Thursday, August 6th, 2009

I mentioned yesterday that I may not post due to a new life being brought into the world by a couple of friends of mine, yet I changed my mind after I was completely crushed tonight to read that one of the great film directors, John Hughes, has left the world today, via a heart attack at the age of 59. The former writer for National Lampoon Magazine ruled the 1980's, as the quintessential director and writer of the decade. His genius may be disputed by some, as he never garnered an Academy Award, nor did he keep a fan base comparable to the likes of George Lucas or Peter Jackson. But if your age 20-40, and can honestly say that nothing that came from the creative mind of John Hughes has not affected you, or weaseled its way into your everyday dialogue, then you're a liar or completely out of touch with the technology of film or television.

Hughes directed eight films, among them Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Planes, Trains and Automobiles and Uncle Buck. The man also penned the aforementioned films, along with a few other films coming from the imagination and pen of Hughes, despite not being in the director's chair, such as the National Lampoon's Vacation films, Pretty in Pink, The Great Outdoors and Home Alone. The thought that somebody could take a road trip without uttering the pure comical genius that came from Hughes' script of the Griswald's many travel misfortunes is heartbreaking. To fathom the thought of future generations not getting their first sexual thrill with the first appearance Kelly LeBrock after mixing a bit of Albert Einstein and David Lee Roth is folly. The thought of a world, in which a child being sent to his first detention didn't try to channel the spirit of Judd Nelson in unbelievable. And to be in a dating world knowing that the girl of your dreams hasn't at one time pictured herself as Molly Ringwald is just plain sad. The world, the future of comedy and cinema, will never be what it once was, and there never will be another John Hughes. Rest in peace.

In other news, Machete confirmed some of the casting rumors, sans Jonah Hill. The rumored Cheech Marin, Michelle Rodriguez, Don Johnson, Steven Seagal, Lindsay Lohan, Jessica Alba and Robert De Niro have all been locked in according to Cinematical. The awkwardness and extreme polar differences between the cast is picture perfect for an exploitation film. Sure, we can gripe and complain, but in the end, this isn't supposed to be an Oscar contender, and with those names, along with the basic premise of Danny Trejo and his deadly machetes, how can we not be entertained?

Also, IWatchStuff has the new trailer for Cirque Du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant, a high fantasy vampire novel adaptation starring John C. Reilly. That brief description is enough to get me in the seats.

Finally, I'm going to end with a video I found on YouTube set to The Who, featuring the films of Hughes. I'm sure there will be better tributes in the coming days, but try not to get emotional watching this. Such a sad day.

Wednesday, August 5th, 2009

One of my friends is currently in the hospital with his wife awaiting for the arrival of their first child. I was out there for a spell, and I work at six in the morning, so I wasn't going to blog tonight, but then I got online and two wonderful trailers was up, so in brief... The first will not embed, but here is the trailer for Peter Jackson's very beautiful upcoming film The Lovely Bones.

Before we get to the other trailer, a few brief things... Cinematical announced that Guy Maddin's latest short, Night Mayor, will debut at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Variety reports that Leonardo DiCaprio's production company Appian Way is going to begin development on a modern gothic big screen version of Little Red Riding Hood. It will be written by David Leslie Johnson, the writer of the currently playing Orphan.

IWatchStuff broke the story that 2007's The Orphanage is already going to be remade. The Spanish horror film directed by Juan Antonio Bayona and produced by Guillermo del Toro will be adapted for an English speaking audience. Probably not a great idea, as the movie is still relatively new, and probably underseen. The director, handpicked by del Toro, will be Larry Fessenden, which I don't really know much about, but at least it is reassuring that del Toro has faith in the guy. I still just can't shake the idea though, is this remake necessary? Is it that difficult to read subtitles? Will we eventually have to suffer an English Pan's Labyrinth for an American audience that doesn't want to read a few subtitles?

