"Breaking Dawn" trailer

Well, I can give them this much: "montage of people getting wedding invitations, cut like a hugely-important epic thriller" is as good a visual representation of WHY this shit is so popular with it's audience as you're going to get...


...I'm weirdly thrilled that it looks as though they've filmmed the everything-shattering sex scene (only alluded to after the fact in the books) wherein a vampire supposedly made of marble-hard undead tissue with no blood or working organs somehow impregnates his human wife with a rapidly-aging telepathic Daywalker fetus. It'll be an utter tragedy if they try and "fix" Stephenie Meyer's godawful "Chris-Claremont-after-a-blow-to-the-head" approach to genre fiction and thus deny us a potential trainwreck-to-end-all-trainwrecks in the making.

Read more »

Escape to the Movies: "X-Men: First Class"

"Intermission" has more about "Hangover 2."

Read more »

Konami's Pre-E3 Teaser

One of those only-in-gaming (or comics) teasers that is either IMMEDIATELY identifiable or utterly meaningless from person-to-person - no middle ground can exist:




I will say this much: If this is teasing what it appears to be teasing - I had BETTER NOT hear the words "first-person," "cover-based," "online multiplayer-focused" or "sandbox" anywhere NEAR it.

Read more »

Gabe & Tycho Get a Movie

Via THR,

If you were wondering what the next answer to Scott Pilgrim and/or Serenity style pickups - re: small-scale niche movie projects that generate PREPOSTEROUS levels of web hype right out of the gate almost-assuredly setting up unreasonable expectations from the gobsmacked studio - you now have your answer: Paramount is setting up an animated theatrical featured based on "The New Kid," a premise (kid is newly-enrolled as the only earthling in an alien elementry school) originally launched as one of the "New Ideas" spinoffs on Penny Arcade.

So, yeah. Whether they realize it or not - and regardless of the series' main characters not actually being part of it - Paramount has essentially greenlit what The Web will now unavoidably regard as "The Penny Arcade Movie;" instantly rendering every scrap of info about the production of what would otherwise sound like any other high-concept kiddie flick some of the most sought-after nuggets in the geekdom.

If they're smart, someone at Paramount is ALREADY putting together something for Comic-Con, where ANY mention of this will pack a hall, easily.

Read more »

Dragon Tattoo US trailer hits (officially)

Via Slashfilm, the pretty excellent trailer for the film that will unite Foriegn Film snobs and your mom's book club in a shared gnashing of teeth against director David Fincher:




Despite what you may infer from the trailer, this is NOT actually a movie wherein James Bond teams up with one of the Suicide Girls to solve DaVinci's code.

Read more »

"George Lucas Strikes Back"

Yet another jokey, reference-packed fan-film comedy sketch mainly about 30-something film geeks "dealing with" The Prequels and the looming figure of George Lucas? Yawn.

Doing it as a high-concept "Oldboy" spoof? Genius.

Read more »

DC Reboots (Again? Maybe?)

So, if you didn't hear, DC Comics - in-tandem with the current big Flash event "Flashpoint" - will soon be resetting EVERY major character's book back to "#1" with new continuities that will (supposedly) render them slightly younger, possibly with different races/genders in some cases as well, and with "streamlined" backstories that place their origins in contemporary contexts and do away with the decades of baggage. People are flipping out, I'm not, here's why...


Firstly, this is all kind of old at this point. Yeah, when the "Silver Age Fanboy Regime" (Morrison, Johns, etc) at DC first started in on a "take two" of The Crisis (re: Infinite Crisis/52) it was a lot of fun... but at this point, they've now pulled this "whoa! massive continuity shift!!!" thing SO many times in events and even individual books (see: JMS's Wonder Woman) it's lost all impact for me on a conceptual level.

Secondly, I'm not buying it (in either sense - I can't afford it right now) - the guys running DC right now are in looooooove with ultra-dense Silver Age-style storytelling, it would be NUTS for them to suddenly junk all the work they've done making the DCU more hardcore-fanboy-friendly for this. I've seen a few people theorizing (BAD's Devin Faraci, for one) that this is actually a "stunt" that'll wind up like a DCU version of Onslaught/Heroes Reborn (or "House of M") - i.e. the "rebooted" universe will only be around for a little while, then someone will "realize something is wrong" (possibly Flash, since "Flashpoint" involves ANOTHER alternate-DCU where he never existed apparently) and will escape-back-to/bring-back the "original" universe, leaving the rebooted universe to become a DC version of Marvel's "Ultimate Comics" line. This theory is bouyed by the fact that the whole thing is tied-in to a much more significant event: Releasing all of the "rebooted" lines day-and-date for tablet-viewing downloads - the REAL big gamble of attracting new readers.

Either way, it's the DCU: Don't like the coninuity? Wait a year...

Read more »