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  • COMIC-CON: Acker, Bekmambetov and Burton showcase ‘9’

    9Focus Features rolled out an extended clip of Shane Acker’s “9” a few moments ago to adulating fans who seemed more eager to ask producer Tim Burton a slew of peripheral questions and offer the usual “you’re an inspiration” sentiments to the macabre-obsessed director.  So it goes at Comic-Con.

    But on the issue at hand, Burton offered that he connected to Acker’s original short film (which was nominated for an Academy Award in 2005) immediately.

    “You see a lot of personal films, but you don’t see a lot of personal films that are animated,” he said in the post-screening panel discussion.  “I’ve been through it before, endless conversations with studios, ‘Why can’t Jack Skellington have eyes?’  I thought I could at least help fight those battles so he could concentrate on the film.  You’ve got enough to worry about making the film to have those kind of stupid conversations.”

    Acker, who chimed in there to mention how supportive Focus, which he calls a “director-driven” studio, has been on the project, said he didn’t originally conceive the story as a feature film.  It was more of a director’s reel piece meant to secure other work for him as a filmmaker.  But when Burton (and co-producer Timur Bekmambetov) took an interest and the project began to unfold as as a feature, he fell in love with the story all over again.

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  • Warm notices for Streep in ‘Julie & Julia’

    Meryl Streep in Julie & JuliaEven before anyone had laid eyes on Nora Ephron’s “Julie & Julia,” I felt fairly confident in predicting the critical response: nice, unremarkable film dominated by a broadly entertaining, larger-than-life turn from Meryl Streep.

    And so it has come to pass. The trade papers are united in their lukewarm feelings on the film itself, while Streep comes in for the expected praise for a showy star turn a showy star role. (Meanwhile, poor Amy Adams gets predictably, if charitably, sidelined, despite her joint billing.)

    Variety’s Justin Chang is harshest on the film, calling it “overstuffed and predigested … a slick, presumptuous vanity project,” but has nothing but kind words for Streep’s “delightfully daffy” performance:

    Doing her formidable best to counteract (the film’s) drawbacks is Streep, whose 5-foot-6 frame makes her an imperfect physical match for the 6-foot-2 Julia, but who proves more than up to the challenge of tackling this beloved celebrity’s equally outsized personality. Delivering an elegant approximation of the woman’s distinctly flutelike vocal pitch and endearing mannerisms, Streep abundantly conveys the warmth, rich humor and joie de vivre so evident in Julia’s TV appearances and her writing.

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  • Gary Oldman at Comic-Con: The next Batman film starts shooting next year

    “But you didn’t hear it from me,” he told the crowd during the Warner Bros. “Book of Eli” panel. It’ll be for a 2011 release.

    The convention center’s roof will land somewhere in La Jolla later this afternoon. Christopher Nolan is fuming somewhere.

  • ‘Jonah Hex’ poster

    I Tweeted a far-away shot of the new “Jonah Hex” poster from the exhibition hall yesterday, but luckily there’s a better image floating around the net now.  I kind of dig it:

    Jonah Hex

  • COMIC-CON: Peter Jackson and Neil Blomkamp unveil ‘District 9’ to eager first audience

    Sharlto Copley in District 9Last night Peter Jackson showed up at the Horton Plaza United Artists theater a few blocks north of the convention center with protege Neill Blomkamp and actor Sharlto Copley in tow.  The occasion: the first ever screening of Blomkamp’s “District 9,” a sci-fi installment that finds itself in the midst of a heavy “what the heck is it?” campaign right now that hopes to drum up anticipation for the August 14 release (and will no doubt see a spike in that once the web press finds time to sit at their laptops and hammer out reactions).

    I didn’t really know what to expect.  I haven’t follwed the viral on this to the letter like so many and I really just thought it would be a nifty diversion during the Con if nothing else.  But it was so much more.  The film, which I won’t even discuss plot-wise, isn’t a watershed moment for sci-fi cinema by any means, so don’t let me over state.

