In Contention

Category: Daily

  • COMIC-CON: Andrew Garfield’s touching ode to Spidey

    Just a few Comic-Con clean-up odds and ends before I officially bid this year’s convention farewell, starting with this. I missed the Sony panel Friday but this nugget was clearly the best part of it, from what I can tell.

  • ‘Moneyball’ poster

    I’m still in a bit of wait-and-see mode on “Moneyball.” It could be an awards play, it could just be a bit of bankability in the fall movie season, but I do dig the one-sheet that hit the net this week. The trailer hit last month. Check out the full poster after the jump.

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  • COMIC-CON: Francis Ford Coppola takes Best in Show

    My Comic-Con coverage came to a close this morning with Francis Ford Coppola’s first appearance here in 19 years, and a glimpse of his latest film, “Twixt.” There’s still the “Cowboys & Aliens” screening tonight, but reviews will be embargoed, so my big send-off is the master himself. And what a send-off it was.

    “Twixt” is film chock-full of genre trappings starring Val Kilmer as Hall Baltimore, a genre writer working on a new premise based on a grisly discovery in a seedy town, where he’s holed up for a book signing. Edgar Allan Poe shows up. In a dream. Like Virgil to Baltimore’s Dante. (And based on an actual dream Coppola had.)

    There are vampires. A seven-sided clock tower tells seven different times. 3D is employed here and there, but not for the whole film. (We wore Edgar Allan Poe masks outfitted with 3D lenses.) Elle Fanning is a pasty living-dead pixie. Bruce Dern is creepy. But let’s get into why this is the best Comic-Con panel I’ve ever seen.

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  • COMIC-CON: Refn’s ‘Drive’ is a bullet of vision

    I’ve had to sit on my feelings on Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Drive,” which had a special screening here Thursday night, because I haven’t found a window to write about it. That’s either good or bad, I don’t know, because the film has just continued to grow in my mind, but I don’t want to over-inflate expectations.

    In so many words, though, I think Refn is the most exciting filmmaker working today. And I haven’t even seen “Valhalla Rising” or his “Pusher” trilogy yet, but just to go by “Bronson” (a personal top 10er in 2009) and his latest, I feel an invigorating injection of originality in the cinema landscape.

    Guy reviewed and enthused about “Drive” at Cannes, so you’ve already digested one thorough assessment here (and one we share completely). So allow me to be a bit more abstract in my thoughts. I’ll just rattle them off as they come to me.

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  • COMIC-CON: Paramount brings Spielberg, Jackson and a taste of ‘Tintin’

    Before I ducked out of town for the day yesterday, I hit up Paramount Pictures’ panel for Steven Spielberg’s “The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn.” The Beard was on hand to discuss the film (and pick up this year’s Inkpot Award), and a surprise appearance by Peter Jackson got the crowd buttered up nicely for the footage.

    So let’s start with that. We were first shown test footage from six years ago featuring Jackson as Captain Haddock and an animated Snowy. This was back when Spielberg was still trying to decide what the best filmmaking technique on the film would be. After that, it was a collage of scenes from the film (which Spielberg noted represented some of the earliest renderings out of Weta).

    My immediate reaction was that the film is Spielberg through and through. In other words, it has the energy, the cinematic thumbprint of a Spielberg film, the in-scene pacing and editorial signature of so much of his work. I wasn’t fully expecting that, but the truth is, they wanted a system of performance capture that would allow the director to be right in the middle of things.

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  • Spinning

    Apologies for the black-out yesterday. After the Paramount panel (which I covered on Twitter, FYI), I had to jet back to LA for the Soundgarden show (easily the best concert experience I’ve had — unbelievable). But I’m going to try and write on the ride back down to San Diego this morning. For now, I’ll leave you with this shot of “Cowboys & Aliens” director Jon Favreau and Faizon Love from Thursday night’s JoBlo/Latino Review party to keep you company. More soon.

  • Tell us what you thought of ‘Captain America: The First Avenger’

    You all know I’m way in the plus column on Joe Johnston’s “Captain America: The First Avenger.” The film hit theaters nationwide yesterday. We’d love to hear your thoughts, so head on back here with them once you get around to it this weekend.

  • Clint Mansell scoring ‘The Iron Lady’

    I’ll level with you, folks: there are a lot of prestige titles coming out in late 2011 that I’m itching to see, and “The Iron Lady” isn’t one of them. Putting to one side concerns about Phyllida Lloyd’s filmmaking prowess — I thought her ill at ease with the medium in “Mamma Mia!”, but she’s an accomplished theater director and everyone deserves a second chance — Margaret Thatcher’s story requires ambiguity and incisiveness in the telling (and playing) to avoid predictable rhetoric, and the margin for error is a fine one.

