This just in from Disney HQ: After bashing records across the globe, The Avengers will go from puny Earthbound box office domination to the final frontier, screening for six lucky multinational cosmonauts currently in orbit: "Marvel Studios announced today that they arranged with NASA to transfer their record-breaking blockbuster film Marvel’s The Avengers to NASA’s Mission Control in Houston, which will uplink the film to the International Space Station (ISS), currently orbiting 220 miles above Earth. The film will then be screened for the space station crew’s exclusive enjoyment." (Take that, Pentagon!) Keep an eye out for Loki up there fellas, eh? [Press release]
When they work, found footage films are testaments to the power of a limited perspective. Features like The Blair Witch Project, REC and Cloverfield get juice out of the fact that we're not able to see or know more than the characters on screen. They use a gloss of the intentionally clumsy -- jittery camerawork, lower quality footage, mundane dialogue -- to allow a story to invade from an unexpected angle. They require cleverness in concept and, more importantly, in construction, particularly when the found footage flick in question is of the horror genre, as so many of them are; there's no easier way to lose your audience than to make them wonder why, when such frightening things are allegedly happening, your characters are still bothering to roll tape. On the plus side, they're a way to hide your monster (or witch, or demon, or alien) from view for longer than is usually allowed a more standard film -- and the monster we imagine is usually much scarier than the one we finally see on screen.
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As the saying goes, it takes a village... and when the long-gestating Nazi comedy Iron Sky finally hits theaters next year, we'll have many folks to thank. (Including crowdfunding backers and financiers from the U.K., Australia, Germany, and Finland.) Iron Sky explains that the Nazis didn't just disappear when World War II ended -- they relocated to the moon to regroup and hatch a space invasion of Earth (or, "meteorblitzkrieg") in 2018. After the jump, the latest grindhouse-y teaser!
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