The Fresh Prince is now entering the "I've made A LOT of money for you motherfuckers so now I get to do whatever the FUCK I want!" phase of his career (his next big project: a father/son scifi action/epic with Jayden written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan); and if you need further proof of this The Wrap reports that he's gotten a greenlight to produce, star in and possibly even direct "The Legend of Cain" - which apparently retells the Old Testament tale of Cain and Able with "a vampire twist."Okay, so... this sounds batshit insane as...
Friday, 31 August 2012
Having Clint Eastwood as Mitt Romney's "surprise" lead-in speaker at the RNC should've been a slam-dunk: Dirty Harry walks out onstage and lays down some gravely platitudes (ideally ones that ignore Mr. Eastwood happening to be pro-choice and pro-gay marriage) while the assembled crowd basks in the glow of just about the ONLY remotely-relevant right-wing actor who isn't a walking joke - or, rather, wasn't one yet..Just one small...
Thursday, 30 August 2012
Via Latino Review2012/13 is the Year of Michael Shannon, and I've been waiting a long time for it - Shannon has been the best "very-possibly-a-genuine-out-and-out-insane-person" actor in Hollywood for years, but he kept being so in movies nobody saw. That changes this year: "Premium Rush" is a theatrical bomb, but it'll very, very soon be thriving on Redbox/Netflix/VOD where people will discover Shannon stealing the ENTIRE MOVIE with a over-the-top-and-then-some villain performance. And after that: He's General Zod in "The Man of Steel," which...
We're starting to see the "Avengers" deleted scenes turning up, and a pattern is starting to emerge: The "much longer" original cut of the film may also have been a "darker" cut, and what went out seems to have been anything that might've changed the "colorful romp" energy of the final film. Probably the right idea - they weren't going to out-gloom the summer's other big superhero epic, and to be perfectly honest the blatant 9/11 allusions in the "alternate opening" is cheesy in the wrong way and would've left a bad taste in people's...
So... it sometimes seems like I have a contentious relationship with my own fanbase, particularly as concerns comments and feedback. It's my own doing, I know, in as much as I decided early on that my approach to being an online personality would be to A.) engage the audience and B.) give as good as I got, within reason.But, without getting into specifics, I've had some instances happen recently in terms of fan-feedback and general appreciativeness that reminded me that I don't accentuate the positive nearly enough in that regard. In...
Wednesday, 29 August 2012
A few weeks ago, my colleague Jim Sterling did a video on what he so as the waning (or, at least, "water-treading") state of the Super Mario Bros. franchise which, along with a general sense of "I've gotta get to this at some point" regarding the matter, inspired me to undertake this episode... which is NOW SHOWING on ScrewAttack!Embedded video (and SPOILER TALK) after the jump:SPOILERS BELOW/ / / / / / / / / / /So... "gotcha," I guess. The AntiThinker WAS back... for about five minutes. I've been planning this bit, broadly, since before shooting...
Sony Pictures, you may have heard, has bought up a bunch of domain names relating to a movie project called "Console Wars." Yesterday, HitFix's Kris Tapley ambiguously tweeted that he'd heard of the project before and described it as "The Social Network" but for video-games.So... a non-fiction drama about corporate-rivalry in the video game world? Interesting. But what would it be about - which "war" are we talking about?It would be almost comically cynical and gauche for Sony to make a movie about a business they are one of the three major players...
Tuesday, 28 August 2012
Sunday, 26 August 2012
You may have already forgotten this, but Michael Bay was producing a "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" reboot for Nickelodeon (retitled to just "Ninja Turtles"), but the project got shitcanned - I'm sorry, postponed - earlier this Summer. Said postponement came shortly after alleged details about the screenplay (reportedly hated by the people financing the project) leaked to the web. The "big deal" detail was that the main characters' origins had been revised to make them aliens.Well, now it seems like the full screenplay might have been...
