Recently James Cameron indicated that he was going to write a book based on his blockbuster 3D flick, well, we have happened across the possible film sequel to the CGI-laden event.
Yeah, it starts out slow and a tad predictable, then turns disturbingly funny, so you know we totally liked it ourselves.
The Perfessor
While I’m sure that many of you have already seen this trailer, I couldn’t resist posting it here:
Which, as it turns out, is much better than the trailers I made with my Iron Monger and Hulk Burger King toys...
(scroll down towards the bottom of the post and you see the three or four vids I did.)
The Perfessor
I just read an article about the top 10 most anticipated films of 2010, While I agree with most of the choices, I have to say that (for me) the single most anticipated film of this year is the following:
The Expendables
Release Dates: August 13 (US), TBD (UK & AU)
No, this isn't a remake of the obscure Vietnam War film. The Expendables is a tribute to every cheesy action movie the '80s ever gave birth to. The plot, such as it is, sees a team of trigger-happy soldiers sent to oust a South American dictator. In true B-movie fashion, a few good men and a lot of explosions are all that's necessary to fight off hordes of faceless bad guys.
The premise may be simple, but the casting is where things get really interesting. Sylvester Stallone directs and stars in The Expendables. Joining him are a Who's Who of action movie giants, including Jet Li, Jason Statham, Dolph Lundgren, Micky Rourke, Bruce Willis, and even the Governator himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger. How could you not want to see a movie with those names attached? If you need a testosterone boost this summer, we bet The Expendables will send you to the emergency room with a serious overdose.
You had me at “...a tribute to every cheesy action movie the '80s ever gave birth to”
The Perfessor
OK, now that may sound a tad harsh, but this was my reaction when I learned that a producer from Uruguay who created and then uploaded a short film of his to YouTube in November of 2009 was offered a $30m (£18.6m) contract to make a Hollywood film.
Fede Alvarez's short film "Ataque de Panico!" (Panic Attack!) featured giant robots invading and destroying Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay.
At first I was “wicked cool†but then I watch the five minute clip clip, and thought, “Wow! Have I already seen this film!†Well, you watch it, and then I’ll continue:
So, here’s what I got out of this. A film producer from Uruguay rips off the plot from War of the Worlds, changes the slow-moving tripods to slow-moving robots, throws in the fighting airships from Independence Day, spices it a bit with a Spielbergain opening (with the little kid), gives it a downbeat, bummer ending, like the Dawn of the Dead films, and winds up with a $30 million contract?
While I’m happy for the guy and all, something clearly just isn't right about all this, as it so clearly ripped off from several high-profile films.
The Perfessor
This just in, the director who brought us Paranormal Activity (Oren Peli) is set up to next deliver his next film, Area 51, which is exactly what you think it is — another Blair Witch-style film.
According to The Hollywood Reporter
The "Paranormal Activity" writer-director's follow-up, "Area 51," has been picked up for distribution in the U.S. by Paramount Pictures, which also distributed his mega-successful debut.
"Activity," produced for just $11,000, has grossed $106 million dollars in the U.S. in the last three months. It has just begun its release overseas, grossing $7 million over the Thanksgiving weekend.
Well, personally, I hope that this film is handled better than his first foray into “Faux-docudrama†filming, as I really thought that his first outing, well, was a slow starter, not really very scary, and almost a snore-fest. Now I’m not totally opposed to this style of filming (Cloverfield was rather good, as was District 9), I did think that The Blair Witch Project was 76 minutes of bad filming and swearing and five minutes of scary.
Another really good example of how horrible this genre can go wrong was the recently-released The Fourth Kind, which purportedly (re)told the “true†story of an Alaskan psychologist who was studying people who had supposedly been abducted by aliens in Nome Alaska. Quite frankly, I simply didn’t buy the “factualness†of the film. No, I don’t necessarily think that we here on Earth are the only inhabitants of the universe, but I really want to know why folks who see aliens are always in some out-back, rural hard to reach place. Why is it that in all the years of UFOs has one never been spotted over New York City, or Tokyo, or London? And why would a (supposedly) more advanced live form travel billions of miles through space only to kidnap some redneck just to “prob†them (if you know what I mean).
