We finally have a real Resident Evil movie! It only took seven tries! (That might not sound good, but by video game movie standards it’s sensational.) The five live-action Milla Jovovich movies were fantastic, but about the only thing they shared with the games was a title. The directors of those features focused on making great action movies for the mass market they knew didn't really care about the games. The CG-animated Resident Evil: Damnation is a great Resident Evil movie because it doesn’t care about the mass market; it’s so focused on the games and the gaming audience that it was released on the Xbox and PS3 dashboards a week before the DVD went on sale. more »
It's a big week for the filmmaking Paul Andersons. Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master opened in a handful of cinemas in New York and Los Angeles, and Paul W.S. Anderson's Resident Evil: Retribution in theaters everywhere (in 3D and otherwise). While The Master offers up a immersive, abstract look at an unstable man being courted by the head of a cult-like movement, Resident Evil: Retribution in its own way also departs from the usual narrative confines of moviemaking. It's the closest thing you'll find yet to a recreation of a video game sensibility on the big screen — which is in line with the franchise's source material — and makes for a memorably unsettling if not particularly satisfying viewing experience. more »
As Paul Thomas Anderson painstakingly rolls out his latest labor of love, The Master — next stop, New York City, with a 70-mm screening at Manhattan's Ziegfeld Theater on Tuesday night — another Paul Anderson with different middle initials — W.S. — is preparing to infect the worldwide box office like a zombie virus on Friday with Resident Evil: Retribution. It's the latest chapter in the movie franchise based on the blockbuster game franchise, which will also spawn a new installment, Resident Evil 6 on Oct. 6.
Guess which film will fare better critically? more »
Milla Jovovich is not just an arresting Fifth Element star and an above-average Project Runway judge -- she's also a roving reporter on the set of her own movie, Resident Evil: Retribution. Jovovich tweeted a holiday-themed video from "Camp Evil," and her version of Santa Claus will haunt you until Christmas day. It's beginning to look a lot like the antichrist!
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This weekend on Twitter, most of our tweeting luminaries avoided addressing the obvious (Paranormal Activity 3) and instead talked about Martha Marcy May Marlene, The Three Musketeers, and -- my word -- Johnny English Reborn. To the tweet machine!
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If Sherlock Holmes could be successfully steampunked into a rakish action hero, there's no reason The Three Musketeers couldn't be gearpunked into some tolerable 17th century equivalent -- and Athos, Porthos, Aramis and young D'Artagnan are actually soldiers, so no serious character tweaking is required to send them off into repeated swashbuckling setpieces. It's not the addition of airships and male dangly earrings that make Paul W.S. Anderson's take on Alexandre Dumas' classic, much-adapted adventure such a drag, it's everything else -- the incoherence, the anvil-heavy dialogue, the lack of anything beyond the broadest of characterizations.
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How do you possibly promote a movie about a promiscuous high school student in the '80s? If you're ripping a page out of the Weinstein Co.'s Dirty Girl's marketing book, try launching a blog where users can anonymously share their deepest, darkest, most twisted sexual fantasies... then making it accessible for anyone aged 13 and up! Um, guys...?
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And you thought Jessica Chastain was having a busy year. Check out the resume of Juno Temple, the 22-year-old British actress whose early roles in such films as Notes on a Scandal and Atonement have given way to a 2011 comprising work on movies from The Dark Knight Rises to The Three Musketeers to this week's quirky indie dramedy Dirty Girl.
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Milla Jovovich has squared off against many insidious adversaries in her career, including zombies (Resident Evil), evil itself (The Fifth Element), and critics (The Messenger). So why is it that her latest foe, a real-life affliction known as prosopagnosia -- which confuses a person's ability to recognize the faces of friends and loved ones (or, in Jovovich's case in Faces in the Crowd, the face of her would-be killer) -- seem like the silliest and most far-fetched enemy of all?
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At the age of 19, Logan Lerman (The Patriot, Jack & Bobby, Gamer) has been acting for over a decade and later this year will take on the most iconic character of his career -- one of the most recognizable heroes in literature, even: D'Artagnan in Paul W.S. Anderson's Three Musketeers. Lerman made his first trip to WonderCon with footage from the October 2011 3D action pic in tow and sat for a quick chat with Movieline about Anderson's insane-looking take on the Alexandre Dumas novel, the reportedly in-the-works sequel to Percy Jackson and the Olympians, and a little-known YouTube user known as monkeynuts1069.
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