Finally, the redband (NSFW) trailer for Zombieland. You may remember one of my first posts here on the Blogspot site when I posted the trailer for Jennifer's Body and talked about how it has been a while since I've been quite that stoked for a horror film. Maybe it was because of the horror comedy mix, but Zombieland is right up there with that film, making it quite a good year for the very overlooked subgenre of horror-comedy. Enjoy.


P.S. My hurried blog is more than likely a grammatical mess, so please overlook it this one time. Also, I may not blog tomorrow night, according to how the happenings mentioned before plays out. If not, I will be back on Friday.

Tuesday, August 4th, 2009

We have basically seen the new poster for Avatar pictured here already, as the same still of the Zoe Saldana's computer generated character Neytiri was all over the Internet's coverage of the San Diego Comic Con. The only new thing about this to me is the title of the film is there, with a note telling us that James Cameron did, in fact, direct Titanic. So why really post this when it's nothing new? I feel that outside of bloggers and mildly hardcore cinephiles, not enough people care about Avatar, or can distinguish the title from M. Night Shyamalan's The Last Airbender when you mention it in conversation. Not that my unread blog is going to alert the world about what many think will be a milestone in science fiction and computer graphics, but rather that I want to blog more about this film, yet I know nothing about it other than the bit of information of Moviefone, IMDb or Wikipedia.

Variety reports that Hugh Jackman has been cast as the wonderfully eccentric P.T. Barnum in Fox's upcoming "contemporary musical", The Greatest Showman on Earth, to be scripted by Jenny Bicks of Sex and the City fame. A musical biopic of Barnum sounds intriguing to me, as I have always been fascinated with the man, and a musical spin on what I'm sure will be a rather bizarre life story could just be weird enough to truly stand out. The article also mentions that Anne Hathaway is in talks to star opposite Jackman. This thing could possibly have potential, but like so many interesting projects, should we expect this to crash and burn? Especially with the scribe of Sex and the City?

The Hollywood Reporter announced today that Watchmen's Sally Jupiter, Carla Gugino, will team up with Zack Snyder once again in his upcoming film Sucker Punch in a supporting role.

Finally, you can't really go to any movie blog this week without hitting an overload of G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, so it is kind of hard to ignore. Today, on Stephen Sommer's official site, we see some concept art for the character Destro, confirming him to keep the metal head he was known for in the cartoon and toy line. Also, in a preview to an interview with Sommers on Cinematical, the web site announces that Sommers is hopeful he will be able to put a sequel into development. There is no doubt in my mind that there will be a sequel, because the movie will kill at the box office, despite if the film is a complete train wreck or not. Also, I am personally shocked that the film currently holds a 91% on Rotten Tomatoes. I have to admit that I actually somewhat enjoy Sommers. It doesn't matter that The Mummy and Van Helsing had awful plots, or that they were critically bashed, they were the epitome of a summer popcorn movie, being flashy, fast-paced, high energy, and entertaining enough to make us forget all the stupidities of the plot. However, I cannot see myself leaving G.I. Joe happy, with 1) the super suits and 2) the incredibly high chance that Kid Rock's "American Bad Ass" will pop up somewhere in the film.

Monday, August 3rd, 2009

After all of the critical acclaim to Hayao Miyazaki's earlier films, such as Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, My Neighbor Totoro, Howl's Moving Castle and several more classics of Japanese anime, you have to wonder why the animation master's latest film, the upcoming Ponyo hasn't gotten more attention. Not only does Miyazaki have an outstanding resume, including an Academy Award and some of the highest grossing anime in America or otherwise, but the film caters to a family audience, and without really knowing anything about Ponyo, I think it would be safe to say that it would be a much more intelligent and entertaining story than the currently playing family fare Aliens in the Attic. And to top it all off, Walt Disney Pictures has the U.S. distribution rights for Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli's stateside releases. Whatever the case, due to lack of promotion, I've suffered through a Japanese and French trailer thus far, and finally the English speaking trailer is out for what will surely be just another masterpiece in the immaculate career of Miyazaki. Enjoy.