Anyway, the premise of Peli’s new flick is essentially the same, someone “stumbles into†Area 51 and film and/or video is left behind and discovered. Again the premise is that this is “true†film, which of course begs the question of how someone randomly “stumbles†across some of the most protected and secretive Real Estate in the country. Anyway. I’ll probably see that film as well, but only because I expect it will suck, and I do so enjoy trashing bad films.
The Perfessor
While we’re on the subject of upcoming films, I thought that I’d add this new clip of James Cameron’s upcoming sci-fi videogame ah, movie, Avatar.
Sure, sure it looks all mad-cool and like that, but if our films become more like videogames and our videogames become more like our films, will we ever be able to tell the diofference (and will we care)?
I remember an item from some years back of how George Lucas was trying to get the digital rights to various classic Hollywood actors so that he could completely re-make Star Wars: A New Hope with his dream cast (something like fantasy football, but with CGI actors).
Other than getting Sean Connery to be able to play James Bond to Infinity and beyond, I’m not really sure this is a good thing.
The Perfessor
Total Film has made an impressive list of 49 films that will help shape the 2010 movie-going experience. These films include the sci-fi vampire flick Daybreakers (January 8).
The Book Of Eli (January 15)
Mel Gibson’s Edge Of Darkness (January 29)
The Wolfman (February 12)
...and, well, a buncha other wicked-cool flicks that we are chomping at the bit to see. You betcha that next year is going to mad-fun to sit in the dark.
The Perfessor
A new kind of “Nookâ€
OK, you tree-hugging, paperless, tech-heads, today is the day you’ve been looking forward to for some time. That’s right, kiddies, Today Barnes & Noble Inc. will begin shipping its new $259 wireless Nook electronic-book reader! According to The Wall Street Journal, the demand for these devices has been so strong that stores won’t actually have any available for sale, or for demonstration, purposes until Dec. 7.
However, Mary Ellen Keating, a spokeswoman for Barnes & Noble, said that "due to high demand, we are prioritizing pre-orders so that those people who ordered before Nov. 20 will receive them for Christmas." As a result, there will be a week delay in shipping the Nook to stores.
Barnes & Noble, which unveiled its Nook on Oct. 20 to compete directly with Amazon.com Inc.'s Kindle e-book reader as well as devices from Sony Corp. and other manufacturers, has declined to say how many Nooks have been sold or how many would be available during the Christmas period.
On Nov. 20 Barnes & Noble said that the Nook was out of stock for the holidays and that customers who ordered the Nook from that point forward wouldn't receive the device until the week of Jan. 4. The retailer earlier described the Nook as its "fastest-selling product."
My mom works at a B&N and, she tells me that folks don’t seem to care that they are not available, and have been buying them in droves.
Dawn of the Red(box) Menace!
Have you ever rented a DVD? If you are like Walt and many others, you either download them directly from the Net, or you belong to Netflix (the lees technologically adept go to Blockbuster or somesuch). Me? I go straight to the box, the Red box. You know the box I’m talking about, the one that sits just inside the door of my local supermarket.
Yep, nowadays we go directly to Redbox and get flicks for a buck. Well, according to (again) The Journal, they are like the fastes growing company in the world (not really, but even in this market they have managed to increase sales from their rental kiosks to almost $21,000 (up from about $12,000 a year ago). Which is pretty impressive.
Now while easy and cheap access to new releases might be good with you (and the profits good for the company) there are those who aren’t all that happy. To wit:
While some Hollywood studios have inked deals with the company, others see low-price Redbox as a red menace, a threat to lucrative businesses such as DVD sales and the cuts it gets of higher-priced rentals at companies like Blockbuster Inc.
Universal Pictures, Twentieth-Century Fox and Warner Bros. have tried to block Redbox's access to their new DVDs unless Redbox agreed to terms like delays for new movies. Redbox, a unit of Coinstar Inc., is firing back with lawsuits against all three studios.
I’m sure there are some more bright and shiny things to distract us this Cyber Monday that aren’t Sarah Palin, but we’ll get to them later, now we’ve got booze, er coffee to drink, and well, stuff to blow up, ah do.
