tagged w/ movies_featured
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Ain't It Cool News is reporting that Sam Raimi will be heading up direction on the film adaptation of World of Warcraft.
UPDATE -- This has been confirmed by Variety (see below, thanks mario_a!), so proceed to geek out in joy/rage/indifference.Ain't It Cool News is reporting that Sam Raimi will be heading up direction on... more
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Artist Han Rudi Giger (better known as H.R. Giger) who is recognized worldwide as one of the foremost artists of Fantastic Realism and who worked on the pop culture film series Alien, designed this bar in Gruyere, Switzerland and he used as points of reference and inspiration his horror-inspiring creation.Artist Han Rudi Giger (better known as H.R. Giger) who is recognized worldwide as one... more
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How @thejohnblog got away with impersonating Jonah Hill on Twitter for so long
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Polyjuice Potion for role-playing, a Pensieve to track arguments, imagine how much easier relationships could be if these things existed in real life!
"As the latest Harry Potter movie installment, Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince, hits theaters, teenage hormones are running at an all-time high at Hogwarts. The sixth book in J. K. Rowling's insanely popular series took us to a major turning point in Potter and Co.'s love lives as Harry's relationship with Ginny develops and Hermione and Ron realize their antagonism was really amoré. In honor of the Potter nerd in all of us, we re-imagined eight magical objects from the Harry Potter world in the context of how they could benefit our not-always-magical love lives."Polyjuice Potion for role-playing, a Pensieve to track arguments, imagine how much... more
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KCKate
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Remember, both of these were conducted at Sundance in January.
Watch our interviews with 500 Days of Summer stars Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt:Remember, both of these were conducted at Sundance in January.
Watch our interviews... more
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Wow, midnight movies. I know they still happen, I just hadn’t recently heard of anyone basing a distribution pattern solely around the phenomenon. Nevertheless, the producers of DEADGIRL are rolling the dice on it, debuting their film at midnight this weekend (July 24 & 25, 2009), and dispatching the filmmakers and cast to screening cities across the country to get the audiences into the theaters.
Granted, they’ve got the right material for the hour: DEADGIRL is about two teenagers who, while exploring an abandoned hospital, find a naked woman chained to a table and barricaded away in the deepest, darkest regions of the building. Rickie (Shiloh Fernandez), as much of a moral center as this film will have to offer, wants to report the find to the proper authorities. J.T. (Noah Segan) — seeing that the woman is too feral and dangerous to be unchained, that in fact she’s undead and essentially indestructible, and that, anyhoo, who the hell is going to know what goes on in a long-forgotten, makeshift prison? — wants to have some… let’s call it, “fun,” first.
Directors Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel suggest that this be looked at as a kind of twisted coming-of-age story. I suspect midnight audiences will be too busy having their buttons pushed to get too far down to the subtext. In any case, it’s obvious that Sarmiento and Harel (working from a script by Trent Haaga) can mount a stylish, daring nightmare, whatever the theme. It’s a helluva way to greet the new day.
Click on the link above to hear my interview with Sarmiento and Harel.Wow, midnight movies. I know they still happen, I just hadn’t recently heard of... more
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Harry Potter continues to work box-office alchemy, turning his latest movie adventure into an overnight blockbuster.
The sixth installment, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," took in $79.5 million domestically over opening weekend and $159.7 million since debuting last Wednesday, according to estimates from distributor Warner Bros. on Sunday.
The movie also took in $237 million overseas since Wednesday in 54 countries, bringing its worldwide total to $396.7 million.
With some of the best reviews of any "Harry Potter" movie, "Half-Blood Prince" was off to the fastest overall start in franchise history.
The sixth movie about the young wizard came in $20 million ahead of the last movie, "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," which grossed $139.7 million in its first five days two years ago.
The new film had the second-highest start ever for a movie premiering on Wednesday, trailing the $200 million five-day opening for last month's "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen."
"Half-Blood Prince" already has surpassed the $157.3 million "Order of the Phoenix" pulled in during its entire first week. By the end of its seventh day Tuesday, "Half-Blood Prince" will be in the $180 million range on its way to becoming the franchise's first $300 million domestic smash since the original movie, 2001's "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," said Dan Fellman, Warner's head of distribution.