@ Yahoo! Video

Variety announced today that Steven Spielberg will be behind a remake of the 1950 Henry Koster fantasy classic Harvey, which starred James Stewart. I read on a message board, sparked by Spielberg's latest job, complaints that Hollywood has ran out of original ideas. It is fair to say that some of Spielberg's best work has been written straight to the screen with the Indiana Jones series, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. Yet, it's not like he hasn't made a name for himself by adapting stories before, with classics such as Jaws, Jurassic Park and Schindler's List. So, it's not that devastating. I also don't really think anyone can outdo Stewart as an actor, but the film is 59 years old, was produced during the Hays Production Code and doesn't get nearly the recognition it deserves. Therefore, I don't think a remake, especially in the capable hands of Spielberg, is a cry of blasphemy.

Speaking of remakes, sequels, reboots, or whatever the hell is going on with George Miller and his Mad Max franchise, the famous Australian character could be coming back. SciFiSquad reports that Jeremy Renner dropped the bomb that he was meeting with Miller and taking a screen test for the film. More importantly than Renner's casting though, it gets this film out into the blogsphere. Good idea or bad? I'm leaning towards bad, as the last good action/exploitation film remade for current day Hollywood was the wretched Death Race. Who can't see the same thing coming here?

Cinematical debuted the poster to The Open Road, starring the unlikely pairing of Justin Timberlake and Jeff Bridges. It's a baseball movie about a minor league pitcher and his estranged father. I've yet to see a trailer or read anything further, but here's hoping this will be the first good baseball movie since Kevin Costner was a legitimate award contender.

Funny People took the box office as expected, with Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince keeping the second spot, edging out G-Force by approximately $400,000. The biggest shock of the week is that the Bollywood film Love Aaj Kal hit the fifteenth spot, grossing higher than new releases Adam, The Cove, Thirst, Lorna's Silence and the documentary that I hyped on Friday Not Quite Hollywood... combined. Quite the impressive feat from a film that as far as I've seen, has completely slid under the radar, and I've yet to hear any critic or blogger speak of it.

Finally, via The Detroit News, Michael Moore claims that his upcoming film Capitalism: A Love Story could be his last documentary. Don't get me wrong, I actually enjoyed Canadian Bacon, but I think Moore is more entertaining being an asshole to our government.

Sunday, August 2nd, 2009 (Short Film Sunday: Destino)

If you go to any cinema related message board on the Internet, usually if Walt Disney Pictures is brought up, it is in very negative tone focusing on the company's law suits, urban legends, arrogance and a growing consensus of some of the films as being overrated. Hardly anywhere does normal bloggers give Walt Disney and all of the very talented animators that followed in his footsteps and company the credit they deserve, being a collective group of true visionaries in the animation medium. It is easy to look at the strides Disney has taken in recent years, just 2009 has already featured the Disney-Pixar instant classic Up, and will see the return of 2D animated princess stories with The Princess and the Frog, as well as Disney's distribution of Japanese anime master Hayao Miyazaki's latest Ponyo. Yet, if you look back to 1945, you can see just how influential of a filmmaker and artist that Disney himself, and his companions were. The very popular Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dali came together for a collaboration with Disney, eventually writing a screenplay with Disney employee John Hench for a short film called Destino, until the financial troubles the company felt in a post-World War II world would eliminate the means to create the short. However, when gathering segments for Fantasia 2000, Walt's nephew Roy E. Disney would bring the project back to life, hiring director Dominique Monfery to use Dali and Hench's storyboards, Dali's wife, Gala Dali's, personal journals, as well as consulting with the then 92 year old Hench to create what the film would had originally looked like, and adding music from Mexican singer Armando Dominguez to fit in the music inspired art theme of the Fantasia sequel. Monfery would also use an eighteen second snippet from the test footage actually animated by Dali, just re-colored. It is the scene with the tortoises, around the 5:22 mark of the video.

