For me hi-tech is a double edged sword. On the one hand it is an indispensable tool in the struggle to democratize and disseminate knowledge. On the other hand it is an indispensable tool of oppression as every online shuffle you make is tracked, recorded and analyzed, every email read and you can't go out for a walk in the park without google watching you either from space or from one of their roaming spy cars.
Every once in a while though something comes along that makes me forgive and forget and when I discovered that the entire out-of-print "Blade Runner Sketchbook" from 1982 was now online for all to see free, well, I just wanted to give a big hug to all those computer geeks who've done so much to rob us of our privacy while providing us with unlimited free porn.
The book is comprised of 99 pages of concept art from Syd Mead, Mentor Huebner, Ridley Scott himself and others and would be the kind of coffee table book I'd shell out for. Until it comes back into print though this will more than suffice.
Here's a couple of samples with a link to the entire online edition below the pictures. Enjoy.
Sly tells Arnold he's way too paunchy to be an angel.
The Governator's quest for relevance continues unabated. Arnold's been pursuing movie projects as though they were house cleaners though his most recently announced film "Black Sands" is apparently being given something of a makeover. Originally intended to be a kind of "good guy against a bad world" kind of story it's now being given a supernatural slant with the big Austrian playing a kind of avenging 'angel' (his word). Uh okay. Oh yeah, the film has also been given a new name: "Black Sunday". I guess you've got to have the whole Sunday thing going on if you're playing an angel and all that. This one's going to have to go straight into the 'wait and see' basket.
All in all business at the domestic box office was the lowest since 1995. Something tells me it had a lot to do with virtually no big movies being produced that weren't followed by a number. Just to drive that point home it should be noted that 8 of the top 10 worldwide box office hits of the year were sequels and it's a trend that doesn't show any signs of letting up. On the bright side global box office hit an all time high this year so somebody is going out to the theater and that's all that really counts.
Juan Antonio Bayona's "The Impossible" is the story of a family whose lives were forever changed by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. The trailer is in Spanish but the imagery is fairly compelling and I'm told the actual movie will be in English. Bayona made his name with the sleeper hit "The Orphanage" a few years back and it will be interesting to see how he handles the pressure that comes with recognition.
Since this is such and excruciatingly slow time for movie news I've decided to expand my list of the worst hit movies of the 21st century (so far) with numbers 6 - 10 done in descending order. So here we go. (You can see numbers 1 thru 5 here.)
10) Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
I sat through this entire movie stone-cold sober but I don't remember it.
9) The Hangover Part II
There's a difference between being edgy and being mean-spirited. Someone should tell the makers of this piece of crap.
8) Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones
Hayden Christansen does perhaps the worst acting job in a major motion picture ever. No small feat that.
7) 2012
2 hours of narrow escapes and not a Mayan to be found.
6) The Da Vinci Code
The secret order of the Bad White Guys has conspired for centuries to hide from us the fact that Leonardo was a drag queen who hid in his paintings detailed orders for the destruction of the World Trade Center using a plane filled with Jesus' kids and piloted by JFK's real killer; Boutros Boutros Ghali.
It's a really slow time of year for movie news. Just about everyone is on vacation or gone home for the holidays. Everyone it seems except Peter Jackson and the folks making The Hobbit.
So here's a bit of Christmas candy for you, the hot off the presses fifth "behind the scenes" video from the gargantuan Hobbit production. Enjoy and Merry Christmas!
What do you get when you mix a Japanese soft core strumpet with a dollar thirty five worth of special effects? Why Tokyo Species of course and here's the trailer courtesy of the good folks at Twitchfilm.com
THIS TRAILER IS NOT SAFE FOR WORK. NSFW.
It's not real porn or anything but there are several boob shots and some hilarious "acting" that is, I think, supposed to resemble sex. But don't take my word for it, check it out and decide for yourself.
After the disaster of Speed Racer the Wachowski's (formerly Larry and Andy, now Lanna and Andy) laid low for quite a while. Well now they're back with their adaptation of Tom Twyker's "Cloud Atlas" about a group of people separated by time who somehow "hear each other's echoes down the corridor of history". Principal photography has just wrapped with it's high profile cast of Tom Hanks, Hugh Grant, Halle Berry, Hugo Weaving, Susan Sarandon and Jim Broadbent among others.
Cloud Atlas is tentatively set for release next October.
It's been a very good week for trailers to say the least. Just when Chris and I were thinking it couldn't get any better when Peter Jackson released the trailer for "The Hobbit" along comes Ridley Scott with the first trailer for "Prometheus". Chris is still in shock and unable to type so I'm posting this one.
