“‘I’ll quote Dick Cook right after James and the Giant Peach was finished. He said, ‘We don’t believe this is a viable medium anymore, and we’re not going to do it,'” Selick told Daily Variety. ‘A few years later they shut down 2D. It’s great that both of those things are back.'” Good news for fans of the stop-motion arts: The Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline visionary Henry Selick signs up with Pixar: “Selick hopes to benefit from the Pixar brain trust and technology, but will continue to produce toons using his trademark stop-motion style.“
Tag: Fanboy
His Luck, a Two-Headed Cow.
Speakin’ in tongues is worth a broken lip for Michael Cera, as is the love of Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, creepily dead-on), in the new trailer for Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, with Chris “Captain America” Evans (I like that choice, btw), Jason Schwartzman, Kieran Culkin, Allison Pill, Brandon Routh, and Anna Kendrick. Between this and Kick-Ass, we’re getting pretty meta with our fanboy films now…but it looks like fun.
To Catch Some Predators.
Adrien Brody, Topher Grace, Lawrence Fishburne, Alice Braga, and Danny Trejo, among others, find themselves stuck in another world’s Most Dangerous Game in the new trailer for Robert Rodriguez’ Predators. Eh, maybe.
The Dark Knight Returns.
“Without getting into specifics, the key thing that makes the third film a great possibility for us is that we want to finish our story, and in viewing it as the finishing of a story rather than infinitely blowing up the balloon and expanding the story. We have a great ensemble, that’s one of the attractions of doing another film, since we’ve been having a great time for years.” Christopher Nolan discusses Batman and Superman (but no World’s Finest)
Where There’s a Whip.
Five movies this past weekend and I didn’t catch this one (although I did see the fun Tron: Legacy teaser): With Sam Rockwell’s Justin Hammer making an appearance, here’s the second trailer for Jon Favreau’s Iron Man 2. This is only two months away? Wow, that was fast.
The Wicker Frog.
Much has been said of the Muppets of yore…In the venerable tradition of “I still think of you, Jim Henson,” a pious Kermit the Frog gets more than he bargained for as the Muppets are mashed up with The Wicker Man (and I mean the creepy-great 1973 original, not the godawful Neil LaBute-Nicholas Cage stinker.)
Coruscant Travel.
In brightest day, in blackest night…
I’ve been watching the casting fly-by on this without commenting, and I still kinda wish they’d gone with Mad Men‘s Jon Hamm for Hal Jordan over the getting-overexposed Ryan Reynolds (who already has two other comic properties to his name in Deadpool and Blade III.) Nonetheless, Mark Strong has joined the cast of Martin Campbell’s Green Lantern as Sinestro, the Lantern’s arch-nemesis. He joins Reynolds, Blake Lively (Carol Ferris), Peter Sarsgaard (Hector Hammond), and Tim Robbins (Sen. Hammond, Hector’s pa.)
Well, that’s a pretty solid cast on the villain side. But I fear this is just going to feel like an attempt to cash in on DC’s second-tier (a la Iron Man on the Marvel side)…unless they go really big and space-age with it. Like Green Lantern Corps, Oans, etc.
(500) Days of Gwen.
“Webb said, ‘This is a dream come true and I couldn’t be more aware of the challenge, responsibility, or opportunity. Sam Raimi’s virtuoso rendering of Spider-Man is a humbling precedent to follow and build upon. The first three films are beloved for good reason.'” Well, actually, not many care much for Spidey 3. In any event, the post-Raimi reboot of Spiderman at Sony has found its director in Marc Webb, previously of (500) Days of Summer.
A solid choice, although two things give me pause: 1) It’s hard to escape the sense that Webb was picked mainly because the studio suits think that, unlike Raimi, he’ll be more malleable than a lot of the A-list names floating around (Fincher, Cameron). 2) The ramifications of the following sentence might just end up being terrible: “The touchstone for the new movie will not be the 1960s comics…but rather this past decade’s ‘Ultimate Spider-Man’ comics by Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley where the villain-fighting took a back seat to the high school angst.”
We are still in the desert.
“‘As a David Lynch movie, I loved it,’ he said of the 1984 “Dune” adaptation by the famously trippy ‘Twin Peaks’ filmmaker. ‘As a “Dune” fan, I was not such a big fan.‘” Taken and From Paris with Love director Pierre Morel talks about his next project, Dune, and so far he’s saying all the right things: “I’ve been reading it over and over again – well, I’m 45 now, so for 30 years…[B]y the time I bought the sixth book I had already read the first one six times! So, I’m a hardcore fan.“