The audience was a bit older for the new movie, with more elder teens turning out to see Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) and pals Hermione (Emma Watson) and Ron (Rupert Grint) as they deal with adult concerns such as heartache, jealousy and romantic triangles.
Fans have grown up with the franchise, from young readers whose parents had to debate whether the early movies might be too intense for their children to see.
"When the first movie came out, they fought to go. The mother was like, well, should I take them, should I not take them?" Fellman said. "Now they're driving themselves to this and going to the midnight show."
Sacha Baron Cohen's mock documentary "Bruno" plummeted after its No. 1 debut the previous weekend. The Universal Pictures comedy fell to fourth-place with $8.4 million, down a whopping 73 percent from its $30.6 million opening.
Crowd-pleasing movies typically dip 50 percent or less in their second weekends. But "Bruno" has had mixed reviews and failed to earn the audience buzz that made a $128 million hit out of Baron Cohen's 2006 comedy "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan."
After 10 days in release, "Bruno" has climbed to $49.6 million and will finish far below $100 million domestically.
While "Harry Potter" had a healthy start, the overall box office plunged compared to the same weekend last year, when the Batman juggernaut "The Dark Knight" had its record opening weekend of $158.4 million.
The top-12 movies this weekend combined for less than that, taking in $153.9 million, down 39 percent from a year ago.
"We got kind of slaughtered even with the 'Potter' movie, but we knew that was going to happen," said Paul Dergarabedian, box-office analyst for Hollywood.com. "When one movie last year makes more than what the top-12 movies did this year, you're going to have a down weekend."
Fox Searchlight's romantic comedy "500 Days of Summer," starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel, got off to a big start in limited release with $837,588 in 27 theaters. That amounted to an average of $31,022 a cinema, compared to $18,376 in 4,325 theaters for "Half-Blood Prince."
1. "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," $79.5 million.
2. "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs," $17.7 million.
3. "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen," $13.8 million.
4. "Bruno," $8.4 million.
5. "The Hangover," $8.32 million.
6. "The Proposal," $8.3 million.
7. "Public Enemies," $7.6 million.
8. "Up," $3.1 million.
9. "My Sister's Keeper," $2.8 million.
10. "I Love You, Beth Cooper," $2.7 million.Harry Potter continues to work box-office alchemy, turning his latest movie adventure... more
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Morgan Freeman is in talks to star alongside Bruce Willis in a big screen adaptation of Warren Ellis’ Wildstorm comic book Red for Summit Entertainment.
The three-issue mini-series is about a former black-ops CIA agent who is forced out of retirement when a high-tech assassin shows up to kill him. The official comic description from Wildstorm reads:
As a C.I.A. operative, Paul Moses’s unique talent for killing took him around the world, from one hotspot to another, carrying out the deadly orders of his superiors. And when he retired, he wanted to put his bloody past behind him. But when a new administration takes over the White House, the powers that be decide that Moses knows too much, forcing him back into the game against the agency that trained him.Morgan Freeman is in talks to star alongside Bruce Willis in a big screen adaptation... more
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"There's no way around it. Unless a screenwriter is writing about one-minute section of life where other sexes do not enter, or a world filled with one sex that practices asexual reproduction, men are going to write about women, and women are going to write about men. But can they do so successfully?
The best rationale I can offer is that men who can successfully write women are those who don't try to write as women. What I mean is -- they write naturally and rationally rather than with specific and often stereotypical tropes in mind. There might be classically "feminine" elements to the story, but the path and thought behind them is, simply, human.
And, of course, I'm not saying that we should let things lie status quo. Some men can write truly beautiful female characters, but the world still needs more screen words written by a women's pen.
But back to the question at hand: Is writing without sex/gender in mind the key to it all? In your opinion, which male screenwriters write women wonderfully, which crumble to gut-wrenching and terrible stereotypes, and what makes them fail or thrive?""There's no way around it. Unless a screenwriter is writing about one-minute... more
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In an interview to GQ magazine, film-maker Quentine Tarantino says that he'll quit the movie industry when he turns 60 and already working on the prequel to the forthcoming film 'Inglourious B******s'.
