"The Hobbit: part 2" has been officially renamed

After announcing recently that "The Hobbit" would be extended into three films instead of two there was a blizzard of speculation as to how (if) this would affect the title of the 2nd film; "The Hobbit: There and Back Again". Well the answer is in as Peter Jackson and Co have announced that that title will now belong to film #3 while the second film will get the new title "The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug".

Glad to see that the big scaly dude is being brought front and center into the proceedings where he belongs.

Bilbo is informed his arch enemy will now get title billing in film #2

"The Iceman" - trailer

Director Ariel Vromen's film tells the tale of Richard Kuklinski, a hit man with a conscience, who plied his grizzly trade during the pre-digital era. The film stars Michael Shannon, Ray Liotta, Winona Ryder, James Franco and Chris Evans.


Curiously there's no release date available that I've been able to find, including on the film's IMDB page.

"The Avengers" alternate opening

Marvel has released this alternate opening to their mega-blockbuster and I have to say I'm glad someone was paying attention and decided to cut it. Having agent Hill hitting leadoff with a scathing critique of Nick Fury would have tainted just about everything else in the film. There's also the fact that New York, as depicted in this sequence, looks more likes it's just survived a really bad gas main explosion instead of an epic battle for the future of the planet.

Peter Jackson reassures the public that GDT's designs for "The Hobbit" are history

I was extremely pleased when Guillermo Del Toro felt compelled to walk out on "The Hobbit". The fact was though that he'd done a lot of design work for the film before taking his hike and there was always the possibility that the upcoming films might be saddled with some of his designs. Happily Peter Jackson (in an interview with i09) has stated that almost all the prep work Del Toro did for The Hobbit was scrapped once he (Jackson) took over the director's role.

Here's highlights of Jackson's interview:

I looked at his designs when he took over and a lot of his designs are very Guillermo . . . it was very much stuff that you would recognize from Pan's Labyrinth or Hellboy... I looked at his designs and I said the only person who can make a Guillermo Del Toro movie is Guillermo... So really I redesigned the film pretty much.

The top 10 movies for the weekend of August 24 - August 26, 2012

1) The Expendables 2	$13.4 Million
2) The Bourne Legacy	$9.3 Million
3) ParaNorman	$8.6 Million
4) The Campaign	$7.4 Million
5) The Dark Knight Rises	$7.2 Million
6) The Odd Life of Timothy Green	$7.1 Million
7) 2016 Obama's America	$6.5 Million
8) Premium Rush	$6 Million
9) Hope Springs	$5.7 Million
10) Hit and Run	$4.5 Million

The number one movie a year ago this week was Buena Vista's "The Help" which spent a second consecutive week at number 1 with a $14.5 million take.

Joe Dante's "The Hole" finally gets US distribution

Produced in 2009 and released theatrically in a number of overseas markets beginning that year "The Hole", directed by Joe Dante (Gremlins), was never able to secure a US distribution deal. It seems that sad state of affairs is finally being set right. Sort of. I say "sort of" because while Yahoo movies lists a release date of 9/28 other sources are claiming that date is for the US DVD release and not a theatrical release. So things are still somewhat up in the air (or down in the hole depending on your point of view) regarding the ultimate fate of Dante's film. Still, I'm going to keep my fingers crossed that it'll make it to theaters. Here's the official synopsis.

Life couldn't possibly get worse, or so thought 17 year old Dane (Chris Massoglia) and his 10 year old brother Lucas (Nathan Gamble), when their single mother Susan (Teri Polo) uproots them from New York City to the sleepy little town of Bensonville. For Dane the only exciting thing about their new town is the beautiful girl next door, Julie (Haley Bennett). With Susan spending more and more time at work, Dane and Lucas are left unattended to explore the depths of their eerie new residence. With Dane paying more attention to Julie, he has far less time and patience for his little brother. But then everything changes when they find a sinister bottomless hole under a locked trap door in the basement. As the brothers experiment with the hole they realize that the cold pit goes on forever. They drop a nail and never hear it hit bottom. They lower a flashlight and a video camera and they get consumed by the darkness. Hoping for some answers about the house's past, Dane and Lucas bring Julie in on their new discovery. When the hole is exposed, evil is unleashed. With strange shadows lurking around every corner and past nightmares coming to life, the trio will have to come face to face their darkest fears to put an end to THE HOLE. 