Later kids!
The Perfessor
OK, OK, all the uber-Trek Geeks already know that JJ Abrams new vision of Trek hits DVD and Blu-Ray any moment now, and virtually everybody else knows that there were two pilots of Trek (the first, if not only TV show in history to have two pilots) The first, The Cage, which was rejected by NBC for being “too cerebral†and the second, Where No Man Has Gone Before, which replaced Jeffrey Hunter (who played the captain) with William Shatner.
Well, it has just been learned that there was actually a third pilot with an alternate version that was largely lost and has before never aired. According to reports, a film collector in Germany recently acquired this print and brought it to the attention of CBS/Paramount. CBS is now releasing this version on Blu-ray Dec. 15.
Here are some clips that have been previously circulated from the alternate version....
While I’m not going to go out and buy a Blu-Ray player just to see this full episode, I’m guessing that there are some that just might.
The Perfessor
In spite of its pedigree, this one could be considered a board game too far. Word has just come to us that Ridley Scott (Blade Runner, Gladiator, and Numb3rs) is gearing up to turn Parker Bros seminal game Monopoly into a hi-tech, big-budger, Sci-Fi film.
Yeah, that’s what we said.
The story stars a loser type fella in Manhattan who sucks at selling real estate, but he's great at Monopoly. Irony! When he tries to beat the world Monopoly playing record, 70 days straight, his friends tell him he's an idiot and tease him. Words are exchanged and he throws down a chance card and goes to bed. The next day he wakes up and . . . he's in Monopoly City, where everyone pays for things in Monopoly money, and there are buckets and sports cars and everyone stands around waiting for this tiresome game of life to end but it never will, it never will.
OK, Clue as a film was actually pretty good, but Monopoly? Really? (I heard something about Chutes and Ladders but I wasn’t entirely sure if it was a gag or for real). Still, is this really the last sign that no one any longer has an original thought in their head? Or is that just my take on it?
I need a drink and something to blow up.
The Perfessor
To be sure, I totally know next to nothing about this film, but the title of it all on its own is enough to entice me to leave my house and head to the theater. Seriously.
For now, this is what I have:
An out of work lothario, Julian Marsh (Hoffman), scores a break as the director of an off-Broadway play. The play is a bizarre adaptation of Hamlet written by a pale Romanian (Ventimiglia) who is actually a master vampire. A perfect combination of low-brow humor and high-brow aesthetics, this comedy/horror film follows an eccentric cast of characters to explain the connection between Hamlet, the Holy Grail, and some very sexy vampires.
I can’t really fully tell you why, except to say that the alliteration of the line “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are dead,†has always held a special place in my writer’s heart. (I actually always wanted to write a story that had two characters named...but that would be telling...)
Seriously, I want to see this film.
The Perfessor
You heard me, let’s get wild, really wild.
OK, perhaps not quite that wild.
Seriously, what I’m talking about is the upcoming Spike Jonze flick the translation of the seminal 1963 children’s picture book by American writer Maurice Sendak, which should be hitting theaters any minute now. I recall reading this book as a youth, and again to my own kids when they were growing up. From the trailer, it looks like it is going to be a great ride.
Still, according to The Wall St. Journal, Where the Wild Things are, isn’t the only children’s book that is coming to the big screen over the coming months.
In the coming months, Hollywood will unveil a series of films based on classic children's books and made by leading art-house directors who have reworked the tales for the 21st century. The result: a slate of big-budget movies sewn from the fabric of children's literature but tailored to look edgier, hipper and more appealing to adults.
These films from books include Tim Burton bringing us Walt Disney's Alice in Wonderland (due out next year). and Wes Anderson reinventing Roald Dahl’s tale, Fantastic Mr. Fox, in stop-motion animation.
Hopefully some of these will hit big, but on the down side, if they do, can it be a far stretch to expect a big-screen adaption of Goodnight Moon?
The Perfessor
As you most assuredly already know, Hollywoodland lately has a penchant for translating funnybooks into films. Sometimes these films work (Spider-Man, Iron Man, Batman Begins. Sometime they are quite mediocre (Superman Returns, and other times they blow chunks (Catwoman).
