Posted May 16th 2008 3:32PM by Elisabeth Rappe
Filed under: Action, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, New Releases, Universal, Comic/Superhero/Geek, Remakes and Sequels, Images, Posters
This comes courtesy of
ComingSoon.net, who had the exclusive debut. You can head over there for a super huge version if you like. It's a good looking poster, and a big improvement over the cartoonish promotional artwork from the first film. I dig the simple, to-the-point posters like this, so much classier than cramming the entire cast in. It does seem as if he has wandered into sepia-toned Sparta, though.
Hellboy II: The Golden Army hits theatres on July 11th.
Posted May 16th 2008 9:15AM by Jette Kernion
Filed under: New Releases, Disney, Theatrical Reviews, Family Films, Religious
It's been two-and-a-half years since we watched the Pevensie children come to life on the big screen in Disney's splashy adaptation of
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but for the characters, only a year has passed between those adventures and the ones in the new movie,
The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. Well, time is funny like that when you're dealing with the magical land of Narnia, as the storyline of this movie amply illustrates.
The structure of events in the movie is actually an improvement on the C.S. Lewis book, opening with a captivating chase scene as young Prince Caspian (
Ben Barnes) attempts to escape from his Uncle Miraz (Sergio Castellito). Miraz has been scheming to steal Caspian's throne and now wants him dead. But Caspian's tutor gives him a magical horn, the horn of Queen Susan, to summon help in time of need. When Caspian blows the horn, suddenly Lucy, Edmund, Susan and Peter are pulled out of a London Tube station (which was the first scene in the book) and into a world of wild, wooded ruins that turns out to be Narnia, thousands of years after they've left. However, Caspian thought he was summoning kings and queens, not British children, and how can these kids help him regain the throne and help Old Narnia? And where is Aslan the Lion in the middle of all this?
Continue reading Review: The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian -- Jette's Take
Posted May 16th 2008 8:02AM by Monika Bartyzel
Filed under: Animation, Classics, New Releases, Disney, Tech Stuff, Home Entertainment
I'm beginning to believe that no one really wants to watch movies anymore. Or, at least, they don't want to actively watch them. Big movie theaters are hurting with the advent of saucy home theater systems, and it seems like most people would rather curl up on their couch then head out for the big community experience. We've already heard arguments about the mass distractions that are attached to home viewing, but I never thought that it would become part of the movie experience.
The Hollywood Reporter posts that Walt Disney is itching to use Blu-ray's Live technology to make a more interactive movie experience. But they're not talking about the
Choose Your Own Adventure sort of fare. They're adding a whole lot of bells and whistles to their classics. First up, my favorite Disney film ever --
Sleeping Beauty.
Luckily, it doesn't seem to be presenting anything that will make me want to go out and get a new player. It's all movie distractions. It might be cool that the menu will have a customized version of Sleeping Beauty's castle that will reflect your weather conditions, but that's just fluff. Besides that, there's just things to distract you from the film -- integrated chats on the movie screen, customized video messages to insert into the movie, the option to mail clips to friends, trivia games, and the option for a constant stream of web trailers.
Continue reading 'Sleeping Beauty' Gets Fancy on Blu-ray
Posted May 15th 2008 9:32PM by Eric D. Snider
Filed under: Comedy, New Releases, 20th Century Fox, Images, Posters
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Did the art department at Fox apply some Photoshop to an actual childhood photo of Rainn Wilson? It sure looks like a young Dwight Schrute to me.
This is the poster for
The Rocker (click image to enlarge), a comedy starring Wilson that's due this summer. Wilson plays a guy who got kicked out of a hair band in the 1980s and now, 20 years later, joins his nephew's upstart band as a means of reclaiming his former glory. The director is Peter Cattaneo (
The Full Monty), with a screenplay by Maya Forbes (various
Larry Sanders Show episodes) and Wally Wolodarksy (various
Simpsons episodes).