The short, of course, wouldn't end up making the movie, but would be released theatrically alongside the comedy Calendar Girls in Britain and Sylvain Chomet's brilliant Italian animated feature The Triplets of Belleville everywhere else. It would also garner four critics awards and an Academy Award nomination for best Animated Short Film, losing out to the Australian Harvie Krumpet.

But before you get all bent out of shape due to an Oscar nomination, most of my favorite shorts doesn't get close to seeing the famous golden statuette, but what makes the film special is that two very different, yet very influential artists could come together and create such a beautiful film. If you're a fan of Dali's, you could watch some of these images unfold all day, one my favorite scenes being a throwback to the Dali-written, Luis Bunuel directed 1929 Un Chien Andalou (my favorite short film, which one day I will get around to posting on here), starting at about 4:02 minutes in. So, without further ado, 58 years in the making, a true, rare (this is more than likely pirated, so if YouTube deletes this soon, my apologies), classic, Destino.


P.S. I found the picture on a random wallpaper search on Google. Kind of a nice peice of fan art in itself.

Saturday, August 1st, 2009

Last year, Universal Pictures hit big with the Abba musical Momma Mia!, setting records over in the United Kingdom, and raking in a decent amount stateside as well, and almost inevitably opened the flood gates for Hollywood to begin a musical craze to try to capitalize on the film's earnings. So no surprise that Universal, via RiskyBusinessBlog, announced that there is a remake of the 1970's funky controversial look at the Biblical life of Jesus and Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar. I don't really see a remake of this cashing in nearly as much as Momma Mia! did. Can you imagine the religious groups already? In a post-The Passion of the Christ world even? There is so many people now just looking for a reason to be angry or offended at a film such as this. Yet, there is one good thing. It is rumored that Marc Webb, the man behind the wonderfully reviewed film (500) Days of Summer, may be helming the project. I have yet to see his latest effort that stars Zooey Deschanel, but if the trailer and reviews are worth anything to go on, a quirky re-imagining of this may actually be an entertaining idea. Probably not a popular one, but entertaining nonetheless.

In more remake news, Variety reports that a remake of the 1935 swashbuckling classic Captain Blood may be re-worked into the fabric of un-needed films. I do enjoy Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, but I would have to agree that a film that is nearing its 75th anniversary may be remade without a terrible argument, no matter how great it was during the original release. However, it isn't the fact that the film is being remade that bothers me, it is the direction of the story in which the new film will take. The directors, Michael and Peter Spierig, of the upcoming Daybreakers film, and writer John Brownlow is switching the tale from the high seas to outer space. Here's hoping that Daybreakers fails, and this goes straight to Syfy.

MovieWeb had an interview with Eric Bana, in which the actor reveals that he will not return as Captain Nero, the Romulan villain of the latest Star Trek film, in the sequel. If there is much to say bad about J.J. Abrams' adaptation, it is that the villainous time-travelling Romulans wasn't strong enough, speaking of course in terms of Ricardo Montalban as Khan. Not that Bana was bad, but I'm not too crushed of the grand possibilities that could come from the next film.

As you can clearly tell, it is a very, very slow news Saturday. So, if you're like me, and none of the aforementioned news bits keeps your interest alive long enough to go and have a fight on message boards across the web, you can entertain yourself by going over the San Diego Comic Con exclusives on ToyRocket. A few from Star Wars, as well as an Indiana Jones fertility idol from Mighty Muggs, some G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra stuff and a figure from Coraline make it all relevant enough to put on this blog.

Friday, July 31st, 2009

I have read for some time that Fox has been trying to get a new prequel to Ridley Scott's 1979 science fiction masterpiece Alien off the ground for some time. I never got too excited about this. Both Scott's original and James Cameron's sequel Aliens were incredible films, and I am one of the few who even quite enjoyed David Fincher's spot in the series in the mostly negative-reviewed Alien 3. However, not even talking about Alien Resurrection (a disappointing effort from Jean-Pierre Jeunet, one of the men behind the fantastic The City of Lost Children), I figured that the two Alien Vs. Predator films had officially killed off the franchise once and for all. Any and almost all fans of Scott's original concept would have feared that any new installment would have been going down the same road as these colossal cinematic failures. Yet, today Variety gave all the fans of the original series hope when it was announced that Scott would return to direct the prequel. The man behind the screenplay will be Jon Spaihts, which I'm not familiar in the least with. Let's hope he holds a candle to Dan O'Bannon, Ronald Shusett or Walter Hill.

