Archive for the ‘Just so you know…’ Category

The Predator is coming back, and he wont be alone

IGN.com recently attended the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, TX where writer/director/producer Robert Rodriguez gathered a small audience to show teaser material for the upcoming July release Predators.

Directed by Nimrod Antal, who accompanied Rodriguez at the event, the teaser material included a first edition trailer and a couple clips from the film. Aside from the presentations, though, the two also discussed some fun facts about the project, which include:

• The first Predator will be referenced as sort of ghost story
• There will be no CGI Predators – all FX regarding them are practical
• 20^th Century Fox supports the violence being to the hilt, based on sales of unrated DVDs
• Rodriguez and Antal have plans to make more Predator movies if this one is successful

Also, the story behind how this new Predators project came to fruition is explained (it has apparently been about 15 years in the making). For those anticipating the film, we recommend taking a look at all of what IGN found out (don’t worry, there is nothing really spoilerish).

View the whole article here.

Also…

Danny Trejo in the original "Machete" trailer

Check out IGN’s quick preview of Machete, set to release late this year. Based on the fake trailer made for Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse, the film brings back all main actors from the trailer, which includes Danny Trejo, Cheech Marin, and Jeff Fahey. Some other actors brought on board for the project include Robert De Niro, Jessica Alba, Lindsay Lohan, Michelle Rodriguez, Steven Seagal, and Don Johnson. It is directed by Robert Rodriguez and Ethan Maniquis.

Star of the film Danny Trejo had this to say – “It is going to be awesome,” Trejo promises. “We duplicate scenes from the trailer in the movie. What that movie has is the three B’s, what I like to call the three B’s. And what that is is babes, bullets, and blood. And then it’s got machetes, too. The film takes off from the trailer and then it just gets so over the top. I think the movie really lives up to the trailer. I’m really, really proud of it.” – IGN.com

Read more here.

Jude Law and Forest Whitaker in the violent dark comedy/thriller "Repo Men"

ShockTillYouDrop.com has recently published an interview with the director of the upcoming sci-fi thriller Repo Men, Miguel Sapochnik.

The movie itself takes place in the future and is about a company that sells artificial organs at absurdly high prices. If a recipient of one of these organs ends up not being able to make the payments, though, said organ gets repossessed by Repo Men like Remy (Jude Law) and Jake (Forest Whitaker). Through an accident, Remy becomes an unwilling recipient of one of these high-priced organs and, because he can’t pay, gets pursued by the same men he used to work with.

The interview goes into a lot of detail about how the film came to fruition, from when the idea came about through Eric Garcia’s novel “The Repossession Mambo” to when Sapochnik was shopping the script around Hollywood trying to get financing. The director clearly recognizes that the tone of the material and subject matter are very much against the grain, but says that these factors are what drew him towards the project. With this being Sapochnik’s first feature film (his background is comprised of shorts), it would be an understatement to say that this was a learning experience.

Sapochnik claims that he got much of his inspiration for the movie from the British comedy group Monty Python, who often mixed violence with humor. “I love the humor of Monty Python. I always remember being so impressed by how violent Monty Python are actually when you look at what they do. Terry Gilliam has a great way of kind of proposing violence. Even Terry Jones in “The Search for the Holy Grail” when he’s kinda cutting the guy up into pieces and he’s saying, ‘You know, it’s just a flesh wound.’ They were very violent movies, but there’s humor in that violence and there’s irony in it.”

For those looking forward to the film or just interested in getting to know exactly what it’s about, this interview should prove to be both entertaining and informative.

Repo Men opens Friday, March 19th.

2009's "Watchmen" made only a few million more than its budget. Is its "R" rating partially to blame?

In an article for Variety.com columnist Tatiana Siegel reports how lately Hollywood has been growing more and more averse to having their films stamped with an “R” rating. The topic gets introduced with the upcoming Clash of the Titans remake, which if you’ve seen the trailer or any commercials you’ll understand is supposed to have its fair share of violence.

Basically, the rule of thumb has been growing more and more into the overall standard. The bigger the budget, the less likely a studio will accept an “R” rating. The logic is of course that PG-13 ratings draw the widest audiences, which means the highest possible returns. Small budget films receive more slack (such as selective horror projects), but studios even insist that they shoot for PG-13 if possible (ex., Prom Night (2008)).

Some requirements are easy to satisfy. For instance, to avoid an “R” rating a film can only show violence against monsters or limited violence against people. If there is blood it must be limited, and if not it must be a different color than red – typically black. And of course, foul language must be kept to a minimum (the F word can only be uttered once).

Studios are more weary of releasing “R” rated pics lately because they’re failing to bring in big returns. Two recent examples are Watchmen and The Wolfman. Both cost over $100 million to produce but failed to make back their budgets with domestic grosses (Wolfman only managed to make back $61 million domestically, and even its worldwide B.O. failed to make it break even).

