If you're a gamer or a J.J. Abrams fan, then you already know that, in addition to the rebooting the Star Warsfranchise, his Bad Robot production studio has teamed up with video game developer Valve to explore movies and games, including adaptations of the latter company's popular Half-Life and Portal titles. The two men revealed they are teaming up at the end of their keynote presentation at the Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain (D.I.C.E.) summit in Las Vegas on Feb. 6. Their conversation is presented in its entirety after the jump and it's worth watching, not so much because of the announcement, which is vague, but because the discussion is a fascinating master class on the differences between storytelling in movies and video games. more »
Who needs Eeyore when you've got the lovely and witty Greta Gerwig feeling blue in black and white in this clip from Noah Baumbach'sFrances Ha. Gerwig is Frances, a live-in-the-moment New Yorker with a knack for getting herself into awkward situations. more »
Part two of Zach Galifianakis' Oscar edition of Between Two Fernsis out, and it manages to top part one. The best line of the segment is when Galifianakis asks Sally Field about the 25 pounds for her role in Lincoln. "How'd you do that, eat Anne Hathaway?" he says. After hearing that, I'll think twice before ever asking another actor about the dramatic weight loss or gain they achieved for a role. more »
Personally, I'd rather see a Monsters, Inc.sequel rather than a prequel. I even have a story in mind: The up-to-no-good WolfsBain Capital does a leveraged buyout of Monsters, Inc., Sulley is fired as CEO, and the new management enlists Mike Wazowski and the rest of the employees to kidnap children and bring them back to Monstropolis so they can be used as cheap labor. Instead, Disney and Pixar have put together a much lighter Monsters-Inc.-meets-Animal-House precursor tale , called Monsters University, that, unlike my idea, might actually sell some tickets. more »
The first thing I thought when I saw this trailer for Rob Zombie'sThe Lords of Salem was, oh good, someone's finally made a movie about what it was like to live on Manhattan's Lower East Side in the late 1980s, before things got all handcrafted and artisanal. The second thing I thought was, this clip appears to have little to do with the synopsis for the movie that accompanied the trailer. more »
Well played, Honest Trailer people. Sam Mendes makes the first James Bond movie that I've ever genuinely cared about, Skyfall, and, with a single four-and-a-half minute trailer you smartly deconstruct the movie in a way that makes me simultaneously laugh out loud and question my sanity. more »
Rooney Mara, Jude Law, Channing Tatum and Catherine Zeta-Jones were all on the red carpet for the premiere of Side Effects in New York City, and I asked them what it was like making a modern Hitchcock film. more »
Can I get a Hoo-Ah? Al Pacino has had a good run playing reviled real-life characters in HBO movies and miniseries, and, based on this trailer for Phil Spector, he's going to keep his streak alive when the movie debuts on March 24. more »
So, how did Roman Coppola come up with the idea for The Secret Society of Ball Busters? I talked to writer and director of A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III at a recent screening of his iconoclastic movie, and he told me that "sometimes when a girl has an intuitive sense about something going on, you wonder where they're getting their information!" more »
New Yorker writer, Lawrence Wright appeared on MSNBC's Morning Joe talk show to discuss his new book, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief, and Tom Cruise quickly became the focus of the conversation. more »
Even if you didn't watch the big game last night, you know that a) Beyonce brought the house — or was it the lights? — down, and b) six big movie trailers aired during the game: Star Trek Into Darkness, Iron Man 3, The Lone Ranger, Oz The Great and Powerful, World War Z and Fast & Furious 6. All were designed to whet the record-setting viewing audience's appetite for these films. Not all of them were successful. Below, I rank the trailers from worst to best in terms of how effective they were at making me want to see the movies they were promoting. more »
Sylvester Stallone doesn't just use his cranium for a battering ram. On the red carpet at Tuesday's premiere of Bullet to the Head, the enduring action star — who wrote his ticket to stardom in 1976 with Rocky— told me that he does keep moviegoers in mind when he approaches a project. "The one thing you have to do is try to be creative with the audience but not be so self-serving," Stallone explained. "In other words, [don't] get too goofy too far out there. Y'know, you try to give them what they want but give them a little twist on it." more »
Holy Nakatomi Plaza! July 15 marks the 25th anniversary of the release of the original Die Hard, a movie that occupies a revered place in my pantheon of smart-ass films. And with the latest sequel, A Good Day to Die Hard, hitting theaters on Feb. 14, Fox has released the Die Hard: 25th Anniversary Collection on Blu-Ray. more »
"I basically replaced Michael Anthony Hall with a zombie" says Warm Bodiesdirector Jonathan Levine by way of explaining that his girl-meet-corpse rom-com has more in common with John Hughes body of work than the Twilight saga.
I was on the red carpet Friday night for the New York premiere — which was hosted by The Cinema Society and Artistry — where I also spoke with star Nicholas Hoult. How did the former Skins star perfect his zombie run? Hours on the treadmill! In fact, when friends stopped by his flat — Hoult is British — he says they took one look at him and said "this guy needs to take a break"! Nope, that's not fatigue, that's zombie reflexes!
Hoult's co-star Teresa Palmer was also in attendance, and her favorite thing about Warm Bodies is that it helps the uber popular zombie genre evolve in unexpected ways. That's right, we can't watch The Walking Dead forever - or can we...?
