You're Getting a "Justice League" Movie After All... Kinda.

Folks who're still hoping to see the Justice League on the big screen are, at this juncture, pining their hopes on a pair of miracles: Firstly, that the quintessentially Oscar/Felix team-up of Zack Snyder and Christopher Nolan yields a great film in "Man of Steel" (FWIW, people inside Warner Bros and various licensing-business sources have seen the film, and the current buzz is exceedingly positive - take that as you will) and that somehow Warner Bros then suddenly figures out how to also not screw-up new incarnations of Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash, etc.

So... keep hoping, but don't keep expecting, basically.

Meanwhile, every WB department other than feature-films continues to make the "getting shit done" part of this look easy. To wit, someone got the bright idea to mix the fifty-something minutes of cutscene footage from "Lego Batman 2" with something like 15-20 minutes of new footage and release it on DVD as a movie. Well... better than nothing, right?

Read more »

Rob Zombie As The Soundtrack For A Disney Trailer. Rob Zombie. As The Soundtrack. For A DISNEY TRAILER.

"Cars" sucks. Yes, I think there's more than a little merit to the notion that "movie people" who usually fall right in line behind Pixar wrote the film off early on because it was "tainted" by connection to the Nascar culture (and wasn't interested in taking the piss out of the sport and - more specifically - it's fanbase like "Talladega Nights") ...but "Cars" still sucks all the same. "Cars 2" sucks a lot less, but only by virtue of dropping the first film's pretense toward Pixar-level meaningfulness and instead wallowing in the cheap slapstick and groaner car-puns that are it's true nature.

Either way, it's all academic because the "Cars" brand is a moneymaking machine for Disney's toy licensing department; so we're getting spinoffs. The first of these is "Planes" - still canonically-tied to the "Cars" universe* but actually being made by regular-ol' Disney Animation. The trailer slipped out a month ago, but is back in the news now that instant-has-been Dane Cook has joined the voice cast:



*I like to imagine that "Cars World" is either pre-historic Cybertron or an alternate-timeline sequel to "Wall*E" where it didn't work out for humanity and these are Wall*E and Eve's descendants.

Read more »

"Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs 2"

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. YES.

The original "Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs" is one of the great overlooked comedies of the 21st Century: An absolutely hillarious scifi/comedy in the mold of "Ghostbusters" that just happens to be animated. The sequel has been similarly flying under the radar, but now there's a trailer (yes, it's a shitty Yahoo embed, sorry.)



Yup, looking good. My one concern would be that it looks like they've basically re-upped and expanded the finale of the first film into an entire movie, but the trailers for the original gave ZERO indication as to how brilliant the actual movie was so we'll see. Even if it doesn't quite measure up, the visual imagination on display in just the design of the food-creatures alone looks worth it.

Read more »

Big Picture: "Continuity Wars"

Abrams-era "Star Wars" is probably deleting/ignoring the Expanded Universe. Should it? Should you care?

The Escapist : The Big Picture : Continuity Wars

Read more »

RiffTrax Wants Your Help Taking Down "Twilight"

There should be something unseemly about a profession comedy outfit Kickstarting a part of their next "bit," but despite their relative fame and legacies RiffTrax is actually a pretty small operation that generally does right by their fanbase; so I'm okay with this.

Anyway, here's the skinny: RiffTrax wants to make their next big theatrical simulcast event a live-riffing of "Twilight;" but since securing the rights just to live-broadcast (to say nothing of make fun of) a recent, major motion picture is a lot more expensive than, say, "Plan 9 From Outer Space," they've set up a KickStarter to get them to what is presumed to be Summit Entertainment's price (FWIW, it looks like they already exceeded the goal, but I could be reading that wrong.)

To my way of thinking, Summit would be crazy not to do this. "Twilight" was never going to be evergreen - it's shelf-life is exactly how long it takes a majority it's original fanbase of teenage girls to become cynical and jaded about romance (so, after dating maybe one or two actual teenage boys, really) - and if they're going to keep making money of these films they need them to become ironically-beloved touchstones of "what were we thinking back then!!??" pop-culture infamy as quickly as possible. The brazen, balletic stupidity of "Breaking Dawn: Part II" was a good first step; hooking up with RiffTrax officially would be a great second.

Read more »

Cautious Optimism

Via ComingSoon

"The Amazing Spider-Man 2" puts me into a profoundly schizophrenic state: It's a movie I absolutely should be looking forward to (Spider-Man vs. Electro and Paul Giamatti as The Rhino? Awesome!) and by all right would sound like something worth getting psyched about - except it's a sequel to "The Amazing Spider-Man," which was fetid dog shit. And since most of the crew guilty of that previous film has come back for this one, well...


Problem is, that in-and-of itself doesn't actually prove anything. It's totally possible that Mark Webb has become a competent director of action, that Andrew Garfield has sat down and found a way to play Peter Parker that doesn't make me want to wring his neck and stab out my own eyes (in no particular order), that the asinine "Peter's Parents" backstory and all the other awful ideas and executions that plagued the first film have been purged from this one and that Rhino and Electro will show up looking an acting awesome (read: "like themselves," because they are both awesome) ...not likely, but possible. So until I start hearing concrete BAD stuff about this one, call me cautiously-optimistic. For now.

Case in point: This is a snap of the "new" costume for the sequel. LOVE the classic comic-style eyepieces. That's something. That's a concrete "like." Let's see the rest of it (and we will, shortly, as the film starts shooting today.)

Read more »

Podcasting. Listen to it.

I joined the Red Shirt Crew for a PODCAST recently, and you can listen to it HERE.

Read more »