While Scott has been insistent in his press releases that Prometheus will only contain some Alien "DNA" this trailer seems to contradict him pretty profoundly. Maybe he's just been playing his cards close to his vest to keep us guessing but it seems the guessing game is over. The trailer not only uses some of the audio from the original "Alien" trailer from 1979 it also prominently parades the "space jockey" cockpit along with a slightly altered version of Giger's original derelict spaceship design and utilizes the same graphic style as Alien to introduce the title. If that's just a bit of Alien "DNA" then I'm Santa Claus.
Unbelievable. In two days we've had the second trailer for The Dark Knight Rises (which looks awesome), the first trailer for "Wrath of the Titans" and now the best of them all: the first trailer for "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey". If you're like us you've been waiting since around 2004 for this. Woohoo!
The movie arrives in theaters December 2012. (Can I buy tickets now?)
In a conversation with MTV News JJ Abrams talked about the upcoming Star Trek sequel. He mentioned that sets were nearly complete and that the film would start shooting "next month". He also said that the movie would be shot "on film" in 2D and then converted in post to 3D. A big part of me just wishes they'd skip that process and leave it 2D. Still with a substantial amount of time to do the conversion (the film isn't released until mid-13) they might have time to do a decent job. We'll see.
If you're a trailer freak like me days don't get much better than this. New Dark Knight trailer and finally the first trailer for "Wrath of the Titans".
After being roughed up by Chinese "security" thugs when he attempted to speak to a Chinese dissident Bale went on CNN to talk about his experience and share some video. He learned first hand what happens when you ruffle the feathers of the unelected. Being that they have no right to govern they're a little sensitive about outsiders exposing the methods by which they retain their illegitimate grip on power.
The 23rd Palm Springs International Film Festival will present their "International Star Award" January 7 to one of my all time favorite actors, Gary Oldman. In announcing the award festival chairman Harold Matzner said of Oldman:
Johnny Blaze is back and this time he's really p***ed off! From Brian Neveldine and Mark Taylor, who teamed up to bring us "Crank" and "Crank 2: High Voltage".
"Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance" is due to hit theaters February 17th.
Here's a preview clip from "Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows" which hits theaters on Friday and will hopefully breath some life back into the box office, which has been way down the past couple of weeks.
The painfully slow trickle of preview imagery from Ridley Scott's "Prometheus" continues with the release of this new poster. It's the same ginormous head from the images released a couple of weeks ago but from a different angle. Both Chris and I have such high expectations for this project. We're keeping our fingers crossed.
Here's an interesting trailer for the upcoming IFC Channel production called "Kill List". It's the story of a former British soldier who becomes a hit man.
Here's the just released "GI Joe Retaliation" trailer. Once again the guardians of all that is worth fighting for find something to fight about and once again there seem to be some evil civilians involved. It's a damn good thing we have the Joes to keep our cliffs safe for militaristic democracy!
The number one movie a year ago this week was Fox's "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader"
which debuted in the top spot with a $24 million haul.
Jesus Orellana has apparently landed a deal with 20th Century Fox to turn his 10 minute short "Rosa" into a feature length, live action film. Pretty amazing considering that not long ago he was just a young guy with an idea he was willing to put a year of work into. That year of work resulted in the 10 minute short and now he's on his way to the big table. Good luck Jesus!
To see the original short which I posted a month ago click here.
Seems like Christopher Nolan is trying to make it clear that he's not doing any more Batman films after this, though for some reason I doubt that the bad guy will ultimately prevail.
"Inception" is Christopher Nolan's second unsuccessful BIG film in as many years. Not unsuccessful financially of course, but conceptually. Coming hot on the heels of his boring Batman sequel "The Dark Knight" Nolan seemed to want to prove to himself that he really was a 'visionary'. I can almost see him going down his 'visionary' check list before shooting started on Inception: "Let's see... $200 million budget: check, A-list actors: check, IMAX cameras: check, 50 million fanboys following me day and night on the internet: check, wicked-cool idea: check."
The wicked cool idea of course is that Nolan's team of hi-tech mind engineers are able to create and plant within an unsuspecting target's consciousness a dream architecture which they can then inhabit along with the target. The goal is to learn things about the target or otherwise manipulate them by planting ideas in their mind during the controlled dream. The latter a process called inception.
