In case you hadn't heard, The Dark Knight Rises has been given a PG-13 rating according Warner Bros. Exhibtor website for "intense sequences of violence and action, some sensuality and language.”
This shouldn't shock many as the first two films in the series - Batman Begins and The Dark Knight - were both rated PG-13 as well.
There are a few tidbits to take from this news - as first mentioned by The Hollywood Reporter - that I will review here, starting off with the fact that the film has even been rated in the first place.
Anyone familiar with the MPAA ratings board knows a film can not be rated unless it is finished, which basically means Christopher Nolan has completed his final Batman film with just over three months to go until its release. Something like this is nearly unheard of as many films - especially summer blockbusters - go down to the wire in post-production, mere days before a film's release date. This only solidifies the fact that Warner Bros. must be very happy with the film to give Nolan such an early OK to final cut it as well as prove his efficiency as a filmmaker.
Next, with the film finished, expect the marketing campaign to get going as a third trailer should be coming in the next few weeks (likely with The Avengers) as well as TV spots, early screenings for critics, and pretty much everything else that comes along with a huge summer blockbuster (though I doubt many have ever been as big as this).
Finally, the details of the film's rating, specifically "some sensuality." This pretty much confirms there will be some kind of love story going on between Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) with Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway) and/or Miranda Tate (Marion Cotillard). The real question is: how far has Nolan gone with this? Sex scene maybe? Hey common, you saw how far The Dark Knight was pushed in terms of a PG-13 rating, so it would pretty much shock me if Nolan wasn't pushing the envelope again in for both violence and language (of course) as well as, well, sex.
We all shall know in about three months so get ready Batman fans, because The Dark Knight Rises will be here sooner than you think.
If you have heard of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, you have heard it is one of the greatest films of all-time. If you have seen Citizen Kane, you know it is one of the greatest films of all-time.
I came across this video over at Collider showing Mr. Orson Welles' giving his final interview on television before tragically passing away mere hours later.
The interview was conducted October 10th, 1985 during a taping of The Merv Griffin Show, just hours before Welles succumbed to a heart attack at his Los Angeles home. He was 70.
While today's generation probably has never heard of Orson Welles nor knows what the man accomplished in his brilliant career, those who appreciate a true pioneer for the mediums of television, film, theatre, and radio will enjoy this short, just under 10-minute clip.
Another year, another talk about a potential resurrection of the Back to the Future franchise.
This story comes from Moviehole on the heels of Deadline's report that writer/director duo Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg have inked a two-year production deal over at Universal.
For those of you unfamilar with their work, they're the guys that brought those Academy Award winning Harold & Kumar movies to life while also bringing back the beloved American Pie cast for next month's American Reunion.
In a recent interview regarding their new contract, the two "average at best" writers/directors spoke about their hopes to bring back another beloved, though "slightly" more important Universal franchise:
“We want Back to the Future, just come out and say it”, Hurwitz nudges Scholssberg into admitting. “That’s our favourite trilogy. We’re always having this conversation…”
Before getting all bent out of shape about this story, the two are quick to point out that any trip down a Back to the Future lane likely won't be in the cards for a while:
“I wouldn’t want to do it now because people would be like, “Oh, there’s no way it will be as good as the original.” But 30 years from now when Spielberg’s like 90 and those guys are kind of on their way out, and those movies just look really old because we’re watching movies that are old, literally in two dimensions or something, it would be great to have all these classics that you’re able to remake.”
While they do state they'd prefer to go the route of sequel (like that's so much better for an iconic franchise), they admit it'll likely be remade for the simple reason of well...time.
“I personally would far rather a sequel, unless it’s something that is so old that the general movie going public hasn’t really seen the movie, and then you could consider it a reboot”, says Schlossberg.
“The problem is [the sequel is set in] 2015, that’s why I feel it is inevitably going to be remade because it is dependent on time periods that people won’t connect with. It’s the perfect movie to remake, but it’s so loved by a generation that is still with it and going to be with it.”
There's a great line in the new 21 Jump Street remake (go figure) where the police captain basically goes tongue in cheek when he talks about the resurrection of an old 80s police program:
"Due to a chronic lack of originality — the powers that be simply revive old crap from the ‘80s and hope no one notices."
For a guy who has now completed his movie star comeback (M:I - Ghost Protocol is ready to cross the $700 million mark worldwide), Tom Cruise is in a prime position for his career going forward. He's got Rock of Ages coming out this summer which is almost a guaranteed $100 million hit, One Shot coming out early next year (which from all accounts will be a great film), and he just started shooting the sci-fi epic, Oblivion, which is set to hit next summer.