Tarantino says "Directors don't get better, they get worse. When you gotta go out and make a movie to pay for the kids' private school and for the three ex-wives, don't talk to me about your artistry... It's their job. I don't want to have to watch the movie I made to pay for my pool."In an interview to GQ magazine, film-maker Quentine Tarantino says that he'll... more
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David Arquette has told E! Online that he will definitely be returning for the next Scream installment, as will his wife, Courtney Cox. We’ve known for a good while that they were in talks for the project, but Arquette is now treating it like a done deal.David Arquette has told E! Online that he will definitely be returning for the next... more
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A Harry Potter musical is inevitable. But what about a Harry Potter rap battle? Indy Mogul brings us a rap battle between “the chosen one” Harry Potter and the evil dark lord Voldemort.A Harry Potter musical is inevitable. But what about a Harry Potter rap battle? Indy... more
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"Steven Soderbergh doesn't sound fine. A bad telephone line between London and Los Angeles isn't helping, but it's not wholly to blame for that air of tired resignation. That crept into his voice as soon as he started talking about Che, his two-part, four-and-a-half-hour-long biopic of Ernesto Guevara.
"Everybody got scarred by [Che] a little bit," Soderbergh says. "I don't know how to describe it. It took a long time to shake off. It was just such an intense four or five months that it really … "
There is a long pause. He speaks slowly and evenly.
"You know, for a year after we finished shooting I would still wake up in the morning thinking, 'Thank God I'm not shooting that film.'"
Does he wish he hadn't done it?
"Yeah."
Really?
"Yeah. Literally I'd wake up and think, 'At least I'm not doing that today.'"
Soderbergh knew Che (recently released on DVD in the UK) would be difficult from the start. The project was brought to him by its eventual star, Benicio del Toro, and producer Laura Bickford, during the shooting of Traffic – the drug war docudrama that won Soderbergh the best director Oscar in 2001. Che was essentially Del Toro's baby and Soderbergh, who was interested in the man but nowhere near as smitten as the actor, approached the movie cautiously, heading into the production with what he describes now as a "pretty significant sense of dread".
Lack of funding fuelled his fear. And the money wasn't there partly because of Soderbergh himself. In the characteristically noble pursuit of authenticity he decided to film Che in Spanish, a decision that effectively blitzed any hope of finding significant investment within the US.
"It's a film that, to some extent, needs the support of people who write about films," he argues. "If you'd had all these guys running around talking in accented English you'd [have got] your head taken off."
Eventually European investors were tapped for $58m (£35m) – a paltry figure considering the project's ambition. As a result Soderbergh was forced to shoot extremely quickly to stay on budget. The two parts were filmed over 76 days, four days fewer than for his glitzy Vegas action comedy Ocean's Eleven, an $85m capitalist fat-cat of a movie in comparison with Che.
"It's hard to watch it and not to wish we'd had more time," he says of Che. "But I can't tell you that if we'd had more time it would be better – it would just be different. There was an energy and intensity that came out of working that quickly."
Indeed, Che is easily Soderbergh's best film since Traffic. But it was a terrible failure at the box office, grossing under $2m worldwide. Soderbergh blames piracy ("We got crushed in South America. We came out in Spain in September of last year and it was everywhere within a matter of days. It killed it.") but it probably didn't help that his film is a foreign-language marathon with an admittedly distant and impersonal lead.
Che seems, in retrospect, like a glorious, sad aberration: a niche-audience epic it would be impossible to commission in these straitened times. Today, the willingness of the studios to take such a punt has all but evaporated – a fact that Soderbergh is more alive to than most."
-more at link"Steven Soderbergh doesn't sound fine. A bad telephone line between London... more
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The top 5 worst movie franchise Facelifts from the The Pink Panther, Honeymooners and Miami Vice.The top 5 worst movie franchise Facelifts from the The Pink Panther, Honeymooners and... more
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The Green Hornet maybe finally be on the way to being produced but it has a small problem it needs a Kato.
