Just in time for its World Premiere at the New York Film Festival this Friday, a new and more sweeping trailer for Ang Lee's Life of Pi has hit the web, setting up the 3-D adventure based on the 2001 novel by Yann Martel. The fantasy-adventure follows "Pi," an Indian boy who survives a shipwreck and is stranded on a boat in the ocean with a Bengal tiger along with some other charming critters.
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Break open the bubbly! Alfred Hitchcock's newly restored silent comedy, Champagne will get be streamed live and exclusively on the visual arts website The Space on Thursday at 7:30 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time (or 3:30 p.m. Eastern time). Champagne (1928) was Hitch's eighth film as director and tells the story of a playgirl (Betty Balfour) living off the profits of her father's champagne business, and her father's plan to get rid of her fiance, who he suspects is a gold-digger. Father knows best! more »
Do you hear the people sing? Actually, they're not just people, they're ac-tors! I'm talking Hugh Jackman, Anne Hathaway, Amanda Seyfried and Eddie Redmayne, the cast of Oscar winner Tom Hooper's poverty-never-looked-so-expensive film adaptation of Les Miserables. Each can be heard performing in this extended clip about Hooper's novel approach to making of the movie musical that's based on Victor Hugo's classic novel about French politics and revolution. Russell Crowe, who plays Inspector Javert and once sang for the much-mocked band 30 Odd Foot of Grunts, is also in the clip, although he doesn't show off his pipes. more »
If you don't have a whiny, teenaged kid, then watch this latest trailer for Taken 2. Although Maggie Grace, as Kim, is ostensibly playing a woman in her 20s, she's behaving just like a 15-year-old! Even under life or death circumstances, adolescents can behave as if they are stuck in their own little personal pool of molasses, and it's up to Dad — or Mom — to gnash some teeth, raise the voice and light a fire under the kid's reluctant ass. more »
"Home is now behind you. The World Is Ahead," Ian McKellen, as Gandalf, says in voiceover in this latest official trailer from Peter Jackson's first installment of The Hobbit trilogy, which is subtitled, An Unexpected Journey. The movie is set for release on Dec. 14, and the trailer offers glimpses of Martin Freeman as Bilbo Baggins, McKellen as Gandalf, a CGI-assisted Andy Serkis as Gollum, Cate Blanchett as Galadriel and Hugo Weaving as Elrond. more »
Just in time for its World Premiere at Fantastic Fest Wednesday night, Disney unleashed a nearly four-minute featurette complete with footage galore from Tim Burton's Frankenweenie. "It's based on my relationship I had when I was a child with my dog," Burton notes in the EPK, available below. "It's probably your first big relationship in your life." Burton first conceived of the idea of Frankenweenie as a full-length, stop-motion animated feature, but due to that ever-present challenge of budget, he instead made a live-action short which was released back in 1984. But now Burton's full-length vision is finally set to hit the big screen.
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Fittingly, Richard Gere's new Wall Street thriller Arbitrage had a screening this week hosted by The Wall Street Journal, Brioni, and high-end jeweler Piaget.
But the Peggy Siegal Company fete was hardly a frivolous bacchanal. Gere and his fellow stars Susan Sarandon and Brit Marling wondered out-loud why more investment bankers weren't in jail, and writer/director Nicholas Jarecki noted his goal was to turn a "paper crime into a blood crime".
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Hermione who? Emma Watson has cast off her Hogwarts uniform and good girl image to play the broken Sam in Stephen Chbosky's adaptation of his own novel, The Perks of Being a Wallflower.
Last night The Cinema Society, along with Lancome and Nylon, hosted a special screening of the teen flick at the hip Crosby Street Hotel in Soho - just the kind of event the quirky characters in the film would have loved to attend!
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Animation icon Ralph Bakshi (Fritz the Cat, Coonskin, Wizards, Cool World) has never been afraid to push the envelope, and boy does he in Trickle Dickle Down, a new political short introducing his recently announced Bakshi Blues project. An announcement for the series declares, in no uncertain terms, "THERE IS NOWHERE FOR ANYONE TO HIDE." And how. Watch as Trickle Dickle Down takes aim at Mitt Romney with Bakshi's explosive take on trickle-down economics.
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May-December romances "can be creepy" says Richard Jenkins, who's part of the cast of Josh Radnor's Liberal Arts, a movie about what might more appropriately might be termed a May-October romance on a college campus. In this particular case, Jenkins adds, "it isn't." The carefully groomed Radnor, who you may recognize from the TV sitcom How I Met Your Mother plays a guy in his 30s who goes back to his alma mater — the movie is set at Kenyon College in Ohio which Radnor actually attended — for a professor's retirement party and ends up falling for a much younger student there played by Elizabeth Olsen. more »
Steven Spielberg debuted the trailer to Lincoln, his highly anticipated film about the 16th U.S. President at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, but the experience was less-than-mesmerizing. That's because the webcast was initially plagued with glitches that left some viewers with nothing more than a "buffering" notice or moments when the trailer seemed to fade in and out of blackness. The Google + Hangout session with the filmmaker and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who stars as Lincoln's son Robert Todd Lincoln, was also bedeviled by sound problems that turned the question-and-answer session into an annoying echo chamber. If you didn't — or couldn't — see the trailer during its premiere, check it out after the jump, along with the first images from Spielberg's '12 Oscar contender. more »
Lionsgate is doing its damnedest to make "Lethal Geezers" into a film genre. Yahoo! just posted the trailer to Stand Up Guys, which the studio will release on Jan. 11, 2013. The Fisher Stevens-directed film stars Al Pacino as Val, a gangster of a certain age who's released from prison and reunites with his former partners in crime, Doc (Christopher Walken) and Hirsch (Alan Arkin). Judging from the trailer, the men reminisce, take their hypertension meds and make up for lost crime while Walken struggles with an order from on high to cap his friend. Hoo-ah! more »
Smashed has been built up as Mary Elizabeth Winstead's career-maker — a character-driven piece about an alcoholic woman entering AA — although time will tell if the addiction dramedy has the mojo to muscle in on the awards race with folks like Marion Cotillard and Jennifer Lawrence hogging all the buzz with their respective festival hits. But take a look at the first Smashed trailer and four additional clips, co-starring Aaron Paul, Octavia Spencer, Megan Mullally, and Nick Offerman (courtesy of Sony Classics) and get to early prognosticating on Winstead's chances.
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Ahead of Thursday's trailer premiere, Steven Spielberg and Co. have released a first-look teaser for Lincoln, starring Daniel Day-Lewis as the 16th President of the United States. Get a taste of what Spielberg has in store with this somber (but stirring!) bit of footage from the film.
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With one last action-packed trailer, Summit continues its final marketing push to bring the $2 billion Twilight Saga down the home stretch. What's nice about this full two-minute trailer is it actually builds tension, at least, moreso than the abridged looks we've had this week. And while it lays down more of a foundation for the final epic throwdown between good vampires and not-so-good vampires that wraps up the series, we also get the tiniest explanation of the "immortal child" hullabaloo at the center of Breaking Dawn.
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