Could have some potential...
The film is set in a version of our world in which super heroes are real but have recently lost all government funding and public support, and out of that setting comes a quirky comedy about an out of work superhero who needs to be saved from his own emotional crisis, and the girl who helps him do it.
While I won't spoil the cause of the 'emotional crisis' here - it's contained in the trailer and is pretty damn fantastic - this whole thing just oozes style and charm and a sense of comedy based in wit and a sincere love for the genre. Galland takes himself in some new directions here while still preserving the unique voice that made Rosencrantz an indie hit. It's Sundance selection season and this looks like an obvious pick from where I'm sitting. Here's hoping the powers that be agree.
Alter Egos was produced by Dan Farah of Farah Films, Carlos Velazquez, Jordan Galland and Milan Chakraborty of Attic Light Films with Ed McWilliams and Doug Weiser as executive producers. Kris Lemche, Brooke Nevin, Joey Kern, Christine Evangelista, John Ventimiglia and Danny Masterson star. Check the trailer below.
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Sequelitis - Mega Man
Not saying I'm a huge Mega Man fan (but I am), but this video is pretty funny. It goes for about 19 minutes, I'd say the good stuff is until 10 minutes in. But watch it all, fuck if I care.
And sorry for the ads...fucking Youtube
And sorry for the ads...fucking Youtube
AKA Jessica Jones will fall in the Marvel Universe
Jessica Jones was once known as Jewel, a crime fighting hero in the Marvel universe, sharing space with the likes of Spider-Man, Iron Man, the Hulk and other well known super heros.
Now she’s given up the cape and gone into business as a private investigator, only to find that getting out of the whole super hero thing is tougher than she thought.
She finds herself working on cases that frequently involve super heroes from the broader Marvel universe, and this is essentially the challenge for the upcoming television show: not all those heroes can be used, since other entities own the television rights to the characters.
Spider-Man, for example, is currently owned by Columbia Pictures.
Luckily, since the acquisition of Marvel by Disney, both ABC and Marvel are owned by the same parent company, so all of the characters currently still owned by Marvel are at least a possibility.
However, that doesn’t mean Disney will want the characters to cross over too much, since the Marvel Film Universe has been very lucrative so far, and they wouldn’t want to take the chance of diluting the characters.
This means that we probably won't see Iron Man or Black Widow actually appear on the television show - but they are free to explore some of the minor Marvel characters alongside newly created personalities for the show.
Clearly, whenever possible, the show will attempt to draw directly from those films. It will exist in the same story world as the films, so events there will affect the plot of AKA Jessica Jones, even if the characters are unlikely to appear directly.
"As we go along things will alter in terms of what is made available to us, but we’re definitely in that universe," Melissa Rosenberg told Hitfix during a recent interview about the release of Breaking Dawn, Part 1, which she co-wrote. "... And as much as I can, I’m going to pull everything in from there that I can use." Rosenberg went on to confirm that Tony Stark and Stark Industries will be integral to the plot of the pilot.
AKA Jessica Jones - Alias will be part of the ABC fall pilot season if it gets picked up. Unfortunately, this is not yet a sure thing. Confirmation may arrive early next year when the major networks start rounding up their pilots.
Now she’s given up the cape and gone into business as a private investigator, only to find that getting out of the whole super hero thing is tougher than she thought.
She finds herself working on cases that frequently involve super heroes from the broader Marvel universe, and this is essentially the challenge for the upcoming television show: not all those heroes can be used, since other entities own the television rights to the characters.
Spider-Man, for example, is currently owned by Columbia Pictures.
Luckily, since the acquisition of Marvel by Disney, both ABC and Marvel are owned by the same parent company, so all of the characters currently still owned by Marvel are at least a possibility.
However, that doesn’t mean Disney will want the characters to cross over too much, since the Marvel Film Universe has been very lucrative so far, and they wouldn’t want to take the chance of diluting the characters.
This means that we probably won't see Iron Man or Black Widow actually appear on the television show - but they are free to explore some of the minor Marvel characters alongside newly created personalities for the show.
Clearly, whenever possible, the show will attempt to draw directly from those films. It will exist in the same story world as the films, so events there will affect the plot of AKA Jessica Jones, even if the characters are unlikely to appear directly.
"As we go along things will alter in terms of what is made available to us, but we’re definitely in that universe," Melissa Rosenberg told Hitfix during a recent interview about the release of Breaking Dawn, Part 1, which she co-wrote. "... And as much as I can, I’m going to pull everything in from there that I can use." Rosenberg went on to confirm that Tony Stark and Stark Industries will be integral to the plot of the pilot.