    What it is, however, is a dedicated, small piece of character-driven genre, much like Duncan Jones’s “Moon” in that way, that was smartly nurtured by Jackson.  It also has plenty of seat-leaping action moments to go around, but at it’s heart, it is a near one-man show from actor Sharlto Copley, a fresh young talent who, quite frankly, stunned the hell out of me with his control of a character that is quite complicated in some ways.

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  • EW’s Wonder Women panel at the Con

    I was bummed I had to miss yesterday’s Entertainment Weekly-sponsored women’s showcase here at Comic-Con, but luckily the mag has video snippets available for viewing now.  No embed feature, though, which is unfortuate, but go give them a look anyway.  Panelists included Sigourney Weaver, Zoe Saldana, Elizabeth Mitchell and Eliza Dushku.

  • New ‘Tron’ lightcycle at viral Comic-Con event

    I covered yesterday’s “Tron: Legacy” panel with as much diligence as I could summon, but the fact remains I’ve never seen the original film and don’t consider myself part of the flock on this one.  That said, there was an intriguing viral event last night that plenty of the web press attended.  Devin Faraci from CHUD snapped this shot of the new lightcycle for the film, and the pic is so gorgeous in its composition and lighting that I just had to pass it along:

    Lightcycle from Tron: Legacy

  • ‘American Graffiti’ — why it still resonates, 36 years later

    American GraffitiGeorge Lucas grew up in a small town, Modesto, California, where on Friday nights the guys hopped in their freshly washed and waxed cars and cruised the streets, rock and roll blaring out of the rolled down windows. Everyone knew each other so the streets were alive as though one big party were happening.

    Lucas, with William Huyck and Gloria Katz, would later write the screenplay for “American Graffitti,” a remarkable little film set in 1962 and a small town in California on the last night of summer before school begins. Loosely based on experiences Lucas had as a teenager, the film would become a touchstone for a generation, having an impact on pop culture no one expected. For the generations after the 1970s that have seen the film, it has the same curious effect, and without sounding self-important or condescending, that impact will grow as they, and we, continue to age.

    Why?  We knew people like this.  We were people like this.

    The film is familiar for almost anyone who ever went to high school, perhaps more so to small town natives. We all knew the town tough guy who hung around with the high school kids long after he had left school because he needs the adoration they give him. There was the class geek: glasses-wearing, short, trying a little too hard to please, but likable just the same.

    The class jock, who would also be the class president dating the head of the cheerleader sqaud, and the intellectual, who could not wait to get out of the town and see what the world held for him. All of us, sometime in our lives at school, knew people like this, perhaps even were people like this.

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  • More images from ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’

    Wes Anderson on the set of Fantastic Mr. FoxOver at USA Today, Susan Wloszczyna has an exclusive first look at nine new images from Wes Anderson’s “The Fantastic Mr. Fox,” plus some insight into the film’s screenplay:

    The much-expanded plot has been tweaked to include many elements found in Anderson’s other films, including a dysfunctional clan and a male rivalry. The four Fox children in the book have been whittled down to one handful: Ash (Jason Schwartzman, channeling his Max character from Rushmore), a petulant social misfit who wears a superhero cape and resents his cousin Kristofferson (Eric Chase Anderson, Wes’ brother) for being good at everything.

    Schwartzman, a veteran of three Anderson features, proclaims Mr. Fox as “the ultimate.” “It’s funny, but also visually beautiful. Instead of adapting his style of directing to animation, he brought animation to him. He made a Wes film.”

    That last bit isn’t exactly a selling point for a guy like me.