Speaking of director news, Variety again, has a blog up saying that Walt Disney Pictures is close to bringing Rob Marshall aboard to helm the fourth installment in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Marshall doesn't seem like a great choice to take on the comic swashbuckling stylings of the series, having previously directed the high profile musicals Chicago and the upcoming Nine. Yet, before Gore Verbinski stepped behind the camera of the first three films, he was mostly known for the American remake of The Ring. Also, after At World's End, which felt so disappointing following quite a smarter sequel in Dead Man's Chest than anybody was prepared for, maybe a new direction needs to be taken. So long as Johnny Depp comes back as Captain Jack Sparrow, we'll at least have a decent performance to look forward to.

Following the theme of Disney, the official Walt Disney Animation website updated some stills of the visual development of the 2010 film Rapunzel. I personally cannot wait until some kind of visual is released from King of the Elves, an animated Disney adaptation of a Philip K. Dick fantasy short story. Either way, the fact that Disney is focusing on hand drawn animation again is enough to make any movie fanatic happy, no matter what genre you generally favor.

I am slightly disappointed with Seth Rogen. A few weeks ago he was all in the tabloids after an exchange of words and jokes with the writers of HBO's Entourage. Now, Us Magazine (I shudder at even having read a story from their site), reports that while promoting Funny People on Howard Stern's Sirius XM radio show, Rogen and director Judd Apatow spoke about their co-star in Knocked Up and her claims that the film was sexist. We all know that Heigl's only asset is her looks after all of her quite public squabbles with the writers of Grey's Anatomy. So, can't Funny People sell itself without getting free publicity beside of a an attempted shot at catching Miley Cyrus' underage snatch by a paparazzo?

Anyhow, speaking of Funny People, Apatow's latest film, starring Adam Sandler, Rogen, Jonah Hill, Jason Schwartzman, Leslie Mann and a few other legitimately funny people, came out today. Judging from the trailer, it looks like Sandler's first good film since Punch-Drunk Love, and possibly the first film of his that will make us laugh since Happy Gilmore. Great reviews are also pouring in. Of course, as I write this, I am also trying to plan out where I can go see the film, because although I'm almost certain that the film will take this weekend's box office, the fact that it is the best reviewed film coming out today on Rotten Tomatoes, not to mention the draw of both Sandler and Rogen, my local Carmike Cinemas have chosen to not get this film, instead filling our theater with Aliens in the Attic. I had hoped, that for the sake of a bright future, humanity would cause this thing to flop. The trailer looks absolutely abysmal. RT gave the film a 25%, which makes me feel like it is the most overrated film of the year thus far. I mentioned yesterday how ecstatic I was for children's cinema this year with the upcoming releases of Where the Wild Things Are and The Fantastic Mr. Fox. Yet, what the anticipation these films gives does for children's cinema, this film takes out, rapes it, name calls it's mother, and shits on its face. I sincerely hope that this doesn't take the box office this weekend, destroying any shock value that G-Force gathered when it overtook Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince this past weekend. Anyhow, bottom line, if you have any other theater to go to, boycott your local Carmike. The longer I keep this blog, the more any readers that happen upon it will learn of my grave distaste for our local cinema. Oh, another option this weekend is The Collector, a mediocre-looking horror flick, as well as the documentary Not Quite Hollywood, chronicling the days of ozploitation, the name given to exploitation films out of Australia. It will most certainly be a very overlooked, entertaining gem for any fan of the exploitation era, as some of these films never reached us stateside. You can check out the trailer (which is NSFW, and probably best not to embed) at the official site. Enjoy.