AKA Jessica Jones - Alias will be part of the ABC fall pilot season if it gets picked up. Unfortunately, this is not yet a sure thing. Confirmation may arrive early next year when the major networks start rounding up their pilots.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Monday, November 14, 2011
Take a Moment - The Most Beautiful Footage of the Aurora
Kinda makes me want to be an astronaut....kinda
Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.
Full Trailer for The Hunger Games
Eh... May check it out. I remember the Japanese version called "Battle Royale". Hope it's as action packed, and not all PG, Narnia-esque violence.
Friday, November 11, 2011
An Adult take on a Classic - Snow White and the Huntsman
Not gonna lie, I'm rooting for the Queen in this one...
Monday, November 7, 2011
Why We Can't Have Great Movies
Last Thursday, Universal Pictures chief Ron Meyer caused a splash late last week, when he admitted that "we do make a lot of shitty movies," and listed Land of the Lost, The Wolfman and Cowboys & Aliens among the studio's clunkers.
But the really fascinating thing about Meyer's presentation at the Savannah Film Festival was the insight he gave into why so many movies are crap: there's a kind of downward spiral where the more movies flop, the more risk-averse the studios become, and the more they make movies that are probably going to flop.
Meyer's comments came just before Universal had a bad weekend — Universal's Eddie Murphy comedy Tower Heist crashed and burned at the box office, being beaten by Puss in Boots. Meyer had been trying to set up a controversial deal to release Tower Heist on Video on Demand just a couple weeks after it hit theaters, and now he must be wishing he'd succeeded.
Now Tower Heist looks likely to join a long line of recent flops for Universal, including Dream House, The Change-Up, The Thing, Your Highness, Scott Pilgrim, Repo Men, The Wolfman, Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant, and many others. If it wasn't for the Fast & Furious and Fockers franchises plus Despicable Me, Universal would have had a pretty dismal last few years.
Movie Line's account of Meyer's remarks in Savannah is pretty fascinating, and well worth reading in its entirety. Super briefly, here are the highlights:
1) He goes into the problems with The Wolfman and Cowboys & Aliens, and says Land of the Lost was "just crap."
2) He says 3-D only makes sense for a small number of movies, like the otherwise-unappealing Journey to the Center of the Earth 3-D.
3) Says that the projects he recently killed, The Dark Tower and At the Mountains of Madness, were just too risky.
4) Says almost nobody can afford to do what James Cameron did with Avatar, and he's proud of A Beautiful Mind — but he wouldn't do it again because he'd rather make money than make critically acclaimed award bait.
What's interesting is the innate contradiction there — Meyer says, on the one hand, that he hates the fact that his studio puts out shitty movies like Land of the Lost and The Wolfman, or mediocre movies like Cowboys & Aliens. On the other hand, he says that aiming too high, with potentially brilliant projects like Dark Tower, Mountains of Madness, or something visually ambitious like Avatar, is too risky. And he wouldn't do Beautiful Mind again.
So Meyer wants movies that are better than Cowboys and Aliens, but not as good as A Beautiful Mind. Not mediocre, just not great. (What's in between mediocre and great? I think the answer to that question would be worth a billion dollars in Hollywood.)
Let's just state the obvious — Meyer wouldn't be apologizing for Cowboys and Aliens and Land of the Lost if they had made money. If Land of the Lost had been a runaway hit, he'd be talking about how Land of the Lost 2 was going to be a lot of fun.
It also seems likely that Universal's recent box office misfortunes have made the studio more risk-averse. Meyer says that Dark Tower and Mountains of Madness were both going to be super-expensive films that might not make enough money back. That calculation might have turned out the same way regardless, but it might be easier to justify a big outlay for a couple of prestige projects if the last several gambles had paid off.
Looking at the list of Universal films for the past decade, it's amazing how few of them stand out as having been great. Children of Men, for sure. I liked Despicable Me a lot. Drag Me to Hell was fun. Slither. And Serenity, of course. Out of those, only Despicable Me was a monster hit.
So after chewing over Meyer's unusually candid remarks for a few days, I'm left with the feeling that there's a downward spiral at work here — one that will probably get worse as box office receipts continue to fall. As people get more and more used to watching movies on demand at home, on their big flat panel screens — a trend that Meyer seems happy to try and cash in on — they'll be less likely to go out of their houses to see a movie on the off chance that it might not totally suck. As more mediocre movies fail, Universal and other studios will try to find the level of "fun concept and cute actors" to get you into the theater.
