Marvel hero in favor of a reboot, it would all but confirm that Vanderbilt would be out of a job for writing the web-slinger to the big screen. Yet, /Film reports today that Vanderbilt has already written a script for the reboot, described as a "gritty, contemporary" styling. I hate to be the one to have to say this, as Spider-Man 3's detractors surely outnumber the ones who found it tolerable, but the complete cheesiness of the entire thing is more on par with Stan Lee's writing style than a "let's make a Dark Knight Spider-Man". Bottom line, Spider-Man 2 is as dark as the character goes and stays relevant. Batman and the characters inhabiting Alan Moore's world of Watchmen are gritty enough to warrant films of such tone, but that doesn't mean that every heroic tale of a man in costume has to make us feel uncomfortable.

For the second day in a role, bad news from Marvel's Spider-Man camp is followed with some decent news from DC's The Green Lantern. After Blake Lively was casted yesterday, THR reports that Peter Sarsgaard has joined Martin Campbell's comic-to-screen adaptation as the main villain, Dr. Hector Hammond. I just wish Hammond had a beard so that Sarsgaard could keep the child molester look.

I hadn't heard much of Atom Egoyan's latest film Chloe until the French trailer leaked today and made waves due to Amanda Seyfried's nudity. Away from the spectacle of the Momma Mia! star becoming Internet fap material for the youngsters, it's the first Egoyan film that looks good to me since The Sweet Hereafter. Liam Neeson and Julianne Moore sharing Seyfried's spotlight isn't too shabby either. Here's the trailer.

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

When Sam Raimi announced a few weeks back that Bruce Campbell may play a bigger part in Spider-Man 4 than what he has previously done during the film franchise, the rumor mill began to circulate on what villain Campbell could play, most Internet bloggers settling on Mysterio as the most popular possibility. As much as I think this would be a great idea, and would be a step in the right direction to save Raimi's big screen saga of Marvel's web blaster after Spider-Man 3 was met with lukewarm reviews, I have to admit that I was a little disappointed that this news probably meant Dylan Baker and his character of Dr. Curt Connors, was going to be denied the transformation into The Lizard and a major part. Maybe I'm more biased when it comes to Baker than I am the character of The Lizard. Sure, Campbell is awesome, but ever since watching Todd Solondz' dark comedy Happiness, I have felt that Baker is one of the more underrated actors in the cinema industry. But according to an article at Ugo, I may be wrong as Baker confirmed that he will be returning to play Connors once again, although he wouldn't say if he would be receiving a larger part this time around. Of course, I would like to see both characters, but with the biggest complaint of the third installment being villain overload, one would have to expect that changes will be made, and only one main villain, a la Dr. Octopus and the most critically-acclaimed entry, Spider-Man 2.

Yesterday I gave a link, via SlashControl, to watch The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas for free. Despite being on the SlashControl web site, the video was hosted by Hulu, the best, and possibly only legal way to watch good quality, free films online. Well, that is until next year, as Entertainment Weekly broke the news today that Hulu will eventually start charging for services. Honestly, like Hulu doesn't make enough money off of advertising sales.

If you never go, 80sTees.com is one of the better sites on the Interwebs to purchase clothing. Anyhow, I found a link to this awesome "Three Teen Wolf Moon" shirt. Great.

On Cinematical's Shelf Life column today, author Todd Gilchrist took a look at Robert Zemeckis' 1997 science fiction film Contact. I'm kind of shocked to say, not only have I never see the movie, but until tonight after reading Gilchrist's appraisal of how the film holds up nearly thirteen years down the line and searching some reviews on RottenTomatoes and Roger Ebert's web site, I didn't really even know much about it. Despite enjoying Zemeckis and Jodie Foster, the face value of a science fiction flick co-starring Matthew McConaughey is just off-putting enough to not be interested in. Still, I just watched this opening sequence, and now I think I'll put this as top priority to rent. Anybody ever see it? Worth watching? Overrated? Underrated?

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

A huge movie news day to be so late in the week. First, the cinema blogsphere has been in utter turmoil since the trailer for James Cameron's upcoming sci-fi opus Avatar debuted this morning. The high quality Apple trailer has had problems all day, and now, the version I seen before work courtesy of TrailerAddict is no longer working. So, in the coming days, as soon as I find a trailer that I can embed, I'll put it on my blog. Anyhow, the big question of the day is, did the trailer hold the impact that the buzz had made all of us anticipate? Cinematical's Erik Davis has a nice article about that topic. I feel that it keeps the buzz. It looked incredible and kept most of the story elements from us. We're still left in the dark, with just a smidgeon of visuals. I hope it stays that way, leaving us completely shocked with whatever Cameron gives us on the big screen in December.

Aside from not being able to access the Avatar trailer, the day was by no means short on movie previews, with CNN Video posting this premiere of the trailer for Michael Moore's latest documentary, Capitalism: A Love Story.


The Hollywood Reporter named the future scribes for the feature film Shazam! adaptation. Most blogs I went to today talked more of actor-turned-writer Billy Birch being part of the project, but I am more satisfied with the fact that his co-writer on the script will be Geoff Johns, a famed comic book writer that has worked with both DC and Marvel Comics. He is most famous for the work done with characters such as The Green Lantern, The Flash, Booster Gold, Hawkman, the Teen Titans, Batman and The Avengers. Oddly missing from that list is Captain Marvel, the hero of the Shazam! series. I'm not sure if Johns ever covered Billy Batson's alter ego in his work on the JLA comics or in his Infinite Crisis work, but it is always comforting to have an actual comics guy working on the screenplay.

ScriptShadow, a Blogspot account that reviews Hollywood scripts has come across Darren Aronofsky's upcoming effort Black Swan. I didn't read the entire review, as anybody that is even a casual fan of Aronofsky knows, you want to be left in the dark on the first viewing. With that said, you can't really go anywhere online today without finding out something on the script, and that is an included sex scene between Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis' characters. Not just any sex scene at that, but an "angry aggressive" sex scene. I just hope not to be hit by any masturbation juices from the surrounding seats whilst watching the movie in theaters.

Yesterday, I touched on a bit of anger stemming from a potential Dirty Dancing remake. Today, via Variety, there is talk of a reimagining of the trippy animated Beatles cartoon Yellow Submarine. The film is to be put in the capable hands of Robert Zemeckis, through Walt Disney Studios, using his motion capture technology employed in the upcoming A Christmas Carol. The fact that Zemeckis is behind this still doesn't make me hate the idea any less. The movie works because it is trippy. If the Blue Meanies look like actual blue monsters, I refuse to watch it. I'm all for a reason to get The Beatles music back into the mainstream, a la the new Rock Band game, but is ruining a classic, that as far as I'm concerned isn't dated, the answer?

I won't be able to blog tomorrow as I have to work the graveyard shift. I'll be back on Saturday, but since I will not get to talk about it tomorrow, do not forget to go see Inglourious Basterds if you have the chance. I will more than likely have to wait until Saturday. Quentin Tarantino's film is really the only good thing coming to theaters this week. Robert Rodriguez has a film, in the same week as Tarantino. That would usually be reason to celebrate, but Rodriguez' flick is for kids, a film called Shorts that seem sub-par and as insufferably bad as his Spy Kids stuff. There is also about six other films that look watchable at first glance, but will all probably go unseen by me that I will not get into.

A rather long post, so I will end with the new trailer for Joe Johnston's The Wolfman. Quite good, enjoy.