Still, you all might be interested to learn that not all comicbook films involve over-muscled, highly-testosteroned, men and women in tights, sometimes the comics are of a less “fan-boy-heroic†nature (The Road to Perdition, A History of Violence), and still wind up being quite excellent.
Well, you’ll want to keep this in mind with the release of a pair of new funnybook films which come out over the next couple of weeks. The pair of flicks based on comic books — this weekend’s Whiteout with Kate Beckinsale and the Sept. 25 release Surrogates with Bruce Willis — won’t have an ounce of spandex involved, reflecting a new trend in Hollywood towards a more non-superhero comic books getting scooped up by Hollywood for adaptation into film.
With the recent success of cape-free comic book movies like “300†and Wanted – along with the upcoming films based on comics like Kick-Ass and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World – Hollywood has quietly been sneaking a surge of comic book movies into theaters without most movie-goers even realizing it.
Here is a link to the trailer for Whiteout (embedding disabled by request), while the trailer for Surrogates is below.
The Perfessor
That’s right. We want your brains, but not in an intellectual, “let’s think thin through†sort of way. We want your brains to toss out to the impending gathering of wolves that is being predicted as a possible future Zombie attack.
No, No, I’m not talking about George Romero’s classic horror film Night of the Living Dead, nor am I speaking of the upcoming Woody Harrelson vehicle Zombieland. I’m talking about a real-life, actual attack of Flesh-eating (brain swallowing) Zombies.
And no, I haven’t taken complete leave of my senses (no matter what Walt will have you believe). I’m reading up on this from this guy. No, seriously, there is a guy out there who is actually talking about the possibility of the outbreak of a flesh-eating virus that will turn dead people into brain-eating zombies.
An outbreak of zombies infecting humans is likely to be disastrous, unless extremely aggressive tactics are employed against the undead. While aggressive quarantine may eradicate the infection, this is unlikely to happen in practice. A cure would only result in some humans surviving the outbreak, although they will still coexist with zombies. Only sufficiently frequent attacks, with increasing force, will result in eradication, assuming the available resources can be mustered in time.
Furthermore, these results assumed that the timescale of the outbreak was short, so that the natural birth and death rates could be ignored. If the timescale of the outbreak increases, then the result is the doomsday scenario: an outbreak of zombies will result in the collapse of civilization, with every human infected, or dead. This is because human births and deaths will provide the undead with a limitless supply of new bodies to infect, resurrect and convert. Thus, if zombies arrive, we must act quickly and decisively to eradicate them before they eradicate us.
And while I think that this guy might have been hitting the Uncle Jack a bit hard before breakfast (something that I’ve been known to do myself), I do believe that the difference is that he is probably serious about what he sees in the dark of the night.
Anyway, there are (or seem to be) quite a load of folk who seem to be taking this guy seriously. I mean, would you ever think that you might be useful in the event of a zombie attack? Well, why not find out by taking a quiz to find out how effective you might be in the event of an assault by the undead.
Oh yeah, and as we’ve already been talking about our pal George Romero, apparently he is going to go back to the well for yet another bite of the Zombie apple.
"I keep asking myself, 'When are people going to say enough with the zombies, already?' " George Romero said with a laugh yesterday as he promoted Survival Of The Dead, the latest instalment of his now six-film "walking dead" oeuvre.
Now I’m not saying that a real-life zombie attack isn’t entirely possible, because, well, there are some strange folks out there, and well, I have seen some very odd things (one of them is this trailer).
So, yeah, this whole Attack of the Zombies motif is funny and all, but really? Zombies?
Makes you think, eh? Me, I think I’m going back to sniffing glue.
The Perfessor
So either the world is going to end in 2012 as the Mayans predicted (don’t believe it, their calender was cyclic and doesn’t so much end on 12/21/2012, but simply reboots — the way the Gregorian calender does every December 31)
Or it is going to end in 2030?
The world's population is growing, food supplies are diminishing, water supplies are becoming more scarce, the ice caps are melting, prices are rising. Things one could argue, are looking bleak - and it looks like they'll be looking bleaker.
The rest of which can be found here.
The Perfessor (drinking ‘til we all drop)