Stephen Chow was to star and play Kato which would have being a perfect choice, but the is proving to be the biggest complication for Seth Rogen’s Green Hornet. Chow decided to give up the director’s chair due to “creative differences”, but luckily Michel Gondry has stepped in. Now according to JoBlo.com there maybe an open casting call looking for actors to play Kato.
The press release calls for “ALL ASIAN ETHNICITIES, Male, 20's - early 40's. The Green Hornets alter ego Brit Reid's manservant/chauffeur by day and Green Hornet's martial arts-skilled sidekick by night. Actor doesn't have to have Martial Arts experience.”
The filmmakers are getting desperate, with such a huge talent base of rarely notice Asian actors looking to get work in a big movie like this, you’d think that Michel Gondry and Rogen would have no problem finding a replacement. Instead, they’re asking the public for new talent.The Green Hornet maybe finally be on the way to being produced but it has a small... more
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An awesome recap of a visit to the set of the upcoming zombie comedy Zombieland from first-time director Ruben Fleischer. "It's Day 38. Just one week to go until Ruben Fleischer's horror comedy Zombieland is wrapped - under time and on budget. And today it's time to break shit. Lots of shit. Shit that took the production designers and set decorators weeks to put together. But I'm getting ahead of myself..."An awesome recap of a visit to the set of the upcoming zombie comedy Zombieland from... more
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That's the request the music producer Danger Mouse (aka Brian Burton) made of David Lynch upon presenting the filmmaker with a new project — an album called Dark Night of the Soul.
"He said, 'David, I know you don't have time to do videos, but maybe still photographs for each song?'" Lynch recalls.
Lynch went on to produce 50 striking photos inspired by the uniquely collaborative album. They're on view in a show at Los Angeles' Michael Kohn Gallery, where tracks from the album play constantly as viewers examine the photographs.
The songs on Dark Night of the Soul were created by Danger Mouse and musician Mark Linkous, better known by his stage name, Sparklehorse. The compositions were then farmed out to performers including Iggy Pop, the Flaming Lips and The Shins' James Mercer, who supplied the vocals and made their own contributions to the music. Lynch himself even sang on two of the tracks.
A legal dispute with the EMI record label has prevented the release of Dark Night (though you can hear the entire album as part of NPR Music's Exclusive First Listen series). Lynch's photographs, meanwhile, have been compiled into a book that is sold with a blank, recordable CD-ROM that buyers are encouraged to use as they please.
"In music, hiding in there, is so much," says Lynch, explaining his creative process to NPR's Scott Simon on a tour of the Michael Kohn Gallery show. "You just sit and listen to the tracks, and these images come."
Many of Lynch's photographs feature dramatic visual distortions that recall the sometimes impenetrable mysteries of Lynch's films.
"Life holds many, many mysteries — abstract things that we all think about," Lynch says. "In a film, when things get abstract, some people don't appreciate that, and they want to leave the theater. Others love to dream, get lost, try to figure things out. I'm one of those people."That's the request the music producer Danger Mouse (aka Brian Burton) made of... more
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I warn you now, there's some plot spoilers below, and even more after the jump...
According to 'pop culture site CC2K,' a script for the upcoming videogame - movie adapatation of 'God of War' has been leaked with the film reportedly following the game's original plot "slavishly," except for the ending, which they've conveniently lined up for a sequel.
At the end of the game, the main character Kratos agreed to become the new God of War following on from him throwing himself from a cliff, in the movie, the ending will see 'Kratos rejecting the throne and falling to his death with the words: "Your turn, Hades."
Expect 'God of War: II" then....?I warn you now, there's some plot spoilers below, and even more after the jump...... more
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JoBlo has the first picture from Wes Anderson's adaptation of Roald Dahl's The Fantastic Mr. Fox.
The stop-motion animated film should arrive in November. So I'm mildly curious about Anderson's leap into this new model. You should be too.JoBlo has the first picture from Wes Anderson's adaptation of Roald Dahl's... more
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