  • Greatest ‘Twilight’ photo ever

    Blade sees red

    (Courtesy: The Movie Blog)

  • 7/24 Web Round-up

    Audrey Tautou in Coco Before Chanel• Sam Toy reports from the set of “Coco Before Chanel.” [Empire]

    • Evan Davis on the cinema of Nicolas Ray. [The Auteurs’ Notebook]

    • Peter Sciretta (who I finally ran into yesterday) video blogs “Avatar” footage reactions with his crew (which is hitting the pavement hard at the Con). [/Film]

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  • ‘Antichrist’ lands in the UK

    Charlotte Gainsbourg in AntichristThe Yanks have to wait until October, but it’s “‘Antichrist’ Day” here in Britain. (Hey, it might not be as popular as “‘Avatar’ Day,” but I like the ring of it.) I’m not going to dwell too heavily on the critical reception in today’s papers — you’ve got the gist by now that it’s a polarizing picture, and true to form, the reviews are split right down the middle.

    (I’m more interested to see what the weekend box-office figures are like, given that the film has been rather adventurously programmed at a few mainstream multiplexes as well as the obvious arthouse venues.)

    Of the credible broadsheets, The Times and the Telegraph are firmly in the “yes” camp (calling it “a fantastically painful mirror” and “a film soaked in the grief of its subjects,” respectively), while the Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw and the Independent‘s Anthony Quinn remain unconvinced. (“The great artist imposes shape, pattern, order,” scolds Quinn. “The mediocre artist just throws stuff at the wall and hopes audiences will gasp.”)

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  • The films you’re supposed to love, but don’t

    Gene Kelly in Singin' in the RainBound to raise many a film buff’s hackles, The Guardian carries an entertaining piece today by novelist Tim Lott on the subject of “the worst best films ever made” — in other words, the roundly lauded and canonized classics that routine appear on “all-time greatest” lists but, well, simply aren’t all that.

    It’s a wholly subjective issue, of course, and Lott is unashamedly provocative (if overly glib) in tackling it, taking down some seriously big targets along the way. Films in the firing line include “The Searchers” (which he accuses of both racism and “rude mechanicals”), “Les Enfants du Paradis” (“dated, overlong and absurdly wordy”), “On the Waterfront” (“a masterclass in ham acting”) and “Death in Venice” (“a colossal piece of soft-focus masturbation”).

    I disagree on most counts, but now and then his venom strikes a chord of with me. I wouldn’t go as far as he does in calling “La Dolce Vita” a “turgid, lazy mess of half-realised conceits,” but I agree that it’s not a film that has aged particularly well; compared to the still-pristine “8½,” its experiments in anti-narrative look idle and incomplete. And I’m glad someone else has the courage to say that subsequent decades of radical reinvention in the field of the movie musical make “Singin’ in the Rain” look like a very ordinary achievement indeed. (I’ll just come out and say it: I can’t stand Gene Kelly.)

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  • Solid sci-fi rears its head yet again in 2009

    I’ve got to eat before I pass out, but a quick iPhone post is quite necessary in the wake of “District 9,” an amazing effort that sits alongside Duncan Jones’s “Moon,” J.J. Abrams’s “Star Trek” and, hopefully (though today’s footage was a great start) James Cameron’s “Avatar” as part of a damn fine year for sci-fi cinema. And truly, a star is born in the film’s brilliant young fresh-out-of-the-gate lead actor.

    More later. Food now.

  • COMIC-CON: James Cameron unveils impressive ‘Avatar’ footage

    AvatarJames Cameron made his long-awaited trip to San Diego this afternoon for the world premiere of 25 minutes of footage from his upcoming film “Avatar,” and the reaction was as enthused as it could have been.  A scene-by-scene description is probably the best way to go about this, so first that, then quotes from the post-screening discussion.

    If you’d prefer to stay pure on this film and would rather skip the scene descriptions, go ahead and scroll down to the quotes section, indicated in bold below.  Also, for those hungry for any and all info, before I dig into the specifics of the presentation, you should really read through Cameron’s E3 address to get an idea of the film’s plot, or else you’ll be quite lost.