Hammer Films promo for "The Quiet Ones"

Not a lot to say about this since the folks from Hammer do plenty of explaining of their own in the piece. All I'd add is that producer Ben Holden's assertion that "The Quiet Ones" is "Hammer's follow-up to "The Woman in Black" is a bit misleading. It is the newly reformed Hammer's 2nd feature after TWIB, but it's not a sequel to that film as the term "follow-up" would seem to imply. The actual sequel to "The Woman in Black" - still in the early stages of pre-production - will be called "The Woman in Black: Angels of Death".

30 second tv spot for "Dredd"

I'm guessing from what I've seen so far that there's not going to be a lot of Rob Schneider-type hilarity in this remake.



"Dredd" hits theaters September 21st.

Off the beaten track trailer of the day - "7 Boxes"

This one comes from Paraguay and tells the tale of a young man who's entrusted with the care of 7 boxes by some local criminal types. Of course, being that the kid works and lives in and around the downmarket markets of Acunsion keeping his cache a secret isn't going to be easy. The trailer looks great and gives a wonderful feel for this much overlooked part of the world. Whether or not the contents of the 7 boxes turns out to be a huge macguffin ala the briefcase from Pulp Fiction remains to be seen. Though it's playing at this year's Toronto Film Festival there are no plans at this time to release stateside.



Trailer courtesy of twitchfilm.

"The Expendables 2" - 2012 - movie review

"The Expendables 2" is what happens when Rocky Balboa decides, after 35 years of taking head shots, that he's capable of writing a script for a major motion picture. Some of these guys are still compelling screen presences (including Stallone) yet the obvious limits of their physical capacity require someone who knows how to write snappy (original) dialogue and create a compelling narrative for them to inhabit. The Italian Stallion is not that guy. (Sure he had Richard Wenk to help him out with the screenplay but anyone who thinks Stallone deferred to Wenk is smoking some of that Afghan weed the guys from "Savages" are selling.)

The story begins with Stallone and Jason Statham leading a charge into a criminal encampment in Nepal in order to rescue an unidentified colleague. Setting aside the fact that Nepal has apparently become infested with palm trees and that many of the evil foot soldiers are speaking Thai this Bond-wannabe setup turns out to be completely pointless. Its only purpose seems to be to provide Ahnuld with the first of several extended cameos.

After this we're introduced to the rest of the crew, including Liam Hemsworth, a fairly obvious marketing ploy intended to get the youngsters into the theaters. He's given the lamest, most cliche-riddled excuse for a backstory imaginable and then set firmly onto a red-shirt trajectory that the blind guy who lives across the hall could have seen coming a mile away.

So after the big non-setup Stallone meets with Bruce Willis' "Church" who informs him that he's got one last chance to apparently square things up between the two of them (manly men being eternally obsessed by squaring things between them you see). To do this he must retrieve some important data from a safe being held by some more baddies. Stallone isn't told exactly what the information is and he's saddled with another marketing ploy, Nan Yu, playing "Maggie" a semi-attractive covert operative who's going to extract the info Willis is after once Stallone and Co have secured the safe.

And that's about it. Once the info is secured we're introduced to the super-evil "Vilain" (wink-wink) played by Jean Claude Van Damme and his super-evil cohort who take it from the boys by force and the rest of the film is a plodding, enervating revenge tale littered with more pointless, nonsensical cameos and recycled one-liners than a late 70s Las Vegas rat-pack review.

Jet Li, Randy Couture, Terry Crews and Dolph Lundgren amount to little more than talking extras, while Bruce Willis, Schwarzenegger and Chuck Norris don't do anything except stand in front of the camera a few times and fire big guns at groups of the most bumbling, inept Keystone-Cop bad guys that ever disgraced the silver screen. The films only actual action sequences are limited to a couple of first rate ass kicking sequences given to Jason Statham and the 'big smackdown' at the film's climax that pits Stallone against Van Damme. Other than that "Expendables 2" is just that; expendable.

The guys here deserve a better swan song than this. To those who might say Sly's hands were tied by the advancing age of his cast I'd direct them to check out Robert Rodriguez's breathtaking "Sin City". While its true that Rodriguez had Frank Miller's incredible series of graphic novels to draw from the fact is that Miller is not the only talented writer working today and if Stallone cared enough, and wasn't so driven by the needs of his own ego, he could have found someone with the requisite skill and patience to craft an interesting, engaging tale that utilized the advancing age of the stars here as fodder for something other than lame self-effacement.