The release date is Aug. 1, but it's premiering at the
CineVegas Film Festival in June, so we should have a review for you then. The premise is good, the cast (which also includes Christina Applegate) and personnel are good, and August has been a fertile month for comedies in recent years (
Superbad,
Talladega Nights,
40-Year-Old Virgin), so we're keeping our fingers crossed for this one.
(And is it me, or is this poster a tad Apatow-esque?)
Posted May 15th 2008 8:02PM by Eric D. Snider
Filed under: New Releases, Disney, Fan Rant
The MPAA's rating system is flawed and arbitrarily enforced, and the system itself is corrupt. I urge one and all to see the enlightening
This Film Is Not Yet Rated for ample evidence of this -- or, if you prefer, just watch
The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian and marvel at how such a violent movie magically got the kid-friendly PG rating.
I didn't know the rating before I watched it, and I didn't remember, off the top of my head, whether the first
Chronicles of Narnia was PG. (It was.) As
Prince Caspian unfolded, I noted that there was an awful lot of stabbing, throat-slitting, and other killing, though I also noted that it was almost entirely bloodless. I figured it was the lack of gore that had prevented the film from being rated R, and that it was instead a moderately violent PG-13.
So I was flabbergasted to discover afterward that it was rated PG. Mind you, I have nothing against wanton violence and destruction in film -- it just needs to be labeled properly.
Prince Caspian has (no spoilers here) several large-scale battle scenes, akin to
Lord of the Rings in size and scope, with people and magical creatures slaying one another right and left. In a scene of hand-to-hand combat, someone slices off someone else's head; in the next shot we see the head, still in its helmet, on the ground next to the body. Elsewhere, there's a massive slaughter while good guys are forced to look on, powerless to help.
Continue reading Fan Rant: The PG Rating for 'Prince Caspian' Is Ludicrous
Posted May 13th 2008 11:02AM by Monika Bartyzel
Filed under: Action, Drama, New Releases, DVD Reviews, New on DVD, Home Entertainment, Remakes and Sequels
Indiana Jones -- The Adventure Collection... or any of the three special editions --
Raiders of the Lost Ark,
Temple of Doom,
Last CrusadeWe're just over a week and a half away from seeing Harrison Ford run around as Indiana Jones for the first time in almost twenty years in
Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and hopefully not collapse in an arthritic fit. Of course, that means putting out a collection for Indy buffs to buy -- just in time for a late-night triple feature before the big release. However, unlike the
Die Hard re-do, which stripped tons of extras away, and other releases that just fill up landfill space, there is a perk in this whole money-grab: aside from getting them as a collection, you can pick them up for the first time separately.
That's music to my ears, since I detest
Temple of Doom, and would be happy not to see it again. Pick up one, pick up a few, or pick them all up in the
Adventure Collection, which is just the three special editions in a fancy cardboard box. Each disc has a bunch of extras -- intros, interviews, special effects, storyboards, and more. Some is old footage, but there's lots of new bits as well -- including a look at
Skull on the
Last Crusade DVD.
Buy the Collection |
Buy Raiders |
Buy Doom |
Buy CrusadeContinue reading New DVD Picks of the Week: Indiana Jones & 'The Great Debaters'
Posted May 8th 2008 10:02PM by Eric Kohn
Filed under: New Releases, Movie Marketing, Cinematical Seven, Columns
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Whether or not shows like
Aqua Teen Hunger Force or
The Simpsons succeeded in translating their television dynamics to the big screen depends on your point of view, but the release of
Speed Racer this weekend raises a more specific question about the viability of turning an animated series into a live action spectacle on the big screen.
The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and
Underdog both suggest how this goal can go wrong -- namely, by imploding on its absurd conceits. You may disagree with the inclusion of some of the following titles, all of which culled their material from animation, but it's fair to say that each of them takes its subject matter at face value, allowing the natural ingredients of the original sources to remain intact. Well, maybe not
Super Mario Bros., but that one is a special case (fire away, if you must). Until somebody makes an
Animaniacs movie with real actors, I'm sticking to this list.