You can also expect to see more movies budgeted in the $100 million to $150 million range, not so much the $200 million and up range — what Mountains of Madness and Dark Tower have in common with Avatar is the high price point. With visual effects getting ever more expensive, you have to spend a lot of money to make a huge, visually stunning epic — as opposed to a smaller risk, which is a movie with just a few big greenscreen sequences or a few big action set pieces.
That, in effect, means that the economics of movie-making are pushing us towards movies where something unusual happens in the real world, or there's a portal, or there are a couple big fight scenes. Not so much with the "become immersed in a strange alien world" stuff. Oh, and one of Universal's most profitable recent movies? Was Skyline, which made an amazing profit margin on a teeny budget because it was filmed in someone's apartment. Everybody hated Skyline, but it made stupid amounts of money.
Also, R-rated movies are going to have to be cheap, like low-budget horror movies. Big-budget movies had better be family friendly, or at least accessible to teens.
So reading between the lines of Meyer's comments, it sounds like the sort of movies he's likely to be greenlighting going forward are: 1) Modestly budgeted. 2) Family friendly, unless they're much cheaper. 3) Movies which "show how great the human spirit is" the way he feels United 93 did. 4) Movies which may turn out to have a decent story, but not a great or particularly challenging story. In other words, comfortable, middle of the road fare.
And you know, sometimes diner food is pretty tasty. You just don't want to eat diner food for every meal.
But the really fascinating thing about Meyer's presentation at the Savannah Film Festival was the insight he gave into why so many movies are crap: there's a kind of downward spiral where the more movies flop, the more risk-averse the studios become, and the more they make movies that are probably going to flop.
Meyer's comments came just before Universal had a bad weekend — Universal's Eddie Murphy comedy Tower Heist crashed and burned at the box office, being beaten by Puss in Boots. Meyer had been trying to set up a controversial deal to release Tower Heist on Video on Demand just a couple weeks after it hit theaters, and now he must be wishing he'd succeeded.
Now Tower Heist looks likely to join a long line of recent flops for Universal, including Dream House, The Change-Up, The Thing, Your Highness, Scott Pilgrim, Repo Men, The Wolfman, Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant, and many others. If it wasn't for the Fast & Furious and Fockers franchises plus Despicable Me, Universal would have had a pretty dismal last few years.
Movie Line's account of Meyer's remarks in Savannah is pretty fascinating, and well worth reading in its entirety. Super briefly, here are the highlights:
1) He goes into the problems with The Wolfman and Cowboys & Aliens, and says Land of the Lost was "just crap."
2) He says 3-D only makes sense for a small number of movies, like the otherwise-unappealing Journey to the Center of the Earth 3-D.
3) Says that the projects he recently killed, The Dark Tower and At the Mountains of Madness, were just too risky.
4) Says almost nobody can afford to do what James Cameron did with Avatar, and he's proud of A Beautiful Mind — but he wouldn't do it again because he'd rather make money than make critically acclaimed award bait.
What's interesting is the innate contradiction there — Meyer says, on the one hand, that he hates the fact that his studio puts out shitty movies like Land of the Lost and The Wolfman, or mediocre movies like Cowboys & Aliens. On the other hand, he says that aiming too high, with potentially brilliant projects like Dark Tower, Mountains of Madness, or something visually ambitious like Avatar, is too risky. And he wouldn't do Beautiful Mind again.
So Meyer wants movies that are better than Cowboys and Aliens, but not as good as A Beautiful Mind. Not mediocre, just not great. (What's in between mediocre and great? I think the answer to that question would be worth a billion dollars in Hollywood.)
Let's just state the obvious — Meyer wouldn't be apologizing for Cowboys and Aliens and Land of the Lost if they had made money. If Land of the Lost had been a runaway hit, he'd be talking about how Land of the Lost 2 was going to be a lot of fun.
It also seems likely that Universal's recent box office misfortunes have made the studio more risk-averse. Meyer says that Dark Tower and Mountains of Madness were both going to be super-expensive films that might not make enough money back. That calculation might have turned out the same way regardless, but it might be easier to justify a big outlay for a couple of prestige projects if the last several gambles had paid off.
Looking at the list of Universal films for the past decade, it's amazing how few of them stand out as having been great. Children of Men, for sure. I liked Despicable Me a lot. Drag Me to Hell was fun. Slither. And Serenity, of course. Out of those, only Despicable Me was a monster hit.
