Tag: Fanboy

Man of Iron.

Also from Comic-Con, director Jon Favreau reveals an extensive (You-tubed) trailer for Iron Man. I’ve never been a huge fan of the comic, to be honest, but this looks much better than I anticipated (and the cast — Robert Downey, Jr., Terrence Howard, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jeff Bridges — is solid regardless.)

You Must Be Joking.

“Bring your sense of humor, but don’t worry — we’ll supply the smile.” From the demented criminal mastermind who brought you IBelieveinHarveyDent.com…a Comic-con teaser for Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight looks increasingly likely after another viral marketing site “by” the Joker — whysoserious.com — appears online. (The clock is ticking down to tomorrow’s Comic-Con presentation time, and the coordinates are in San Diego.) Update: A Kramervision version of the teaser has been Youtubed (also here), and it’s…a teaser, although you do at least get to hear Ledger’s suitably bizarre voice. (And, no, I’m not Rick-Rolling you.)

Update 2: Ok, the madness has begun. If you’re playing along at home, the number that appeared in the sky over San Diego was 800-395-9646. Call it, and you get a rather creepy message — apparently the Joker holding somebody at gunpoint — with the first password, “INSIDE JOKE.” Stage 2 — “Catherine, Annie, Elizabeth, and Mary Jane had someone I admire in common. Who was it?” Henry VIII was my first guess, but apparently the correct answer is “JACK THE RIPPER.” Stage 3 involves more legwork in San Diego…Update 3: Or does it? The Joker has left us a Morse-encoded laugh to ponder in the meantime. K, let’s see here…It’s “MOUNTEBANK.” (Some aspiring Bruce Wayne locked that one down well before I did…I was on “MOU.”) Stage 4 is an anagram of sorts — CPRAISMSEIOOFN — My summer a few years back spent trying to get actually decent on Scrabble, and the occasional cheating that ensued, would’ve helped me here, but somebody else figured it out first: “CRIME OF PASSION.” (Hint: As with the morse code, note the two large words.) Stage 5…well, the site’s locked up…

Update 4: While the Warner Brother server was flailing, balloons were passed out in San Diego with the next clue, “head games.” From there, it’s on to the Joker’s case file and another clue, apparently found in bathrooms at the next San Diego point, “74 BARS.” The Clown Prince of Crime then goes the US History route: “Who was the lawyer who got his client acquitted of murder by fatally shooting himself by accident in a courtroom in 1871?” (I’ll give you my own hint: Copperhead.) Answer: VALLANDIGHAM. The next checkpoint involved finding a particular brick in San Diego to ascertain the real name of “Dr. Death,” “GASLAMP DAN HASLAM.” Now, time for a game of cards… Note the actual still of Ledger and Gyllenhaal from the film (click on the word “knife,” or see below) — It looks like the Joker wears make-up in the Nolanverse, and didn’t fall into a vat of anything bothersome this time.) Also, note there are 26 cards at bottom, which should help you to discover the next keyword, “UNFORGIVABLE.”

(Phew, Holy detective work, Batman! This is hard!) Ok, next the San Diegans were to find a child on the street learning to defend himself (note also another police report) The accompanying surveillance site — and this picture — help in discovering the next (punny) clue, “BASEBALL BAT.” After that, we’re in anagram territory again…consider the missing letters and you might just end up with “LARCENY.” Alright, two more clues to go…the next one involves a “Gotham Girl Guide” and her cookies, so we’ll need the troops on the ground again for this one… Update 5: Ok, word has come back that the cookies password is “STARVE.” Then we’re sent to a half-lit LED on a bomb to ascertain the next clue, “REAPER.” (I was stumped by this one for awhile – all I’ll say is that green and red mean something, and the HA’s are there for a reason.) Finally, the San Diego fanfolk had to find a certain license plate reading “291759,” (on a limo near their start point) and, voila, the Joker covers his trail, and offers up a high-quality version of the teaser Youtubed above, before this all started. (Click on the dot.) Ok, a bit of a letdown at the end there, sure (As, one fanboy wit at AICN put it, “Be sure…to drink your…Ovaltine?”) Still, the journey was the reward (even if it ate up much of my Friday afternoon.) Clever, clever, Warner Bros. marketing gurus.

Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun.

Sunshine, directed by Trainspotting‘s Danny Boyle and written by The Beach‘s Alex Garland, is an absolutely maddening film. Even more than their (and star Cillian Murphy)’s last collaboration, 28 Days Later, Sunshine ends up being a movie of two parts. The first hour and change of this flick is as intelligent and gripping a science fiction film as I’ve seen in years. Borrowing liberally from 2001, Alien, The Abyss, Solaris, and other sci-fi classics, it establishes both the terrifying sublimity and rickety U-boat-style claustrophobia of space travel from its opening moments. But, near the end, the movie takes a wildly wrong turn — you’ll know it when it happens — and Sunshine spins off uncontrollably and irrevocably into the yawning darkness of mediocrity. If you’re a genre fan at all, I have to recommend this movie just for its captivating, unsettling first eighty minutes or so — it’s really some of the best hard sci-fi I’ve seen in awhile. But, be advised — sadly, the mission gets compromised well before the end.