1. Popeye (1980)
Robert Altman's offbeat ode to the famous Fleisher cartoon starring the spinach-eating strongman and his darling Olive Oil is the great misunderstood work of the director's career. Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall manage to bring utterly ridiculous characters into a realm of believability that you could never imagine when watching the show. Suddenly, Popeye made sense -- goofy, almost surreal sense, but sense nonetheless -- in the real world. Thanks to veteran adult cartoonist Jules Feiffer's screenplay and a soundtrack so catchy Paul Thomas Anderson borrowed from it twenty years later in
Punch-Drunk Love, the classic status of
Popeye can't be denied.
Continue reading Cinematical Seven: When an Animated Series Goes Live Action ... and Gets it Right
Posted May 7th 2008 9:45PM by Eric Kohn
Filed under: Comedy, Independent, Casting, Deals, New Releases, Cannes, Slamdance, Sony, Distribution, DIY/Filmmaking, Home Entertainment, Movie Marketing
With five nominations, it looks like
Superbad will be the star of
the 2008 MTV Movie Awards, and its three jubilant male leads --
Michael Cera,
Jonah Hill, and
Christopher Mintz-Plasse -- deserve the kudos. But one major talent behind the whole affair has stayed relatively anonymous while these young up-and-comers bathe in the spotlight: Director
Greg Mottola. The erstwhile independent filmmaker, responsible for some of the best installments of
Arrested Developed and
Undeclared, launched his career a solid decade before the rise of
Judd Apatow with a charming little low budget comedy called
The Daytrippers. Starring
Stanley Tucci,
Hope Davis,
Liev Schreiber, Parker Posey and a host of other fantastic character actors, the film follows a wildly dysfunctional family over the course of a single day, as Davis, playing a worrisome housewife, tries to track down her unfaithful husband (Tucci).
Mixing warm humanity with pitch-perfect screwball timing,
Daytrippers marked the sort of debut that told you a filmmaker had a big career ahead of him. After a modest premiere at the Slamdance Film Festival, it landed at Cannes, barely got a theatrical release and promptly vanished thereafter. Mottola turned to TV work, and slipped out of the film scene for a good ten years. These days, it's no easy task to track down
Daytrippers on DVD --
you can nab second-hand copies on Amazon for decent rates, but not a single retail outlet carries it. Aside from the occasionally airings on cable, the movie has vanished.
Continue reading Sony Hopes to Release Greg Mottola's 'Daytrippers'
Posted May 7th 2008 8:02PM by Jeffrey M. Anderson
Filed under: Foreign Language, New Releases, Theatrical Reviews, Festival Reports
While Hong Kong filmmakers have a gift for action, they tend to overdo it in the melodrama department, at least when it comes to watching their films through Western eyes. Perhaps the worst Hong Kong film I've seen to date is Jackie Chan's
Heart of Dragon (1985), which features Jackie caring for his developmentally disabled brother (played by goofball Sammo Hung, who co-directed). All the heartstring tugging made me want to claw my eyes out. Or take another look at a masterpiece like John Woo's The Killer and you'll see an operatic hugeness to the emotional scenes -- especially between men -- that an American would never even dream, much less dare. These folks have an extremely high tolerance level for sentimentality; it takes an enormous amount before their sap detectors begin going off.
The same goes for action director and one-man HK film industry Johnny To (also known as "Johnnie To Kei-Fung"). To was a fairly minor director during Hong Kong's exciting late 1980s/early 1990s heyday, when imported films began to tantalize American viewers bored with big explosions and Vietnam rescue flicks. His biggest credit was as co-director on the exceptional supernatural superhero movie The Heroic Trio (1992). But after the 1997 handover to China, when most other filmmakers withdrew or abandoned ship, To flourished and eventually became the country's most successful and exciting filmmaker. His action hits included: The Mission (1999), Running Out of Time (1999), Help!!! (2000), Fulltime Killer (2001), Running Out of Time 2 (2003), Running on Karma (2003), Breaking News (2004), Election (2005), Triad Election (2006) and Exiled (2007), along with some 40 other films.