The problem with Inception as a movie, the thing that makes it labored and ultimately unsuccessful as a film is that it has the whole dream thing backwards. Dreams are primarily emotional in nature. The brain summons unresolved or unhappily resolved emotional situations to review and provides a visual forum to play them out in, with both the narrative and the stage being created on the fly. Sometimes the feelings get ahead of the images and the images shift abruptly in an attempt to compensate. Sometimes the imagery gets out in front of the feelings and the feelings shift gears. All this shifting around can be jarring and is one of the reasons dreams are so difficult to remember. While its been proven that you can 'direct' your dreaming; that is, guide your mind into its initial dream state once you fall asleep, fact is that there's no way to dictate how long this directed dream will hold together. When the mind wishes to move on to something else it just does.
In his film Nolan proposes a kind of directed dreaming on steroids. One where you can not only instruct the mind where to go when you fall asleep, but one where the visual context is also provided down to the last rivet as well as the ability to force the dreamer to stay within the provided dream context until something wakes them up. How do you impose such a rigid and vivid architecture on the mind and force it to play out? How do you prevent the mind from tiring of the dream you've presented it and simply moving on to something else? To his credit Nolan tries to address this issue and his answer is a kind of white blood cell response: when the mind detects the presence of "others" who shouldn't be there it attacks them and the dream falls apart (literally).
Okay Mr Nolan. Lets say for a moment that I simply accept your character's ability to provide the brain with a set of pre-defined dream parameters, as well as the ability to force the dreamer to stay within the dream of your choosing, as well as your explanation of what happens should the mind of the dreamer rebel, I'm still left with the nagging fact that your dreams simply don't look or, more importantly, feel like dreams. Not at all. Not a bit. Not 1%. Nada. Just because I've accepted (for the sake of argument here) that you can provide the contextual framework for someone else's dream it doesn't mean you're off the hook regarding the look and feel of said dream world. Even leaving aside the fact that dreams occur from a first person POV and Inception slavishly maintains its third person perspective throughout, dreams are not the clean, static visual experiences depicted here; even the most vivid ones. If a dream is vivid its because the feelings it brought up were spot on. A place 'felt' right. The feelings stirred up by the presence of a lost loved one were exactly the same feelings the dreamer used to experience in that person's presence, and so on. The visual context is window dressing. A late loved one may appear with an entirely nebulous face that tells me little about who I'm talking to, but the feelings surrounding this apparition tell me without a doubt who it is. In Inception Nolan has it backwards. All the attention goes into the visuals, which look plenty expensive but which in reality have only a secondary connection to the experience of dreaming.
Emotions are how dreams maintain their stability, not visuals. A hotel can go through 20 or 30 different looks in a dream and still remain the same hotel as long as it feels like the same hotel. So Nolan's insistence on the rigid visual architecture as the glue that holds the whole mess together is meaningless since it's the feelings not the visual details of place that maintain dream continuity. To be sure there are moments sprinkled within the film where the narrative makes mention of the importance of feelings but these seem mere afterthoughts or nods to a conceptual truth the film maker seems unable to address.
Because of this I believe it's pointless to go into detail about the movie, it's plot, it's characters, the acting etc. It fails from the start by addressing its fundamental conceptual premise in an upside down fashion so everything else is just expensive furniture going down with the Titanic.
All of this may seem like just so much Christopher Nolan bashing to some but I'm not the one that set the table here, he is. He decided he was going to take $200 million and bring his big dream idea to the silver screen. While the film made some $800 million around the world my guess is that if it were the product of some relatively unknown director instead of the latest "visionary" effort by the hot director du jour the box office would have been tepid at best and it would have been met with a chorus of reviews that commented on it as a kind of noble failure, which is exactly what it is.
I give Nolan credit for trying, though. At least someone out there is willing to attempt to find something interesting to do with the new technology. Unfortunately he chose perhaps the most difficult landscape to capture convincingly as the stage for his narrative and his idea either wasn't very well thought out or was taken over early on in the process by studio types who wanted to prevent him from creating a David Lynch type product that would be hard to mass market. As a result what we wind up with is a series of well crafted cinematic images that purport to depict the emotion-based inner world but do so in a cold, emotionally neutral manner that left me walking out of the theater thinking not about lofty questions of reality and inner-world conflict but about whether I was going to go straight home or pick up something to eat first.
You know when I first heard someone was going to make a movie called "Battleship" I thought "Hmmmm, there's no way they're going to take the world's most boring board game and try and turn it into an action movie, right? Right?" Well here it is some time later and "Battleship" (the action movie based on the static the board game) draws ever closer to release. Who says Hollywood is out of good ideas? On the upside Michael Bay is not directing.
Seems from this new trailer that they should rename it "Transbattleformaship".