Very quickly in Sunshine, we’re given the set-up. Earth’s Sun is dying, an endless winter covers the lands, and the last, best hope of our planet rests on the shoulders of eight young astronauts, who are undertaking what amounts to a suicide mission: They will fly the solar-powered, bomb-carrying Icarus-2 to the Sun and reignite our star with a controlled nuclear blast. (The Icarus-1 tried seven years earlier and failed — apparently, nobody warned these people about the logical consequences of naming your ship thus.) These reluctant heroes include a number of likeable actors: Cillian Murphy (28 Days Later), Rose Byrne (padding out her genre cred again after 28 Weeks Later, and on whom I think I’m developing a crush), Chris Evans (the only good thing about FF, and very charismatic here), Michelle Yeoh (Crouching Tiger, always good), Benedict Wong (Dirty Pretty Things), Cliff Curtis (Live Free or Die Hard), Troy Garity (Steal this Movie), and Capt. Hiroyuki Sanada (Ringu, The Last Samurai) But, even early in the mission, some of these otherwise-amiable spacefarers are displaying Ash-like symptoms, and that’s even before the crew receive a long, lost distress signal from the Icarus-One. Tense meetings are held, important decisions are made, but faster than you can say the Mars Orbiter, human error has further complicated an already complicated situation, and soon the entire mission — and thus by extension the survival of Humanity — has been jeopardized…

This is all well and good. There are a few narrative quibbles one might make in the early going — Why, for example is Murphy the only person who knows how to work the payload? Seems like you might train a back-up — but, for the most part, everything holds together with some moderate suspension of disbelief. More importantly, the threats seem dire, the tension palpable, the vastness of space awe-inspiring and horrible, the machinery somehow alien and calculating, the odds of success tremendously unlikely. But, at a certain point in the story, just after the dwindling crew of Icarus-2 is forced to weigh the type of heady moral quandary that all good sci-fi is based on, a new threat to the mission emerges — which I won’t give away but which is eminently guessable — and it’s at this point Sunshine just leaps off the rails. The last half-hour of the movie is stylishly done, to be sure, and there are a few good flourishes (such as [spoiler] the final fate of Chris Evans’ character), but it’s assuredly not the movie we started with, nor is it the film Sunshine had been building to so tremendously to that point. (And this isn’t like me griping about the last ten minutes of Children of Men, which in retrospect and after repeated viewings seems uncharitable to an otherwise amazing science-fiction outing– this misstep really alters the mood, character, and ultimately the final experience of the film.) Again, if you enjoy science fiction, I’d give this movie a go regardless — its setup is that good. But, unfortunately, this Sunshine isn’t spotless by any means, and ultimately ends in eclipse.

Update: I’ve since discovered after taking a look at referrals that the film’s official site linked back to this review. Hey, thanks (particularly considering the review is mixed one. Mixed-positive…but mixed.)

Lyra, daemons, and bears, oh my!

Another big fantasy trailer comes in the wake of Harry: New Line plays the LotR card to help sell audiences on the new teaser for Chris Weitz’s take on Phillip Pullman’s The Golden Compass. Well, the actors and the polar bears look pretty good…I’d like to see more of the daemons.

Give him the whip.

Professor of archeology, expert on the occult, and how does one say it? Obtainer of rare antiquities…Via AICN (and in case you missed the pic a few weeks ago), Harrison Ford suits up as Indy once more, this time on video (and George Lucas seems to fess up — finally — that Han shot first.)

Indiana, Hurt and (Broad)bent.

Dr. Henry Jones, Jr. garners some more distinguished colleagues for Indy 4 with announcements that John Hurt has joined the film (some sites say as Albert Einstein, others as Abner Ravenwood), as has Jim Broadbent (in what’s likely to be a Marcus Brody-type role.) Already on board: Cate Blanchett, Shia La Boeuf, and Ray Winstone.

Bats Goes Torque.

I’d be more excited to see Heath Ledger’s Joker in action, but for now on The Dark Knight front, we’ll have to content ourselves with pics and video of Batman’s goofy new trike (the “Batpod”) and Flickr-ized shots of Maggie Gyllenhaal and Aaron Eckhart as Katie Holmes and Harvey Dent respectively. Hmm, ok.

The Bad News Blots.

Also in comic-to-film news, there’s more rumors of close-to-official casting for Zack Snyder’s Watchmen happening. Keanu Reeves apparently passed on Dr. Manhattan, so now they’re looking for, um, Jason Patric in that role. (I’m not seeing it, frankly, but he’s no better or worse than Keanu, I guess.) Also rumored, Thomas Jane as the Comedian, and, as Rorschach, Little Children‘s Jackie Earle Haley. That’s actually not half bad.