That is why it is beyond me he would even consider to headline Clint Eastwood's remake of A Star is Born which is being put together over at Warner Bros. right now. No, it's not the fact that Eastwood will be behind the camera (that man is an American legend). It's the fact that a certain publicity whoring musician/wannabe actress named Beyonce is attached to star as well.
As you may recall, Leonardo DiCaprio was originally set to play the part Cruise is being courted for which is of an over-the-hill musician who falls for a young starlet (Beyonce) he's trying to help make a star. However, DiCaprio probably realized Beyonce can't act for shit and dropped out of the project before he got in too deep.
Look, I get it that Eastwood is behind the film and any actor would kill to work with the man, but I'm sorry, when you have a celebrity (not an actress) such as Beyonce in the film as well, there is a certain part of both Hollywood and the moviegoing public that will not take your film seriously. I think it has been pretty much established that this woman can not act and that having her in a movie is just that: having Beyonce star in a movie.
I won't go as far as to say this will be Tom Cruise's Bodyguard if he signs on, but I think at the point the actor's career is in right now, he can choose better and more interesting roles to say the least.
We'll see what the actor decides in the coming weeks as the film is expected to start shooting this July.
Even though I've heard nothing but great things about Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive, I am yet to see the film. I just ordered it on Blu-ray so I'll see what all the hype is about soon enough.
With that said though, today we have our first look at the next team up of Ryan Gosling and Refn with Only God Forgives (doesn't that title just sound badass?).
The film - which just began filming earlier this year - takes places in Thailand where Gosling plays a character named Julian who killed a cop a decade ago and has been on the run ever since. He manages a Thai boxing club, but it's really all a front for a drug operation his mother heads for a criminal organization (to be played by Kristin Scott Thomas).
I'm not going to get into all the gritty details - as I've listed the synopsis below - but the film's main predicament revolves around Julian's brother, who kills a prostitute, then is murdered himself by a retired cop, Chang (known as the Angel of Vengenance). Julian is ordered by his mom to avenge his brother's death and of course, all hell break loose.
This thing certainly sounds like it has the potential to be great but one can't judge until an actual trailer is seen. That might be a bit far off as Deadline reports the project - which was originally supposed to be picked up by Film District (which distributed Drive) - has been bought by The Weinstein Company's VOD/multi-platform gig, Radius. Apparently, the film is extremely violent and Film District was probably uncomfortable taking on such a project.
Early word is the film may be ready by the fall film festival circuit but is more likely pegged for 2013 with Cannes being a strong possiblity for a debut.
We'll keep an eye on this project as it becomes available.
Sony Pictures has released the first clip from this summer's The Amazing Spider-Man via the film's viral website, MarkOfTheSpider-Man.com.
Surprisingly, the clip doesn't include any footage of the webslinger in action, choosing instead to showcase Peter Paker (Andrew Garfield) attempting to visit Gwen Stacy at her home but having trouble with the intimidating doorman (this was referenced in the recently released trailer).
I pick out a few important things from this clip:
1.) Just from the dialogue alone, it's nice to no longer have to hear Sam Raimi's goofy, comical banter that was overdone so much in the previous Spider-Man trilogy.
2.) Garfield (despite being close to 30 years-old in real life) actually does look like and come off as a teenager still in high school. The display of disbelief and dumbfoundness he portrays as he's practically interrogated by the doorman actually comes off pretty genuine as a teen still coming of age.
3.) Finally, the film just looks more realistic and grounded than what was shown in the previous Spider-Man films. I never was the biggest fan of Raimi's trilogy and always hoped the series would be taken in a more reality-based direction. Hopefully this clip is a nice preview for the tone of the rest of the film.
When we first heard word about a year ago of Warner Bros. and Leonardo DiCaprio teaming to bring the spec script Harker - a re-imagining of Bram Stoker's Dracula told from Jonathan Harker's point of view - to life, there was much to be excited about.
For one, the vampire genre was in dire need on a re-invention with the Twilight craze being on the loose the past few years. Also, the fact the Leonardo DiCaprio was involved in the project and anything the guy has his hand in will be top notch. Finally, the fact that Jaume Collet-Serra (Unknown, Orphan) would be directing as he has proven himself as an up-and-coming capable director.
Since then, the only news about the project was that Collet-Serra had left the project to work on the live-action adaptation of Akira. However, since that project has recently run into budget problems, it seems as if Collet-Serra is back on the project with a star to go with him.
Vulture reports that none other than Academy Award winner Russell Crowe is in talks to join the film for the title role as Harker (in this tale he will be a Scotland Yard worker in England - not a lawyer as in previous incarnations - who hunts down the monster causing havoc).