Screenwriters have stopped writing scripts that are intended to be “R” rated because studios are refusing to pick them up. However there are people within the industry who are willing to be more cavalier with raunchy material. Director/Producer Todd Phillips (The Hangover) supposedly told writer Phil Hay regarding the topic, “Write [the script] the best it can be. And we’ll figure it out later.” – Variety

What is your opinion on the “R” and/or “PG-13″ ratings? As a moviegoer, do you care about what the rating is of the movie you want to see? Do ratings affect which movies you see? What if a film is rated “R” but proves satisfying and entertaining enough to justify its ticket price?

Tell us what you have to say!

Quick Opinion: The movies mentioned by Siegel (The Wolfman, Watchmen, Prom Night) may not be the best examples to list on this topic. Based on reviews and audience reactions, as well as talks with friends, both The Wolfman and Watchmen‘s lack of success is not due to their being “R” rated. People seem to agree that The Wolfman‘s plot was too generic and its characters too flat, and seemed undecided about whether it wanted to be new or nostalgic. Fans of the Watchmen comics conceded that there was too much story to pack into a single film, which made the screen adaptation feel overstuffed and lack concentration. The remake of Prom Night suffered from arguably too little violence, and might have actually made more money had it shared the same “R” rating as its original. Because of how popular the horror genre is with teenagers, though, business logic tells you that you don’t make a product for a particular audience and then make it inaccessible to them (remember the No Admittance Under 17 “rule”). However, sometimes I think that studios who make horror films fail to recognize that there are plenty of horror fans over the age of 17 as well (in fact most of them). All in all, I’m convinced that it’s not the “R” ratings on certain films that are the issue, but the overall poor quality of those films and their inability to satisfy their audiences.

Kathryn Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker" won Best Picture, but she was also the first woman to win Best Director

Well the Oscars are now over, so it’s time to recap how we did in predicting the winners. All in all we didn’t do too bad. But who out there guessed all of them correctly? Did you? Tell us about how you picked the winners to win, and we might seek you out for your opinions next year!

Here is how things shaped up.

Picks:

Best Picture: Avatar or The Hurt Locker

Best Director: Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker

Best Original Screenplay: Joel and Ethan Coen for A Serious Man

Best Leading Actor: Jeff Bridges for Crazy Heart

Best Leading Actress: Sandra Bullock for The Blind Side

Best Supporting Actor: Christopher Plummer for The Last Station

Best Supporting Actress: Mo’Nique for Precious

Winners:

Best Picture – The Hurt Locker

Best Director – Kathryn Bigelow   (*she is the first woman to receive this award)

Best Original Screenplay – Mark Boal for The Hurt Locker

Best Leading Actor – Jeff Bridges for Crazy Heart

Best Leading Actress – Sandra Bullock for The Blind Side

Best Supporting Actor – Christoph Waltz for Inglourious Basterds

Best Supporting Actress – Mo’Nique for Precious

View all of the winners here.

It’s been a fun Oscar season for sure, but it’s almost sad to see it all over and done with. Here at Movie-Thoughts we’ll soon switch gears to get you all ready for the upcoming summer blockbuster season, which is shaping up to be a good one. Be sure to stay tuned with all the news, reviews, and various articles we’ll be posting to keep you informed and thinking. See you around!

Antoine Fuqua, directing Richard Gere

ComingSoon.net has published an interview with Brooklyn’s Finest director, Antoine Fuqua (Training Day). The interview is a follow-up to one the site conducted with the director back at Sundance, so some references have been made that may not register without reading that previous interview.

“The way [the movie's] three stories are woven together is what makes it such a fine addition to the [street movie] canon, and it shows a lot of growth in Fuqua as a filmmaker in being able to tell these stories without judgment. It’s also his first movie made outside the studio system, which probably allowed him to focus as much on the characters rather than on the violence inherent to the genre.” – ComingSoon.net

The three stories they pertain to are that of the rookie cop (Ethan Hawke), the undercover cop (Don Cheadle) and his criminal friend (Wesley Snipes), and the 25 year officer about to retire (Richard Gere).

The interview is very informative and highly recommended reading for fans of Fuqua’s work.

Freddy's back April 30th

ShockTillYouDrop.com published their findings of when they visited the set of the new Nightmare on Elm Street remake. The film is meant to reboot what had become a tired franchise, which was launched with Wes Craven’s career-defining 1984 film of the same title. Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes production studio is the creative entity behind the movie, which also helped create The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake back in 2003 as well as the recent Friday the 13th remake.

The set visit documents various aspects of the new film, from the look of the actors, the attitude of the creative minds behind the project, and the differences between this picture and its original. One feature of the film that its director Samuel Bayer stresses was how it’s trying to be legitimately scary, not “fun horror” like the remake of Friday the 13th.