Continue reading SFIFF Review: Linger
Posted May 7th 2008 5:06PM by Jeffrey M. Anderson
Filed under: Foreign Language, New Releases, Theatrical Reviews, Festival Reports, Cinematical Indie
With only a handful of films to his credit, Sixth Generation Chinese director
Jia Zhang-ke has become one of the world's great master filmmakers, and he has the lack of distribution to prove it. Like many other greats from Orson Welles to Hou Hsiao-hsien, he has struggled to get spectators and his movies together at the same place and the same time. His film
Still Life won the Golden Lion at the 2006 Venice Film Festival and promptly sat on the shelf. It received a cautious and limited release in New York earlier this year, but since it never turned up on the West Coast, the San Francisco International Film Festival picked it up as an entry in the 51st fest (after failing to secure it for their 50th), and it opens at the end of this week at the Roxie Cinema. It's by far the best film I've seen in this year's fest, and it probably would have been the best of last year too.
Continue reading SFIFF Review: Still Life
Posted May 7th 2008 3:32PM by Eric Kohn
Filed under: Action, Comedy, Drama, Casting, New Releases, Celebrities and Controversy, Images
Catching an afternoon screening of
Iron Man last weekend, the questionably denigrating representations of Afghani villains bugged me less than the bizarre cultural references in the trailers preceding it -- especially when it came to accents. Three previews in a row contained characters speaking intentionally mangled English, a fact all the more recognizable because all of them were played by well-known actors.
You Don't Mess With Zohan showed
Adam Sandler as a tough Israeli hair stylist.
The Love Guru preview found
Mike Myers blabbering on with South Asian inflections. Rounding things out in perhaps the most innocuous case,
Cate Blanchett popped up as a Communist baddie in
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Are these gross caricatures or fair play?
We've touched on this issue before, but it looks like each month the trend gets a little stronger. There's edgy and there's a line:
Borat may or may not send the wrong message, but the character's
faux Kazakh accent tells you a lot about the way Americans tend to judge foreigners on the basis of their less-than-perfect English. The specific nature of the satire gives Cohen's performance an underlying purpose -- unlike, say,
Love Guru, which seems more like a chance to ignorantly marvel at Myers' ability to turn Indians into a continuous punchline. Recently,
a few Hindu groups launched protests against the film. This could mark uncharted terrain for Myers, who did not, as far as I know, get lambasted by any hippies after the first
Austin Powers.
Posted May 7th 2008 9:02AM by Elisabeth Rappe
Filed under: Action, New Releases, Fandom, Newsstand, Movie Marketing, Comic/Superhero/Geek, Remakes and Sequels
In all the breathless excitement, possibility and release date
for Iron Man 2, it's always good to step back and hear from the main men. You might be surprised (and maybe relieved) to know they haven't really started thinking about the sequel yet. On the other hand, one immediately begins to panic, thinking "Dear God, they won't actually ditch
Jon Favreau, will they?"
To answer that,
Entertainment Weekly sat down with both
Robert Downey Jr. and Favreau, the weariness apparent in their voices as they tried to actually comprehend doing it all again.
Let's start with Stark himself on where the sequel will go. "There's this idea of Terrence [Howard] putting on a suit and coming back as War Machine, who is pretty iconic in the Iron Man and Marvel universe. Just seeing where it can all go, but grounding it in a very modern mythology. I see it as the greatest dysfunctional family story ever told .... In
The New York Post a couple days ago, [there was a cartoon] of Iron Man suited up, and he's telling the governor even his super-powers can't get him out of the budget problem. That was what Jon was hoping for and excited to see the most, the idea that Tony Stark and Iron Man can become part of the cultural fabric. When we heard posters were being defaced to promote political or social ideas, he just got such a hoot out of that."