So after chewing over Meyer's unusually candid remarks for a few days, I'm left with the feeling that there's a downward spiral at work here — one that will probably get worse as box office receipts continue to fall. As people get more and more used to watching movies on demand at home, on their big flat panel screens — a trend that Meyer seems happy to try and cash in on — they'll be less likely to go out of their houses to see a movie on the off chance that it might not totally suck. As more mediocre movies fail, Universal and other studios will try to find the level of "fun concept and cute actors" to get you into the theater.
You can also expect to see more movies budgeted in the $100 million to $150 million range, not so much the $200 million and up range — what Mountains of Madness and Dark Tower have in common with Avatar is the high price point. With visual effects getting ever more expensive, you have to spend a lot of money to make a huge, visually stunning epic — as opposed to a smaller risk, which is a movie with just a few big greenscreen sequences or a few big action set pieces.
That, in effect, means that the economics of movie-making are pushing us towards movies where something unusual happens in the real world, or there's a portal, or there are a couple big fight scenes. Not so much with the "become immersed in a strange alien world" stuff. Oh, and one of Universal's most profitable recent movies? Was Skyline, which made an amazing profit margin on a teeny budget because it was filmed in someone's apartment. Everybody hated Skyline, but it made stupid amounts of money.
Also, R-rated movies are going to have to be cheap, like low-budget horror movies. Big-budget movies had better be family friendly, or at least accessible to teens.
So reading between the lines of Meyer's comments, it sounds like the sort of movies he's likely to be greenlighting going forward are: 1) Modestly budgeted. 2) Family friendly, unless they're much cheaper. 3) Movies which "show how great the human spirit is" the way he feels United 93 did. 4) Movies which may turn out to have a decent story, but not a great or particularly challenging story. In other words, comfortable, middle of the road fare.
And you know, sometimes diner food is pretty tasty. You just don't want to eat diner food for every meal.
Thursday, November 3, 2011
Take a Moment - Thousands of Starlings Moving at Once
A vast number of starlings is known as a "Murmuration"
Murmuration from Sophie Windsor Clive on Vimeo.
Craig, Bardem star in new Bond thriller 'Skyfall'
LONDON (AP) — Ah, Mr. Bond, we've been waiting for you — and at last 007 is back, several years after his last screen adventure.
Producers announced Thursday that filming has begun on "Skyfall," the delayed 23rd film in the series and Daniel Craig's third outing as the suave British superspy.
Craig, who has brought a hard edge to his portrayal, told reporters that the movie, directed by Sam Mendes and shot in London, Scotland, Turkey and China, would be "Bond with a capital B."
Craig said he was "tremendously excited" to be stepping back into the role for the first time since 2008's "Quantum of Solace."
Work on the film was postponed, and Bond's future looked uncertain, when studio MGM filed for bankruptcy in 2010. But MGM's new management and EON Productions announced earlier this year that the spy would live to fight another day.
Craig will be joined by Spanish star Javier Bardem as Bond's nemisis, while British actors Albert Finney, Ralph Fiennes and Ben Whishaw will play as-yet-undisclosed roles.
Judi Dench returns as spy chief M and the film introduces two new Bond girls — English actress Naomie Harris as a field agent named Eve and French performer Berenice Marlohe as "a glamorous, enigmatic character" named Severine.
"There's lots of surprises," said Mendes, who won an Academy Award for his 1999 film "American Beauty."
"I think this has all the elements of a classic Bond movie, including — to quell any rumors — a lot of action," Mendes said.
Some have questioned the choice of Mendes, best known for his stage work and emotionally intense dramas like "Revolutionary Road" and "The Road to Perdition."
But he and the producers said they did not plan to take the series in a radically new direction.
Producer Michael G. Wilson said the series had "started down a path" with Craig's first appearance as a gruff, muscular Bond in "Casino Royale" in 2006.
"And we're sticking to that path," Wilson said. "An interesting story, well written, with a great cast and plenty of action."
Mendes said action movies were "a world that's new to me, and I've embraced it."
"The action needs to coexist with the drama, and that's the balance we've got to strike," he said.
Filming will take place in London's government district of Whitehall, at Pinewood Studios outside the British capital and on location in Istanbul, Shanghai and the Scottish wilderness.
Early reports that the film would shoot in India and South Africa have not materialized, but the producers insisted they had not trimmed Bond's budget since "Quantum of Solace," which was widely reported to have cost roughly $200 million.
"It is in the same range as the last one," Wilson said. "We haven't had to change anything in the script to get what we want."
Cast members said they had been training hard for their roles — Craig, it seems, by growing the designer stubble he sported at Thursday's press conference.