Saturday, 25 August 2012
Neil Alden Armstrong, the first human being to set foot on another world, a human achievement which has not yet been equaled (think about that for a minute - NO human being has done anything as monumental as that since) has died at the age of 82. I'm having a little trouble processing that today, so instead I think I'll repost THIS:The Escapist : The Big Picture : Once Upon a Time in The Fut...
Friday, 24 August 2012
Below, Bill Nye handily explaining WHY it's important not to simply "let them be" regarding creationists, flat-earthers, etc.There are two kinds of people in the world: Thinkers and Believers. The distinction has nothing to do with religion or "atheism" or even intelligence - it's about how you approach life on a day-to-day basis. Do you think for yourself, or do you let someone (or someTHING) else decide for you? Do you put your trust in "traditions" or do you apply logic? Do you "feel" or do you reas...
Thursday, 23 August 2012
A big conversation-piece last year on the festival circuit, "Butter" is a political satire - supposedly in the vein of "Election" - that uses a yearly butter-carving competition (yes, we are firmly in "Little Miss Sunshine" middle-america-as-quirktastic-museum-piece land) as a metaphor for "modern politics" (read: the 2008 presidential election.) Jennifer Garner is the deliberately Palin/Bachman-esque wife of the reigning champ who enters the contest herself in order to maintain her family's prestige after her husband is...
Wednesday, 22 August 2012
I was just talking with a friend about remakes tonight, too...I'm not "against" remakes. You can make a good movie out of anything, "anything" includes other movies, and so on. But there's a point where this just becomes nonsense. At this point the "remake cycle" is just that - a self-perpetuating corporate organism: You produce a remake of a known-quantity not only to hold on to any IP no matter what, but also to re-sell the original on Blu-Ray and because you know the outrage/intrigue generated by potentially desecrating a sacred cow will translate...
Tuesday, 21 August 2012
It's been a long time coming, but now it's here: Nintendo Power Magazine is shutting down after 24 years. If nothing else, a lot of people's magazine collections are about to become really valuable.I am feeling about as rotten about this as I did when Dr. Seuss and Jim Henson died. Yes, Nintendo Power was a nakedly commercial corporate thing - a singularly genius bit of marketing by Nintendo of America in realizing that there was going to be a "gamer culture" and getting in front of it with a big, glossy fan magazine of their own....
Sunday, 19 August 2012
Tony Scott, younger brother of Ridley and easily one of the most important and influential action movie directors of the last several decades (an "of all time" case could absolutely be made,) is dead from an apparent suicide. Witnesses say he jumped to his death from the Vincent Thomas Bridge in San Pedro, California, his body being later retrieved from the water by LAPD officers. What may have led to this fate is, at this time, unknown. Awful, awful news.Like his brother, Scott had a quixotic career. Originally schooled as a painter,...
What frustrates me most about "The Expendables" franchise (Part 2 is worse than Part 1, incidentally) - and mystifies me about people who're still furious at me for not liking the first one - is that I WANT stuff like that to be good. I'm as big a fan of the bloated 70s/80s action aesthetic as anyone; and I don't understand how this franchise built around the guys who invented that stuff gets it so profoundly wrong while the likes of "Hobo With a Shotgun" or "Machete" can make it work.Case in point: This trailer for "Bullet In The Head" -...
Saturday, 18 August 2012
This. This would be awesome.THR reports that Marvel/Disney is seeking James Gunn, who most-recently gave the superhero genre a vicious dressing-down in "Super," to try his hand at the real thing as director of "Guardians of The Galaxy." Aside from how cool and "different" a move it would be to hand a big-budget space opera to a guy mostly known for niche genre flicks like "Slither" and some early Troma collaborations (and, yes, the two "Scooby Doo" movies;) I can think of some other reasons for fandom to get excited...Gunn is simpatico...
