Oh, man. So it's just another Friday night and I'm lounging with my best BFFs at the the latest fabulous Hollywood see-and-be-seen (don't ask me where, please -- I wouldn't want to make you feel embarrassed). And we're enjoying some light cocktails and hard drugs when the topic of conversation turns to, as always, "Who would win in a fight -- Anakin Skywalker, Mace Windu, or Billy Elliott?"
It's a pretty controversial topic of conversation, as we all know. After all, Mace Windu's got that badass purple lightsaber, and Billy Elliott has those sweet dance moves, and Anakin Skywalker's all pouty and sad... The debate wages on as usual for an hour or so, and then my friend Jill says, "Wait. Guys. What if they had the power of teleportation? What then?"
And we are just like, "Whoa."
Here's the trailer for Jumper, directed by Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity) and starring Hayden Christensen, Samuel L. Jackson, and Jamie Bell. The debate wages on. There can be only one.
]]>Thirtysomething creators Marshall Hershkovitz and Edward Zwick are no strangers to naval-gazing angst. They practically revived the genre singlehandedly. So it's no surprise that their new series, Quarterlife, takes a long, earnest look at today's twentysomethings as they search for their identity.
What is surprising is that this network-quality show isn't on any network -- it's on MySpace.
Based on a Hershkovitz-Zwick pilot rejected by ABC, Quarterlife will "air" every Sunday and Thursday beginning Nov. 11. A day after hitting MySpace, segments will appear on www.quarterlife.com, and a week after that, they'll be available webwide.
But what's it about? Well, in the broader scheme, it's about a group of friends struggling to find their way out of college. Specifically it's about one woman, Dylan (Bitsie Tulloch), and how her relentlessly honest blogging RUINS PEOPLE'S LIVES.
And, going by the trailer, it also seems there will be a lot of hugging.
The key thing about Quarterlife is not its subject matter -- or even if it's good or not -- but the fact that it is the latest in a number of professional projects that are legitimizing the Web as a place for creative content. What do big money and big names hitting the scene mean for indie creators? That remains to be seen.
But when one of the stars of "Lonelygirl 15" has a lead in a show by the guys behind Blood Diamond and The Last Samurai, the times, they are a changin'.
]]>This trailer for David Cronenberg's new thriller manages to introduce all its major plot elements -- orphaned baby, abandoned corpse, secret diary, Naomi Watts -- while maintaining a sense of intriguing mystery. How does it all add up? No telling. Only thing we know for sure is that Viggo Mortensen is one sexy tattooed Russian gangster. Eastern Promises opens today; if its success is anything compared to that of A History of Violence, it'll stick around for quite some time.
The new teaser trailer for Iron Man, starring Robert Downey Jr. and directed by Jon Favreau, dropped today. As it was being passed around the office here at TDR, REELEDin manager Spencer Somers was overheard muttering, “It’s gonna take a lot for me to see another superhero movie that’s not Batman or Superman.” And you know what? He’s never been more right (In fact, he’s hardly ever right. Burn!). After such recent debacles as Ghost Rider, Fantastic Four 2, Spider-Man 3 and X-Men 3, comic book movies, especially Marvel ones, are wearing pretty thin.
But this would be a good time to list some other quotes heard by TDR staffers as this trailer was going around: “Badass!” “This is fucking awesome!” “That looks great!” And yes, Spencer agreed that he would indeed be seeing this one.
So of course, leave it to Favreau (whose last effort was 2005’s best-movie-no-one-saw Zathura) and Downey Jr. (in the midst of a career revival that includes another one of my favorite movies of 2005, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang) to get us excited again. I’m almost ashamed to say that I had my doubts, but it’s reassuring to know that there are some filmmakers that you can count on. ]]>
In June, we posted the intriguing first "trailer" for P.T. Anderson's upcoming There Will Be Blood. I use the quotation marks because that clip was more of a beguiling short tone poem than a typical teaser. Nonetheless, it got us excited.