    That teaser trailer released a few weeks ago wasn’t terribly illuminating: the writing is jokey, while the flash of Meryl Streep’s performance hints at “Julie & Julia”-scale broadness, but it’s altogether too brief and context-free to offer a sense of the film’s overall tone.

    Indeed, the most intriguing thing about the trailer is the unexpected use of Clint Mansell’s brooding “Moon” score as accompaniment — and as it turns out, there was more to that particular choice than initially met the eye. A reliable first-hand source informs me that Mansell is on board to score the actual film, which adds some lustre to a respectable but slightly unsexy list of below-the-line contributors.

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  • ‘Drive’ red-band trailer

    As you can see from the previous post, Kris is every bit as punch-drunk on Nicolas Winding Refn’s electric throwback thriller “Drive” as I was at Cannes — read my review here — where it deservedly won the Best Director prize. It stands as my favourite narrative feature of the year so far; the rest of 2011 would have to be nothing short of miraculous to dislodge it from my year-end Top 10. Anyway, on the heels of last night’s Comic-Con screening comes a neatly assembled red-band trailer via IGN — and as sleek, smart and propulsive a taster as it is, it still can’t quite capture what a rush the film is. I’d almost recommend saving yourself for the full movie, but who am I kidding? Click on the image to watch it at IGN, or check out the embed after the cut.

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  • “You don’t want to be trapped inside with me, sunshine.”

    So I was sitting down for a casual interview with Nicolas Winding Refn this evening, after seeing his ABSOLUTELY AMAZING OMFG FILM “Drive” at a special screening. Guy Pearce walks up with Tom Hardy in tow, so I couldn’t pass up the photo op. As you know, “Bronson” was comfortably one of my top 10 films of 2009. And I managed to not utter the words “Dark,” “Knight” or “Rises” while chatting briefly with the classy and ultra cool Hardy. I hope these two work together again soon.

  • COMIC-CON: Live, via satellite, Ridley Scott!

    So Fox’s big reveal Thursday was footage of and chatter about “Prometheus,” Ridley Scott’s (hopefully) triumphant return to the science-fiction genre.

    Out of the gate, moderator Damon Lindelof asked Scott (who was checking in via satellite from Iceland) why it’s been so long since he saddled back up to “the genre he redefined,” as the marketing material notes triumphantly. Said Scott, “I was too busy doing other movies and exploring other genres. I honestly never thought about science-fiction until there was something of the first ‘Alien’ that no one ever asked a question about. No exploration of that one big question.”

    Surely he’s talking about the Space Jockey of the first film, but nevertheless, everyone’s playing coy about the “Alien” connection. Scott said the new film has the DNA of the original film, but that they go off in another direction. Nevertheless, he hinted that by the end of “Prometheus,” you’ll understand the connection.

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  • COMIC-CON: Fox brings ‘Apes’ and Andrew Niccol’s new vision of the future

    After all the “Twilight: Breaking Dawn” riff-raff cleared the drain this morning (sorry), I finally made it to Hall H in the afternoon, for 20th Century Fox’s panel. The slate of films previewed included Ridley Scott’s “Prometheus,” Andrew Niccol’s “In Time” and Rupert Wyatt’s “Rise of the Planet of the Apes.”

    I figure I’ll start with the latter, since it’s fresh on the brain. This is actually a film I haven’t been able to really take seriously for quite some time. I have a blind spot for it and just have kind of ignored it (while admitting that the effects stuff we’ve seen is impressive).

    Well, after seeing two clips and a sizzle reel of the third act action sequences, I’m not only sold on seeing it, but I think it could actually be something great. Not to be all breathless. Maybe my expectations are so low that any favorable morsel would have been delicious, but I’m stoked for story elements now, not just technical aspects.

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  • COMIC-CON: Rick Baker, a fan like the rest

    My first panel of this year’s convention was a delightful focus on makeup artist Rick Baker, who is coming off his seventh Oscar win for last year’s “The Wolfman.” He drew a nice crowd of die-hards at the Hilton Bayfront’s Indigo Ballroom, which let out a massive cheer when moderator Geoff Boucher of Hero Complex quipped, “Congratulations for not being at the ‘Twilight’ panel.”

    Ostensibly Baker was on hand as a bit of early buzz-stirring for Sony’s “Men in Black III,” and we got some great glimpses of the makeup work on the film. Baker said he was “so glad” to get the call from Barry Sonnenfeld, but when it came to expanding on the work he’s already done on the series, it took some thinking.