Continue reading Robert Downey Jr. and Jon Favreau Talk 'Iron Man 2'
Posted May 6th 2008 2:02PM by Monika Bartyzel
Filed under: Comedy, Romance, New Releases, DVD Reviews, New on DVD, Home Entertainment
I'm doing things a little different this week. Peter has covered this week's great releases in his column, noting flicks like Teeth and I'm Not There. For you Hilary Swank lovers, there's some post-death love after the jump, but below is a collection of film spoofs, rather than a plain ol' film.
The Passion of Greg the Bunny, Best of the Film Parodies Volume 2After Fox canceled the Seth Green-starring
Greg the Bunny, it seemed like that was the end of the show. But like some other Fox victims, that wasn't the end. There was a bit of a hiatus, and then IFC jumped on board and allowed Greg to get cinematic and merge television land with movie land. The result -- a whole bunch of puppet movie spoofs. Click
here to get an idea of what you'd be in for. It's not every day that you get to see a puppet embodying Frank Booth.
This release includes spoofs of movies like
Monster and
American Movie, plus the 2005 reunion special that takes on
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,
Rain Man, and more. As for guests, this batch includes Seth Green, Sarah Silverman, and Adam Goldberg.
Buy the DVD Continue reading New DVD Picks of the Week: 'Greg the Bunny' and 'P.S. I Love You'
Posted May 5th 2008 9:02PM by James Rocchi
Filed under: Action, New Releases, Tribeca, Warner Brothers, Theatrical Reviews, Family Films, Comic/Superhero/Geek
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I don't know a lot about
Speed Racer aside from what I've gleaned from the theme song over the years -- apparently, the young man's a demon on wheels -- so, in many ways, I'm the best possible audience for Larry and Andy Wachowski's new big-screen interpretation of the character. Originally a Japanese animation program exported and re-dubbed for the American market in the '60s,
Speed Racer has now been revived and revitalized for now. And the Wachowskis have created a blast of pure pop family fun;
Speed Racer's a bright, bold visual spectacle designed for kids.
And why shouldn't it be? Or, rather, how could it not? This is a property where one of the supporting characters is, after all, a monkey; any fully-grown individual hoping for an adult action film or racing realism is looking in the wrong place.
Speed Racer plays like a car-crazed visual wonder -- it looks and feels like what pop artist Roy Lichtenstein would dream if you locked him in a room full of gas fumes, gave him only candy to eat and showed him nothing but
Tron, Indianapolis 500 footage, episodes of the '60s
Batman TV show and
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. All at the same time. With the volume very, very high.
Continue reading Review: Speed Racer
Posted May 5th 2008 1:03PM by Eric Kohn
Filed under: New Releases, Executive shifts, New Line, Warner Brothers, Warner Independent Pictures, RumorMonger, Distribution, Other Festivals
Near the end of last week,
Defamer spread the rumor that
Picturehouse, once the indie arm of
New Line Cinema and currently dangling from the edge of the hulking entity known as
Warner Bros., has its days numbered. Now that New Line is history and Warners, like many studios, has faced increasing cutbacks, it may give short shrift to the shingles responsible for handling artier fare. Along with Picturehouse, this also includes Warner Independent Pictures, whose recent release slate includes David Gordon Green's magnificent
Snow Angels.
Defamer suggested that Picturehouse president
Bob Berney might wind up at WIP or head up a new, currently anonymous company. On Friday,
Variety's Anne Thompson
put it in more coherent terms: It appears quite likely that WIP and Picturehouse will merge together as a single company, with current WIP president Polly Cohen working alongside Berney. Whatever happens, let's just hope that the final result still leaves room for the sharp selection of independent and foreign titles that Picturehouse has handled since its birth three years ago.
Defamer points out that Marion Cotillard's unexpected Oscar win for
La Vie en Rose matters less than the flop of
Run, Fatboy, Run, while the John Simpson-directed horror film
Amusement might get dumped on DVD. It was just last year, however, that the company helped edgy fare like
The Orphanage and
Rocket Science get the sort of release most studios would never try. Let's hope that bravery lives on, somewhere.
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