THE HUNGER GAMES teaser from the VMAs
Let me take a moment here. Okay. Okay. I just watched The Hunger Games teaser six times. Why? Because I haven’t been this excited for a blockbuster adaptation since Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. I don’t know if the teaser does anything for non-fans, but the sequence captured here, a scene from inside the arena where the Gamemakers start lobbing fireballs at tributes, is exactly how I pictured it. Well, minus Jennifer Lawrence being there. But after seeing her in Winter’s Bone, I’m confident she’ll make a badass Catniss. For those unintiated in the world of The Hunger Games, the story is set in a dystopian North America now called Panem. The country is ruled by a dictator (President Snow, played by Donald Sutherland) who reminds residents of the 12 inhabited districts that they’re lives are in the President’s hands by...
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Big 6: Realism in CONTAGION, Women Directors, more
Contagion: A Virus Movie Determined to Get Real “It’s an ultrarealistic film about a pandemic, and that’s the key phrase,” the film’s director, Steven Soderbergh, said. “We were looking for something that was unsettling because of the banality of the transmission. In a weird way, the less you trump it up, the more unsettling it becomes.” Read the full NYT article Oscarwatch: Can Women Directors Break Through? This year, several female directors are already making their mark, and there are still others yet to come. Madonna and Angelina Jolie will both be bringing films to audiences. Can you imagine someone taking that sentence seriously ten years ago? The times, they are a-changing, even if they change a-slowly. Read the full Awards Daily post Scandals of Classic Hollywood: Rock Hudson, Hollywood’s Most Eligible Bachelor The problem, then, was that when Rock Hudson...
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Big 6: COMMUNITY appeal, Ken Jacobs 3D, Tim Burton, more
Tonight’s Community: The most insanely self-referential 22 minutes in sitcom history. Outside of ongoing jokes about the school’s academic haplessness, the show isn’t about education, and I don’t read it as a stand-in for America. Rather, the show is about itself in particular and TV in general, but again with a sort of blank aimlessness that often produces a vortex of jokes about some marginal bit of pop culture, like the rock group Barenaked Ladies, who are debated at length in the context of whether they are worthy of being debated about at all. Read the full Slate article 3D Experiments From Ken Jacobs Hollywood might do well to learn from Ken Jacobs, who can boast more than 40 years of provocative, demanding and transformative explorations of various permutations of 3-D, putting the primitive, in-your-face assaults of Hollywood to shame. Read...
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Big 6: Brad Pitt on MONEYBALL, THE HOBBIT’s Bilbo, more
Brad’s Pitch: Why an A-list actor was willing to go to bat for Moneyball… For Pitt, Moneyball also evoked “films about process,” particularly the seventies movies he loved. “I thought of The Conversation: How do you tap a phone? Or Thief, with Jimmy Caan: How do you crack a safe?” Pitt says. “And I saw in it a guy who had an obsessive quality like Popeye Doyle,” from The French Connection. Read the full NY Mag article ‘The Hobbit’: Peter Jackson and the one true Bilbo Baggins Jackson added: “I can’t imagine anyone else doing Bilbo, which is one of the reasons, really, we signed [Martin Freeman] up even with having the ‘Sherlock’ break — normally on a movie you wouldn’t want to do that with the schedule,” Jackson said. “But we literally couldn’t figure out any other actor and we...
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Every trailer for the Gurus of Gold pre-Toronto Oscar predictions
It feels like just yesterday I was ranting writing about how much I didn’t love The Social Network, and how I was happy to see The King’s Speech as the Oscar frontrunner (and eventual Best Picture winner). Oh how quickly time goes by. Well, fellow awards watchers, it’s almost Oscar time again. And the Gurus of Gold are back with their pre-Toronto predictions. I have to put mine together before the start of the fest, too. Until then, you can pass the time by watching all of the available trailers for the Gurus’ top ten predictions: 1.) Steven Spielberg’s War Horse 2.) George Clooney’s The Ides of March 3.) Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist (Winner of the Best Actor prize at Cannes) 4.) Stephen Daldry’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close No trailer yet. What’s up with that WB? 5.) Alexander Payne’s The Descendants 6.) Woody Allen’s...
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Big 6: SCAREFACE reunion, UP house, more
Pacino, Scarface cast celebrate film’s legacy Part of the charm of the film, Pacino said, is that it wasn’t initially a hit. “It’s one of my favorites because of its whole evolution,” he said. “It (was) sort of eviscerated after it opened by the press. … Nobody was fond of it, except it had good audience participation.” Read the full AP article Disney Allows Reproduction of ‘Up’ House in Utah This is a company that once forced a Florida day care center to remove an unauthorized Minnie Mouse mural. More recently, Disney told a stonemason that carving Winnie the Pooh into a child’s gravestone would violate its copyright. So how is a homebuilder in this Salt Lake City suburb getting away with selling a near-identical copy of the floating house in the Disney-Pixar film Up? Read the full NY Times article...
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