The article includes many quotes from director Bayer and producer Bradley Fuller, which do well to explain exactly what their aims are with this film. According to the article, Bayer was pursued feverishly by Platinum Dunes and Newline Cinema because of his knack for being a visual storyteller (almost all of his credits are for directing numerous music videos). As Spike Jonze has proven (Where the Wild Things Are, Adaptation, Being John Malkovich), a background in directing music videos is not a bad one.

The article overall proves very revealing – so much so that if you’re not one for spoilers then you might want to avoid it. Likewise, if you can’t get enough information about this remake (which opens April 30th) then you’ll want to check it out ASAP.

Also See…

ComingSoon.net interviews Johnny Depp about his role as the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, as well as some other upcoming roles. The film opens March 5th.

According to Diane Garrett, "Up in the Air" is just one of this year's films that acknowledge the frequency of infidelity

Diane Garrett of Variety.com wrote in an article the other day how it seems the topic of infidelity is hot this year in Hollywood. The reason for this suspicion – 4 out of 10 nominated films for the Best Picture Oscar deal directly with the subject.

Up in the Air, Precious, An Education, and A Serious Man are those 4, and aside from these there’s still those films that weren’t nominated, such as It’s Complicated and Nine.

Garrett notes that, socially, infidelity is a topic that the country can’t seem to avoid, with news breaks about Tiger Woods, John Edwards, Mark Sanford, David Letterman, and John and Kate Gosselin flashing day and night. For something that’s supposedly so immoral, it sure seems to happen quite a lot. Could this be why it’s such a popular topic in recent films?

On the contrary, Garrett makes a different conclusion, chalking the timeliness of the subject up to its versatility in the field of writing.

“It’s interesting, it’s common, and it’s juicy,” says Wesleyan U. film scholar Jeanine Basinger. “You can tell it as comedy, drama, whatever.” – Variety

Infidelity is an issue that audiences seem to have a strange interest in. Strange, that is, because the negative effects of it are well known (scarred children, emotional pitfalls, birthed insecurities, etc.) but because it’s so common it’s traversed from being a serious taboo to fodder for entertainment. And beyond the incorporation of the topic in this year’s four nominees, Garrett insinuates they treat it as a common indiscretion like the most of us. This contrasts, she says, with films like Unfaithful which explicitly claim that such an act should not be tolerated.

To add to Garrett’s article, at least this year’s films aren’t in any way condoning the act of cheating.

Publicity photo for Johnston's "The Wolfman"

Director Joe Johnston (The Rocketeer, October Sky, Hidalgo) spoke with FilmJournal.com about his upcoming movie The Wolfman starring Benicio Del Toro, Emily Blunt, Anthony Hopkins, and Hugo Weaving, which opens February 12th, as well as some ideas regarding is next movie The First Avenger: Captain America.

Regarding The Wolfman: Johnston had only three weeks of pre-production, he says, because the studio “had already spent so much money and had gone down this road with Mark Romanek, and said, ‘We have to start shooting the movie at this point.’ I think a lot of it involved possibly actors’ contracts and a release date. Fortunately for me, Mark Romanek [the film's original director] made a lot of good choices. He cast some great actors”—the three leads were all aboard by this point—“I was able to cast a few more good ones, and I was able to change a few of the locations that I didn’t think were great.”

Concerning Captain America: “We’re in prep,” Johnston says. “Rick Heinrichs is production-designing and we’re set up down in Manhattan Beach [California]. It’s the part of the process that I love the most,” he enthuses. “We have eight or ten really talented artists, and we all just sit around all day and draw pictures and say, ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if we could do this?’ It’s that phase of the production where money doesn’t matter: ‘Let’s put all the greatest stuff up on the wall and [then later] see what we can afford.’” The film, he says at this early stage, will begin “in 1942, 1943″ during World War II. “The stuff in the ’60s and ’70s [comic books] we’re sort of avoiding. We’re going back to the ’40s, and then forward to what they’re doing with Captain America now.”

To read more (which we recommend) see the full article.

According to Variety.com’s Todd McCarthy, this year’s apparent running theme of the Sundance Film Festival is to rebel. This theme, he expresses, spans across many of its meanings and hidden meanings (from the social, to the political, to the philosophical, etc.), however an irony presents itself when he finds a film that he believes truly does rebel against many norms but hasn’t garnered much praise for it. From the program booklet to festival director John Cooper, everyone and everything at the festival is calling for rebellion. It’s a shame then, insinuates McCarthy, that what is really rebellious isn’t credited much for being so.