Friday, 17 August 2012
This week's "Escape to The Movies" will be up in a few hours, but for those of you making weekend movie plans now, let me shoot some quick takes at ya:"ParaNorman" is my favorite movie of the year, so far. Yes, more than "Cabin in The Woods." Yes, more than "Avengers." Better than "Coraline." An absolutely perfect movie with great characters, great mystery, and it eats "Super 8's" lunch in terms of Amblin-throwback "kid adventure" movies. Destined to be a cult hit, and will mark the point where Laika Animation dethrones Pixar as the hardcore film-geek...
Thursday, 16 August 2012
I wonder... Did any prescient movie journalists back during the "Arnold Era" of American action movies do any serious writing about the action stars of said era having a "bubble problem?" As in: So much of their appeal was bound up not in their performances but in their cartoonishly pumped-up "straight-dudes-can-be-gym-queens-too" physicality they were innevitably going to have much greater difficulty transitioning to the "aging hardcase" phase of their careers?Case in point: The trailer for Arnold Schwarzenegger's (lead-role) post-Governorship...
Tuesday, 14 August 2012
Wound up giving Time Life's big "Power Rangers" DVD set (on behalf of myself and my brother) to my kid sister as an overdue birthday/College Graduation present (good job, Catie!) shortly after it finally hit my mailbox today. I was just a little too old to be "into" MMPR when it was new (though Linkara's fantastic "history of" videos have made into something like an after-the-fact fan), but she was a massive fangirl for it...
Supposedly, the most-common advice given to screenwriters in present day Hollywood is: Don't specialize. Be good at something, fine, but get your name on as much of "everything else" as possible. Make sure they know you're available for action, comedy, scifi, whatever. David Ayer's career stands out like a living rebuke to that advice - since 2000, Ayer has written (and more-recently directed) eight films: "U-571," "Training Day," "The Fast & The Furious," "Dark Blue," "S.W.A.T," "Harsh Times," "Street Kings" and now "End of Watch." Of...
Monday, 13 August 2012
Now that Christopher Nolan has effectively dashed Batman-fans' hopes of seeing any more favorite characters turn up in the "Dark Knight" universe; we're probably going to be seeing A LOT of fan-films popping up that mainly exist to imagine "Nolan-ized" versions of fan-filmmakers' favorite bad guys. Case in point: "Puppet Master" plays out as basically the first-act of a nonexistant "in-between-quel" centered around Riddler and The Ventriloquist. I dig it: What I appreciate most about this is how plausible it is as an actual part of the series,...
Friday, 10 August 2012
From the looks of things, watching for seams-showing where FX and editing were employed to turn the "Red Dawn" remake's bad guys from China to North Korea will be a lot more interesting than the movie itself...I'm making an effort to be more positive lately, so let's momentarily ignore the fact that this movie apparently sucks so profoundly that it's been sitting on a shelf for three years and focus on some stuff I actually LIKED in this trailer:1. Shot with the snow-globe is a clever repurposing of the "Jurassic Park Effect."2.) Thor being a returned-veteran...
Wednesday, 8 August 2012
It's not really being reported as a "major" entertainment story, but Seth MacFarlane's "Ted" is probably going to end up being one of the biggest hits of the year - it's actually doing bigger business than "The Dark Knight Rises" in a lot of Europe right now - even moreso given it cost so relatively little to actually make. That kind of impact makes waves, and this is probably the first visible one: "ALF" is heading to the big screen.If you're under the age of... I dunno, 20 maybe?, this is quite possibly (pardon the pun) totally...
Tuesday, 7 August 2012
Let's get this out of the way, first: Yes, endorsing Mitt Romney for president does make Clint Eastwood significantly less cool - which is to say, still cooler than YOU... just not by as much.*Anyway, here's the trailer for "Trouble With The Curve," aka "The Anti-Moneyball."I could've sworn Clint had retired in front of the camera, but even without that it feels bizzare to see him acting in a movie he didn't direct. However, the director Robert Lorenz has been Clint's producing-partner and assistant director for a LONG time, so you can't help but...