Bardem joked that the hardest part for him was "learning the English vowels." Harris said she had been doing practicing yoga, learning stunt driving and firing machine guns, "which I've discovered I have a real taste for."
Producers Wilson and Barbara Broccoli — old hands at building suspense around the movies — kept many details under wraps.
Of the plot, they revealed only that "Bond's loyalty to M is tested as her past comes back to haunt her" and MI6 comes under attack.
As for the meaning of the title, Broccoli said it "has some emotional resonance which will be revealed in the film."
Broccoli said the producers hoped Mendes would sign up for a second film, and "definitely" wanted Craig to return as Bond.
"Skyfall" is due to be released on Oct 26, 2012 in Britain and Nov. 9 in the United States, 50 years since the release of the first 007 film, "Dr. No."
There will be no change to one part of the series' winning formula — attractive women and hunky men. Asked whether Craig and Bardem would take their shirts off, Broccoli sought to reassure fans.
"Damn right," she said.
"If Barbara gets her way," Wilson added, "it'll be more than just their shirts."
Producers announced Thursday that filming has begun on "Skyfall," the delayed 23rd film in the series and Daniel Craig's third outing as the suave British superspy.
Craig, who has brought a hard edge to his portrayal, told reporters that the movie, directed by Sam Mendes and shot in London, Scotland, Turkey and China, would be "Bond with a capital B."
Craig said he was "tremendously excited" to be stepping back into the role for the first time since 2008's "Quantum of Solace."
Work on the film was postponed, and Bond's future looked uncertain, when studio MGM filed for bankruptcy in 2010. But MGM's new management and EON Productions announced earlier this year that the spy would live to fight another day.
Craig will be joined by Spanish star Javier Bardem as Bond's nemisis, while British actors Albert Finney, Ralph Fiennes and Ben Whishaw will play as-yet-undisclosed roles.
Judi Dench returns as spy chief M and the film introduces two new Bond girls — English actress Naomie Harris as a field agent named Eve and French performer Berenice Marlohe as "a glamorous, enigmatic character" named Severine.
"There's lots of surprises," said Mendes, who won an Academy Award for his 1999 film "American Beauty."
"I think this has all the elements of a classic Bond movie, including — to quell any rumors — a lot of action," Mendes said.
Some have questioned the choice of Mendes, best known for his stage work and emotionally intense dramas like "Revolutionary Road" and "The Road to Perdition."
But he and the producers said they did not plan to take the series in a radically new direction.
Producer Michael G. Wilson said the series had "started down a path" with Craig's first appearance as a gruff, muscular Bond in "Casino Royale" in 2006.
"And we're sticking to that path," Wilson said. "An interesting story, well written, with a great cast and plenty of action."
Mendes said action movies were "a world that's new to me, and I've embraced it."
"The action needs to coexist with the drama, and that's the balance we've got to strike," he said.
Filming will take place in London's government district of Whitehall, at Pinewood Studios outside the British capital and on location in Istanbul, Shanghai and the Scottish wilderness.
Early reports that the film would shoot in India and South Africa have not materialized, but the producers insisted they had not trimmed Bond's budget since "Quantum of Solace," which was widely reported to have cost roughly $200 million.
"It is in the same range as the last one," Wilson said. "We haven't had to change anything in the script to get what we want."
Cast members said they had been training hard for their roles — Craig, it seems, by growing the designer stubble he sported at Thursday's press conference.
Bardem joked that the hardest part for him was "learning the English vowels." Harris said she had been doing practicing yoga, learning stunt driving and firing machine guns, "which I've discovered I have a real taste for."
Producers Wilson and Barbara Broccoli — old hands at building suspense around the movies — kept many details under wraps.
Of the plot, they revealed only that "Bond's loyalty to M is tested as her past comes back to haunt her" and MI6 comes under attack.
As for the meaning of the title, Broccoli said it "has some emotional resonance which will be revealed in the film."
Broccoli said the producers hoped Mendes would sign up for a second film, and "definitely" wanted Craig to return as Bond.
"Skyfall" is due to be released on Oct 26, 2012 in Britain and Nov. 9 in the United States, 50 years since the release of the first 007 film, "Dr. No."
There will be no change to one part of the series' winning formula — attractive women and hunky men. Asked whether Craig and Bardem would take their shirts off, Broccoli sought to reassure fans.
"Damn right," she said.
"If Barbara gets her way," Wilson added, "it'll be more than just their shirts."
Red Band: New 21 Jump Street Trailer
This actually looks pretty good and I'll probably go see it. It looks like Channing Tatum will join the ranks of Jon Hamm by trying comedy. Could pay off...
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