    “Everyone always says, ‘We want to see aliens like we’ve never seen before,’” he said. “But it’s a little hard now. Back when I did the ‘Star Wars’ Cantina scene, it was a lot different.”

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  • Greece and Poland first to enter foreign Oscar race

    The Oscar race for Best Foreign Language Film — or, to use its formal title, Most Inoffensively Socially Conscious Non-English-Language Feature To Pass Through The Academy’s Narrow Qualifying Hoops Whilst Remaining Sufficiently Low-Profile For Voters To Feel Like They Discovered It For Themselves — is truly the gift that gives all year round.

    Scarcely have the previous year’s nominees finally trickled out to US theaters, to a chorus of polite indifference, than countries begin formally submitting their chosen contenders for the next year’s award — and the baseless speculation and generally befuddled head-scratching begins anew. In the past few weeks, Greece and Poland have become the first countries to enter the race ahead of the Academy’s October 1 deadline — and while such early birds are rarely heard from again in the game, these two films (both from female directors, and one of which I’ve seen) are rather higher on the radar.

    Poland, in particular, appears to have intensively focus-grouped the Academy’s foreign-language branch and subsequently created their Oscar entry in a purpose-built lab: Agnieszka Holland’s “In Darkness” is a true-life Holocaust drama about a Leopold Socha, a reformed petty criminal who heroically helped numerous Jewish refugees hide in the sewers of Nazi-occupied Lvov.

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  • COMIC-CON: ‘The Avengers’ teaser poster

    If you’re a diligent get-spoiled-ASAP type, you’ve probably already seen the teaser trailer for “The Avengers” (which plays as a button on the end of “Captain America: The First Avengers”). Marvel may not have a presence here in San Diego this year, but of course they’ll take advantage of the assembled (no pun intended) by dropping a little material from the film. So, the teaser poster will do. Check out the full image after the jump.

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  • Another year, another Con…

    …and a thinner Con, at that.

    There was very little on the convention schedule that grabbed my attention when it was released last week. I’ll be on hand for the Fox panel tomorrow, hoping to get some good vibes from Ridley Scott’s “Prometheus.” I’ll be there for Paramount and Steven Spielberg on Friday when we all get a glimpse of “The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn.” I’ll definitely be on hand for Francis Ford Coppola’s first appearance here on Saturday when he brings a slice of “Twixt,” and, of course, I’ll saddle up to the Entertainment Weekly “Visionaries” panel, this year featuring Jon Favreau and Guillermo Del Toro.

    Speaking of Del Toro, I’m intrigued by “Pacific Rim” enough to poke into the Legendary Pictures panel (which won’t be in Hall H, interestingly enough). I also feel the need to check out the “Beavis and Butt-Head” event (as the terrible twosome will be back on MTV later this year and I am, I must confess, a die-hard). Maybe I’ll make it to Relativity’s “Immortals” event, maybe I’ll head to the Hilton Bayfront tomorrow morning for a focus on makeup artist Rick Baker, but I’ve literally just given you my role call of interests this year, easily half the amount of events on my list in years past.

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  • ‘The Amazing Spider-Man’ trailer

    One more treat before I head down the coast: the trailer for Marc Webb’s “The Amazing Spider-Man.” I’d like to be excited for this, but even with the tonal shift to the incredibly sincere, the whole enterprise just feels so painfully redundant. That’s what happens when you leach on to a proven property so you don’t lose the rights, I guess. I do dig the POV stuff at the end, though. Sony’s fourth stab at the character hits next summer. The panel is Friday (I’ll miss it — no big loss). So I imagine you’ll all be hearing more about this one in the coming days. Check out the full trailer via Yahoo! Movies after the jump.

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  • ‘Captain America’ keeps the summer sizzling

    So, “Captain America: The First Avenger” wraps up the summer’s superhero slate this week. Yes, we have “Cowboys & Aliens” on the way to keep the general comic book flow going, but Marvel’s other bookend to the summer hits Friday, and, well, I thought it was just (yankee doodle) dandy.

    “Robust” is the word that kept coming to mind while watching the film. You get a lot of bang for your buck here, with action set pieces galore, beefy production values (which might as well include Chris Evans’s physique) and a generous splash of pulp 40s fun to keep it unique throughout.

    I always thought Joe Johnston was the most interesting choice of Marvel’s stable of directors leading up to “The Avengers” next summer. He’s kept an even genre keel all of his career and “The Rocketeer” (20 years old and getting the anniversary treatment soon) is probably the nostalgia hook that really cinched it as a nice call.

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