Monday, 6 August 2012
Kathryn Bigelow's "Zero Dark Thirty" - previously known as "Killing Bin Laden" - has released it's first trailer. The film, about the international covert manhunt undertaken to find the Al-Qaeda leader in the wake of 9-11, was in-production and shooting before the Navy SEAL raid actually brought Osama bin Laden down and was originally slated with an open-ended conclusion in mind; though that's obviously no longer the case...Originall slated to open in October, it was moved to December (read: after the presidential election) in reaction to...
Variety and others are reporting that there's big doin's in the world of Marvel movies once more: Supposedly, Marvel/Disney and Fox are in serious talks about swapping around some rights. See, while Fox is already going ahead with a "Fantastic Four" reboot from "Chronicle's" Josh Trank; their other Marvel franchise, "Daredevil," has been stalled after David Slade left the project, and Daredevil's contract is much closer to running out. So, evidently, the two studios are working out a deal: Fox can keep Daredevil (with JOE FUCKING CARNAHAN in talks...
Saturday, 4 August 2012
I've heard people joking about "Soldiers of Fortune," but this is the first time I've actually seen the trailer. My response: This is either going to be brilliant or brilliantly-horrible.The premise, at least, is pretty killer: A rebel insurgency in a third-world dictatorship is looking to fun their revolution by partnering with a slimy "extreme vacation" outfit whose business is leading bored billionaires on safari-esque live-fire paramilitary "missions" in such hotspots. "Something goes wrong," and suddenly the group of weekend warriors...
Friday, 3 August 2012
Entertainment Tonight running a trailer-preview for the "Red Dawn" remake is a geuine two-fer: I didn't think either of those things were still happening.Chris Hemsworth and Josh Hutcherson are not, incidentally, aging backwards - this thing was shot about three years ago and has been shelved largely owing to the MGM crack-up and (reportedly) really, really sucking; then got delayed again to perform a villain-ectomy: Originally the film was about an armed Chinese (replacing the Soviet Union from the original) invasion of the United States;...
Devin Faraci at BAD has dug up something pretty spectacularly awful - possibly the worst thing you'll see on the internet today. A confluence of awful things in the popular culture mixed together in such a way as to feel like a parody... except its all horribly, horribly real."Diggity Dave" - some kind of personality from "Pimp My Ride" - has apparently been making a Nolan-Batman fan-film and has taken to "talking it up" recently with an incredible claim: The Aurora Massacre shooter was "obsessed" with the project and contacted Mr. Diggity...
Yes, I said I was done talking about [REDACTED]; and I think I've been pretty good about that. However, I never said anything about mentioning someone else talking about [REDACTED.]Honestly, though, I'm mainly posting this short cartoon about [REDACTED] because it's creator is a fan, tweeted it to me and I thought it was fucking hysterical and deserved more views than it was getting. Enj...
Thursday, 2 August 2012
"Thor 2" is subtitled "The Dark World," and now we may know part of what that's in reference to: Deadline reports that former Doctor Christopher Eccleston has been signed as the new main villain - Malekith. And in case you were thinking the "Thor" movies might be pulling back from the high-fantasy stuff after the character(s) turned out to be so memorable tearing up NYC in "The Avengers;" this fellow's full name and title is Malekith the Accursed:...
Wednesday, 1 August 2012
A side-effect of reporting/commenting on the popular culture is that you become acutely aware of your own position in it; to the extent that I still get a little giddy when something I've done/said actually becomes a (tiny) part of the stuff I'm commenting upon or otherwise observing.To wit, it's felt awfully... "vindicating," I guess, to get a shout-out from Hollywood-Elsewhere and a name-drop from "Zero Punctuation" within a span of about 10 hours. Kudos, gents.The Escapist : Zero Punctuation : The Amazing Spider-...
I've been retweeting (when able) people's photos of themselves buying/eating lunch at any Chik-Fil-A rival today as a little counter-protest against "Chik-Fil-A Appreciation Day;" wherein Republican/Conservative politicians have been encouraging followers to patronize said restaurant chain to show their solidarity with bigotry and anti-gay discrimination. So far, this is my favorite, tweeted by @laputanwmach...
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