The new clip, which began making the rounds on the Net last week, is substantially more informative. It's also amazing. There's blood, there's oil, and there's Daniel Day-Lewis, who eats up every frame of screen time as a greedy prospector in early 20th Century California. There's also Little Miss Sunshine's Paul Dano as a fanatical preacher who locks horns with DD-L.
The clip may only be two and a half minutes long, but this has multiple Oscar nods written all over it. Paramount Vantage releases the film Dec. 26.
There’s an old dictum in the movie business that while it’s always exciting to see one actor play multiple parts in the same film, it’s merely frustrating and confusing to see multiple actors play the same part. History has largely born this adage out, giving us films like Kind Hearts and Coronets and Back to the Future Part II in the case of the former, and the 1967 version of Casino Royale in the case of the latter. Leave it to indie maverick Todd Haynes to say “eff that” and make a biopic about Bob Dylan in which the famous singer/songwriter is alternately played by Batman, The Joker, Richard Gere, a twelve-year-old black boy, and Galadriel Lady of the Galadhrim.
Stunt casting aside, this first full trailer for I’m Not There really goes out of its way to bow down and kiss Bob Dylan’s folksy ass. I have to confess that, unlike everyone else I know, I was not baptized at the First International Church of Dylan. I think Dylan is fine and all, but I can’t really get on board with the slavish Dylan worship that this trailer seems to be pushing. The fact that Haynes has taken such liberties with the casting gives me hope that maybe the film has a more irreverent approach to the subject than is let on here. After all, this is a movie from the same guy who made a biopic about Karen Carpenter and her battle with anorexia using stop-motion animation and Barbie dolls. It would be a real shame if he started taking himself, or Bob Dylan, too seriously.
]]>Co-starring a nearly unrecognizable Jenna Fischer, Walk Hard appears to have considerably more visual flair than producer Apatow's previous films (due, one assumes, to the direction of Jake Kasdan, who also co-wrote the script). Whether the world really needs a parody of music bio-pics isn't clear -- but with an original soundtrack of catchy tunes and Reilly singing them, it's suitable entertainment for all the Millers out there. Maybe even the Joneses, too. Not the Smiths, though. Screw those guys. ]]>
When I first heard about the concept for this Jack Black vehicle -- a man accidentally erases all the movies at his friend's video store, and together they must remake the films themselves -- I thought it just sounded like an amusing setup for Black to run around and be silly for a couple of hours. Nothing wrong with that, either. But I was wrong.
To begin with, Be Kind, Rewind is brought to us by Michael Gondry, director/co-writer of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Second of all, Black's co-star is the immensely appealing Mos Def, who not only has Emmy-nominated dramatic chops, but has also pulled off comedy flawlessly in everything from Chapelle's Show to Hitchhiker's Guide. So there's that.
But the big thing is, it looks good. Instead of a simple farce about two guys bumbling around with a camcorder, we seem to be getting a funny, charming fairy tale about two guys who remind everyone how to fall in love with movies again. Which is a lot more exciting than just a movie with Jack Black getting earing a dress and getting smacked in the face a lot.
Although it also has that.
]]>Only mere whispers and mutterings throughout our history hint at the existence of one of the most mysterious, cryptic, enigmatic and… secret American artifacts. It is a secret book, kept by every President, that holds every secret United States secret in the history of crazy secrets. Its name: The President’s Book of Secrets. And getting his hands on it is the only way that secret-hunter Benjamin Gates can clear his family name, which has been recently marred by the discovery that his great-great grandfather allegedly planned the assassination of President Lincoln. In secret.
But good god, how is he going to do it? He has one option, and one option only: he’s going to kidnap the President. Clearing the name of his long-dead great-great grandfather is obviously more important than whatever else the President has going on.
Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present National Treasure: Boooook of Secretsssss, coming to a theater near you this Christmas.
I think that when, the Coen Brothers are on their game, they're as good as any filmmakers on the planet. And novelist Cormac McCarthy is, to me, as close to a national treasure as we've got these days. (If you don't believe, just read his most recent novel, The Road.) So when the Coens' most recent film, an adaptation of McCarthy's Western neo-noir No Country for Old Men, received rave reviews after its Cannes premiere, I got excited.