    Seven sequences were unveiled, beginning with a “Full Metal Jacket”-like military briefing with actor Stephan Lang front-and-center.  The scene also introduces us to the central character in the film, Jake Sully, a crippled former military officer himself with an eye toward the cosmos and the planet Pandora.

    The next scene reveals the avatars, genetic bio-suits constructed from the DNA of the Na’vi, tall, blue-skinned warrior natives of Pandora.  Floating in a tank of fluid, being prepped for integration with human consciousnesses, the imagery is quite beautiful in this scene, the avatars in a docile, tranquil state, Sully peering at them, recognizing in them the chance to walk, however virtually, once again.

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  • James Cameron says circle your calendars, August 21 is “‘Avatar’ Day”

    I’ll get to my reaction to the 25 minutes of absolutely mind-blowing “Avatar” Comic-Con footage in a few minutes, but for now, it’s worth announcing that James Cameron dropped a bit of news at today’s big Fox panel for the film.  If you weren’t able to be in Comic-Con for the big unveiling, you won’t have to wait until December to get a glimpse of the film:

    We’re going to do something unprecedented.  It’s a social marketing experiment.  We’re going to take over as many IMAX 3D theaters and other select 3D theaters worldwide on August 21 and we’re going to let an international global audience come see 15 minutes of “Avatar” for free.  It’s going to be “Avatar” day.

    There you have it.  Circle your calendars.

  • ‘New Moon’ press conference at the Con

    The Twilight Saga: New MoonI skipped out on this morning’s “New Moon” press conference, despite the inevitable traffic spike attending would have given us.  Those bird’s-eye view photos of the masses, however, have been passed around over and over and over again just a few hours later.  Kinda crazy.

    Anyway, Jeff Wells, attending his first Comic-Con (which is its own delightful sit-com waiting to happen), was on hand and took the video below, but his matter-of-fact dismantling of the film’s stars and their attitude at the presser that is worth passing along:

    This morning’s New Moon/Comic-Con press conference began at 9:54 am — almost a half-hour late — inside a super-sized meeting hall within San Diego’s Bayfront Hilton. The film’s three stars — Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner — posed for photos and took questions from a throng of about 75 or 80 journalists…Lautner is clearly the most ambitiously press-friendly among the three. While Stewart and Pattinson did their usual usual — i.e., giving answers that suggested they’re a lot more complex and aloof and thoughtful than their participation in movies based on the Twilight series might suggest. It’s the age-old “I’ll do this but only if I can answer questions like Marlon Brando” routine. But Lautner, who has a bee-stung Beagle Boy nose , exhibited the personality of a publicist or a glad-hander. He clearly enjoys smiling and wants everyone to like him. He could be the next Regis Philbin if he wanted to go there.

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  • COMIC-CON: Disney showcases ‘Carol,’ ‘Alice,’ ‘Tron’

    (from left) Patton Oswalt and Tim Burton at the 2009 San Diego Comic-Con InternationalThe first opening day studio panel has just concluded as Walt Disney Pictures brought Robert Zemeckis (“A Christmas Carol”), Tim Burton (“Alice in Wonderland”) and the “Tron: Legacy” principals to Hall H for a hefty three-dimensional dose.

    The “Christmas Carol” footage, which was an extended version of the Marley’s ghost sequence Disney has been showing for a few months, seemed to leave the audience dizzy with glee.

    Patton Oswalt sat down with Zemeckis before the unveiling for a brief Q&A, leading by questioning the director’s reason for tackling the Charles Dickens classic after so many incarnations have already been filmed.

    “If you read the actual novel, it’s very, very trippy,” Zemeckis said.  “It’s very surreal and it’s really cool, and it’s very cinematic.  I think we now have the filmmaking tools to film what Dickens wrote.”

    Oswalt addressed the issue of “dead eyes” in the performance capture technique and a term applied to the uneasy visceral feeling it summons: “the uncanny valley.”

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