Monday, January 4th, 2010

2010 is upon us. I was looking through my tags from the last year of posting and wasn't really surprised to see that James Cameron's Avatar took the top spot. As I've said before, I actually enjoyed Avatar, but there is probably about 20-30 films from 2009 that should be getting more praise than the effects laden cat people drama. Anyhow, it is undeniable that the science fiction 3-D tour de force has been dominating the cinematic news as of late, and should come as no surprise that it is the major topic on my first blog in the new year. First off, Cinematical has an article quoting Zoe Saldana and Cameron from an Interview with The Reelz Channel about the deleted additional footage of Jake Sully and Neytiri's sex scene, with Saldana even adding that the pony tails would plug in and play a part. Cameron also all but confirms that it will be part of the DVD release.

Also, Avatar continues to dominate the box office. Of course, this week provided virtually no new films, but Avatar maintained its momentum, having a very small percentage of a drop from last week with $68 million. This breaks the record for the highest third week of all time, previously set by The Dark Knight, as well as New Year's holiday gross, formerly held by Meet the Fockers. Despite this success, it is not the domestic U.S. numbers that are the amazing story, it is that the worldwide gross has topped a billion dollars and has already passed The Dark Knight for the fourth highest on the all-time release list, just below Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, in which it is estimated it will pass within the next week. Still off a little ways, but reachable is the number one spot, another Cameron film, Titanic.

Finally, on a note not related to blue cat people, CoolToyReview has put up a lot of the toys used for their online gallery for auction on eBay. Here is the link. The movie related auction contains mostly James Bond and classic Universal horror figures, with three Hot Toys figures, Don Vito Corleone from The Godfather, the Mark III from Iron Man and James Dean.

Tuesday, July 7th, 2009

Last year, when I first saw the trailer to the Zach Galifianakis-starring film Visioneers, I got way overexcited, and proclaimed to all two people that would ever listen to me, that he could be the movie geek's frontrunner for Oscar contention. Because, let's face it, as great as Sean Penn, Richard Jenkins, Frank Langella, Brad Pitt and Mickey Rourke was in all five respective nominated performances of last year, none has the everyman appeal that Galifianakis does. But did I go a little too far with that statement? Well, seeing that theatrical distribution fell through, I won't know for sure until July 21st, when the film goes direct-to-DVD. However, I have faith, after watching the new trailer for Robert D. Siegel's Big Fan, that Patton Oswalt will take up the mantel for the unexpected contender that we will all be cheering for come this Academy Awards. The trailer is incredible, and seeing that director/writer Siegel also wrote last year's hit The Wrestler, as well as being the former senior editor of the satirical newspaper/web site The Onion, we know he understands drama and humor, and seems capable of mixing the two perfectly. In fact, the first film I thought of when watching the trailer, mixing kind of a gritty, serious storyline with what will surely have its fair share of humor, was Todd Solondz' excellent 1998 film Happiness. To top such a film, in my personal opinion, is a tall order, but watch and see what you think.

Other things in brief... MSN Cinemash has featured an entertaining video from 500 Days of Summer, based on a snippet of dialogue from the film, where Joseph Gordon-Levitt portrays Nancy Spungen, and Zooey Deschanel takes the role of Sid Vicious in a nice parody of Sid and Nancy. Definitely worth a view if you're bored.

Cinematical has an interesting story up, stemming from an interview Francis Ford Coppola did with Esquire, where he said that he originally didn't want to do a sequel to The Godfather, and when finally convinced, he just wanted to take a role to help with the screenplay, and had considered passing off the directorial job to then young Martin Scorsese.

Not shockingly, but sadly, it was announced that Rob Zombie's inaugural animation film, The Haunted World of El Superbeasto, will be released straight-to-DVD. This adds on to the previously mentioned Visioneers as two kind of anticipated straight-to-DVD efforts this year. Maybe one day, we could look forward to the medium not being dominated by rejected Lifetime films and Steven Seagal.

Speaking of Galifianakis, MovieWeb reports he is considering a new film directed by The Hangover's Todd Phillips called Man-Witch, where the bearded comedian will be the only male in a school for witchcraft. Sounds like solid comedy, let's just hope this one gets made.

Stephen Dorff mentioned somewhere that Blade could get a reboot. Don't get me wrong, I'm actually a fan of the first film, but does anybody really want this?

I'll close with another discussion of Michael Jackson. In honor of the media insanity of his funeral today, added with the fact that Bruno debuts this coming Friday, do you think that it was the right choice to completely cut Sacha Baron Cohen's interview with LaToya Jackson out of the film? Sure, the premiere night right after he died, I get that. But, let's face it, the people most likely to be offended at a tactless joke about a recently deceased person would be Christians, homosexuals, and seeing the role Michael Jackson played in breaking down walls, African Americans. And can't we already be sure that the theater will be emptied of these groups? I can't wait to see how many people Baron Cohen offends, why not add a few more?