Then, when I saw this trailer, I got really, really excited. Let's hope that in 2007, Oscar season actually means some great films, and not just "prestige" mini-major hype jobs. Based on some of the trailers that have surfaced in the past month or so (most notably There Will Be Blood), my hopes are kind of high.
For now.
Now that the technology for producing high-quality special effects isn't confined to Skywalker Ranch, web series set in space are more possible than ever. But how many of them promise to be interesting character-based dramas as well? Well, there's at least one, if Shane Felux's Trenches lives up to the promise of its trailer.
Focusing on the front-line drama of an intergalactic war, the special effects are tight and the actors engaging -- the perfect solution for all those Battlestar fans jonsing for a fix. In short, it looks like Starship Troopers, without painfully fascist -- and it was produced on a shoestring budget by Stage 9 Media. We'll have more about this when it premieres this fall, but in the meantime just start getting excited.
Zowie. Robert Zemekis follows up his motion-capture family extravaganza The Polar Express with the motion-capture fantasy spectacular Beowulf. The fact that those two projects are bookended by the basically-one-man-show Cast Away and the planned motion-capture remake of A Christmas Carol start to make you think maybe Zemekis just doesn't like working with live actors all that much. But this project looks mighty damn cool.
With the increasing dominance of CGI in the fantasy film genre, it's amazing no one's really run with this concept before. Mo-capping the actors gives them the same visual texture and intensity as the backgrounds and effects, making the whole world blend together seamlessly. It's really pretty gorgeous.
And to those who say mo-capped actors look plastic and creepy, I say puh-leeze. Like Angelina Jolie didn't already look like a goddess crafted from Sculpey anyway.
]]>What exactly happened with Wes Anderson? Rushmore is still one of my favorite movies, but I lost my taste for his particular brand of whimsy when his movies became more focused on the footwear than the storylines (not to name names or anything, Life Aquatic).
I want to say that the trailer for his latest film, in which Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman and Adrian Brody play brothers attempting a spiritual journey through India, seems like a return to form. And there's certainly a lot to like about it -- funny dialogue, beautiful cinematography, and Adrian Brody (he can rescue me from a giant ape any day). But somehow I'm still left a bit cold. Maybe it's just because even in these two and a half minutes, I feel slapped in the face by how clever Anderson thinks he is being. Nothing wrong with letting your characters smile a little, Wes. Nothing wrong with it.
Five years after he channeled Douglas Sirk all the way to four Oscar nods with Far From Heaven, Todd Haynes is about to deliver his devout fans another curveball. While we haven't seen anything yet, it's safe to say that his new film, I'm Not There, won't exactly give the life story of Bob Dylan the same kind of treatment Ray or Walk the Line did for their respective real-life music-genius subjects.
Why? Well, for one, six people are playing Bob Dylan, including Heath Ledger, Christian Bale, Richard Gere and, yes, Ms. Cate Blanchett. Last week, footage of the film was leaked on YouTube showing Blanchett in all her drag glory. An obvious nod to D.A Pennebaker's Don't Look Back, the clip also features the hilarious David Cross playing none other than Allen Ginsburg. I'm Not There comes out this fall.
]]>This kind of thing doesn't happen in the upper reaches of Hollywood. J.J. Abrams, one of the hottest non-actors in Hollywood (he created Lost as well as directed Mission: Impossible III), doesn't just come out of nowhere with a new movie. Especially if that movie is what seems to be a mega-budget disaster flick set in New York. But that's exactly what happened last week, when a teaser trailer screened before Transformers. And it's big, like Statue-Liberty-crashing-down-in-the -middle-of-Midtown big.
The film is known as both Cloverfield and Clover, but neither its IMDb page nor its official Web site gives any detailed information whatsoever, except for the fact that it's coming out next January. After a few cameraphone-captured versions of the trailer surfaced last week, Paramount finally posted an official version to the Apple trailer page.
At his always-excellent indieWIRE blog, Matt Dentler has been on top of the story, and so have his readers -- one comment mentions a page that lists the myriad theories surrounding the film. Stay tuned to find out if any of them turn out to be true.