McCarthy seems to look upon the Sundance Film Festival as a place where liberalism pats itself on the back and preaches continuously for better environmental care, better treatment of “different” people, etc. No one is really against such things. McCarthy suggests, however, that what would really be daring and rebellious is if a film were to challenge the festival’s liberal partiality. This is just one suggestion.

Two films that McCarthy mentions stuck out to him actually seemed rather non-partisan: A documentary titled Waiting for Superman (which is about the failing American school system and how both democrats and republicans have both failed to improve it over the years) and Obselidia (which takes place in the 1930s and is about a young female movie projectionist and her male companion sharing intellectual conversations, many of which orbit topics about life). He claims that Obselidia stood out not so much because he thought it was “great art,” but simply because it was so different from everything else at the festival. Its differences, apparently, are not so much in its content but its conveyance. To sum up his words, the visual details in the film say just as much as its explicit messages, and shares a temperamentality similar to the French New Wave and Robert Bresson. These elements, McCarthy claims, make Obselidia one of the more truly rebellious films at Sundance this year.

Read the full feature article here.

In Other News…

In another Variety.com feature article, this one by Timothy M. Gray, the topic of awards and award snubs is introduced yet again. Gray makes a case that some films like, say comedies, don’t get the recognition they deserve by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and other such organizations, and that actors like Paul Rudd (for I Love You, Man) aren’t getting the credit they deserve for contributing complex and layered character portrayals, and in Rudd’s particular case it might be because such a performance is within the parentheses of humor and farce.

Quick Opinion: Concerning the Sundance Film Festival, I’ve heard many similar opinions floating around places like film school classrooms and other film-related publications. McCarthy makes a solid point, however in relation to the United States subjects like the environment and homosexuality are still volatile issues that continue to polarize a number of people. Because these issues are volatile, institutions like Hollywood like to more or less steer clear from them – if for no other reason than because the U.S. recession is still ongoing and studios aren’t convinced that controversy will sell better than formulas and franchises. So in a sense, because films that tackle “important” issues are still far more rare than special effects extravaganzas, they can still easily be considered “rebellious” (regarding the U.S. that is). Personally, I find torture films to be far more “rebellious” than documentaries warning us that we’re destroying our planet.

Concerning awards and award snubs and the people who continue to bicker about who or what isn’t getting the credit it deserves, I’m loosing my patience. People need to realize that there are only so many awards to give out. There are only a few of them, which is why winning one is supposed to be an honor. If every notable job or performance was given an award, there would be so many given out that receiving such awards would cease to mean much except to those who might profit from including such an accomplishment on their résumés. Audiences appear to be caring less and less about awards in general, relenting to the already known fact that artistic awards, in the grand scheme of things, don’t mean much – if anything. There are plenty of great movies throughout history, many of which were not “recognized” for their quality at the time of their release. Citizen Kane is considered by an overwhelming number of critics and film historians to be the greatest movie ever made, yet it did not win 1941′s Best Picture Oscar. Orson Welles is considered by almost all critics and historians to be one of the best film directors ever, yet he never won one directing award throughout his career. Awards don’t make careers, and they certainly don’t guarantee memories. Being fondly remembered is the highest award/reward that a work of art and/or an artist can receive, and audiences need to realize that one award snub here and there isn’t going to prevent such an honor from occurring.

Joel and Ethan Coen handle directing/producing duties arguably better than anyone

In an article for Variety.com, feature writer Anthony Kaufman sheds light on the world of filmmakers who decide/are able to both direct and produce their movies. People like Peter Jackson, Clint Eastwood, and the Coen brothers are members of an elite group that has won Oscars for both directing and producing, and accomplishing such a feat is even harder than one might think.

The two different, and arguably opposing functions of directors and producers is perhaps the number one reason for the high level of difficulty in doing both. It’s the job of the director to make sure the artistic quality of a film is the highest it can be, and the producer’s job is to manage and organize all aspects connected to a film’s financing. Being that art can be very costly, directors and producers naturally clash every so often during the making of a movie. And aside from this, the simple fact that one person is doing two jobs makes the endeavor daunting.

A positive way of looking at the added responsibility is to say that having to keep both art and practicality in mind while making all decisions is a very useful skill to have because it keeps either from getting out of hand. If a film’s artistic side is met with too few limitations it can make it appealing to too narrow an audience, while if the budget hampers the art’s ability to express itself sufficiently the overall quality of the product suffers.

Director Lee Daniels (Precious) sums up the job of director/producer like this: It’s “powerful, but a powerful curse.” Read more about the job of being a director/producer by clicking on the link below.

Source: Variety

In Other News…

Blake Lively

Gossip Girl and Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants star Blake Lively has been cast in Warner Brothers’ Green Lantern. She will reportedly be the romantic interest opposite star Ryan Reynolds, who is playing the supernatural superhero.

Source: Hollywood Reporter