Either "The Dark Knight Rises" continues its quest to achieve the most opaque viral marketing campaign in history or somebody is playing the Batman lovin' community for a bunch of fools. Either way it'll be interesting to find out.
The below images are part of identical packages sent to Wired and Empire magazines allegedly from the CIA dealing with one Dr. Leonid Pavel who's apparently gone missing and is of some special interest to the agency.
Some alert fan apparently has identified the "scientist" as actor Alon Aboutboul who, surprise surprise, just happens to be a member of the DKR cast. What's it all mean? Does it actually have something to do with the caped crusader's swan song? I have no idea.
For what it's worth here are the images for your consideration.
Harry Morgan, best known to those born after about 1960 as Col. Sherman Potter on M*A*S*H, died Wednesday from pneumonia at the formidable age of 96.
Before he joined the Korean War effort (TV version) Morgan was well known to an earlier generation of TV viewers as Joe Friday's trusty sidekick Bill Gannon on the original "Dragnet" series. He also had a long and distinguished movie career appearing in more than 50 films including the classics "High Noon" and "Inherit the Wind".
After being jilted by a second would be director Thor 2 is picking itself up and putting itself back out there. According to The Hollywood Reporter "Monster" director Patty Jenkins has abruptly exited the sequel citing "creative differences". Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps strangely Kenneth Branaugh who helmed the first installment also declined to direct Thor 2 citing "creative differences".
Oh well. They say the third time's the charm big guy.
The number one movie a year ago this week was Buena Vista's "Tangled" which overtook "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1" for the top spot in it's second week of release with a $21.6 million haul.
If you've been following the goings on over at the Star Trek sequel you've probably heard that Benicio Del Toro was being courted to take an unnamed major role in JJ Abrams production that begins shooting next month. The hot rumor had it that he was going to play arch villain Khan. Well, forget it. Abrams has quashed the Khan rumor and now it appears Del Toro is out too. Apparently Abrams didn't want to pay him what he wanted so that's the end of that.
The new rumor is that Abrams has signed Peter Weller (aka Robocop) for yet another as yet unspecified role. I guess we can only wait and see if that report has legs.
A trailer is finally online for the long-delayed release of the Drew Goddard directed, Joss Whedon penned "The Cabin In The Woods". Chris Hemsworth, aka Thor, stars. The film is set for release in April of 2012.
A movie that's been getting some buzz lately is the upcoming independent film "Wish You Were Here". I have to say, as much as I like to see movies being made that don't rely on 1700 special effects shots, I can live without a movie like this just fine. What the world definitely doesn't need is another movie about consumer-youths on vacation acting out their little "I broke my fingernail" dramas with a healthy dose of have-nots (in this case Cambodians) providing suitable destitution for the background. Yawn.
In the spirit of fairness though if I'm going to trash a movie I'll at least include the trailer so you can draw your own conclusions.
"Wish You Were Here" is set for release early 2012
"Sinners and Saints" director William Kaufman's latest action flick is, after many a delay, allegedly due to arrive in US theaters soon. Starring Tom Berenger and a bunch of guys I never heard of it seems like it might be worth the price of admission simply on the strength of the way Kaufman utilizes the desolation of post-Katrina New Orleans.
David Fincher's "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" has a new extended trailer. The Sony Pictures release is due in theaters December 21; just in time for the holidays! Have to admit, it looks pretty interesting.
Tom Rothman, head of Fox Filmed Entertainment is not at all happy that someone managed to leak some incredibly low quality footage of the upcoming Ridley Scott blockbuster "Prometheus" over the Thanksgiving weekend. The so-called "trailer" which saw a few hours of life on the net before Fox managed to get it pulled offended Rothman not simply because it represented a breach in what had been air tight security surrounding the film but because the quality of the bootleg was so appalling. In his words "It's heartbreakingly unfair, because ... the quality of the visuals is as spectacularly beautiful, shot in 3-D compositionally the way only a master could do it," and the bootleg footage did not reflect that.
Official still from Ridley Scott's upcoming "Prometheus"
There's a new TV spot for the soon to be released alien invasion flick "The Darkest Hour". The film follows 5 young people trapped in Moscow in the aftermath of an overwhelming alien invasion and looks pretty good if the trailer is any indication.
Disney has released a new trailer for their upcoming movie "Ava..." oh wait, I mean "Cowboy vs. Al..." uh, I mean "John Carter". The film about a man in the 1800s who finds himself on an alien planet leading a race of indigenous people in their fight for survival is due out in March of next year.
