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.
The Oscar season draws ever closer, and during a time where the only bit of sparse cinematic news has came at the hands of the huge financial successes of James Cameron's Avatar, there has not been much more to talk about than what could be the underdog and surprise picks for the Academy Awards. Of course, being my Short Film Sunday segment, I thought we would take a look at a very underrated category, the Best Short Film-Animated. I would like to say that I'm going to throw out an obscure short that nobody has ever seen, as that is my main goal while doing this segment within the blog, yet after finding that Partly Cloudy, the lovable short film that accompanied Up was on In Contention's short list, I had to pass along the flick. 