No word yet on who will play Dracula or when the film is will start filming but it's safe to say the flick will go before the camera sometime by the end of the year.
In probably the best news that's come to the Terminator universe in a long time, current franchise rights holder Megan Ellison (head of Annapurna Films) went on record today to state that the next installment of the sci-fi franchise will be rated R. Responding to a question asked by TheTerminatorFans.com on Twitter in regards to the film's rating, Ellison had this awesome response to say:
We can’t really tell you guys anything about Terminator BUT it will be an R rated film as God and James Cameron intended.
How refreshing is that to here? With all the bullshit dumbing down of action franchises in recent years (Terminator, Die Hard, most recently The Expendables) it's nice to here this woman knows what true fans of Terminator want.
Now if they can only bring back Linda Hamilton along with Arnold and have James Cameron executive produce, I'd be sold.
For those of you that don't know, Frank Darabont - the three-time Academy Award nominee for both The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile - was fired by AMC last summer as showrunner and producer of the hit TV show, The Walking Dead.
Darabont was the man who brought Robert Kirkman's famed graphic novel series to television and had his hand in everything from the show's first season, most notably writing and directing the Pilot (which was nothing short of a masterpiece) and second episode along with co-writing the subsequent four.
The reason for Darabont leaving was plain and simple: money.
AMC decided that they did not want to spend as much for each episode for the show's second season as they did for its first. You see, AMC agreed to only produce six episodes for the first season of the zombie-apocalypse drama because they were unsure it would be a hit. Due to this, the normal 12-13 episode season budget for a show was now available to be spread across six - creating astonishing production values and ensuring the show would be top notch its first year.
While Darabont tried to make it work in Season 2, the tighter budget all but killed the creative freedom he hoped to have for the show and left him telling AMC to go stick it.
Low and behold, this weekend both a video and open letter from Darabont himself comes out explaining what his original vision was for the premiere of Season 2 and affirms my belief that studio execs are the bane of quality filmmaking these days - TV included.
First, in the video below, actor Sam Witwer (a close friend of Darabont) dishes in an interview with Horror Hound and posted by Paranormal Pop Culture about what could have been for show and his own personal feelings about it:
Next, Darabont responds with a letter to AICN, clarifying Witwer's comments and explaining in-depth what the plan was for the Season 2 premiere episode:
CraveOnline is much mistaken in saying this was for a “web series.” This was never meant as a web gimmick, this was intended for use in the actual TV series. I wanted to kick off the 2nd season with the flashback episode Sam describes, which would have followed a squad of Army Rangers getting trapped in the city and trying to survive as Atlanta falls.
The idea was to do this with a very focused “you are there” documentary feel. Not going all shaky-cam, but still making it a bit rawer and grainier than the rest of the show. We’d start with a squad of maybe seven or eight soldiers being dropped into the city by chopper. They have map coordinates they need to get to; they’ve been told to report to a certain place to provide reinforcement. It’s not a special mission, it’s basically a housekeeping measure putting more boots on the ground to reinforce key intersections and installations throughout the city. And we follow this group from the moment the copter sets them down. All they have to do is travel maybe a dozen blocks, a simple journey, but what starts as a no-brainer scenario goes from “the city is being secured” to “holy shit, we’ve lost control, the world is ending.” Our squad gets blocked at every turn and are soon just trying to survive. I wanted to do a really tense, character-driven ensemble story as communications break down, supply lines are lost, escape routes are cut off, morale falls apart, leadership unravels, mutinies heat up, etc. (Yes, this approach owes a spiritual debt to a number of great films, including Walter Hill’s Southern Comfort.)
Along the way, I thought we could briefly dovetail this story with a few established characters from the show. Not to overdo that, mind you, because it could get silly and too coincidental if you load too much into that idea. But I thought it would be great to veer off on a quick narrative detour that brushes our soldiers briefly up against some people we know. Picture our squad arriving at a manned barricade where some civilians are being held back from leaving the city on shoot-to-kill orders to stop the spread of contagion, it’s a panicked high-intensity scene, and in this crowd of desperate people we find Andrea and Amy. The barricade gunners panic, the civilians start to get mowed down by machine gun fire, and in this melee the girls get pulled to safety by some old guy they don’t even know. It’s Dale. He’s nobody to them, just some guy who saw the opportunity to do the right thing and reacted in the moment. This would have been perhaps a minute or two of the episode, just a cool detour like the various outposts the soldiers encounter in Saving Private Ryan, but we would have witnessed the moment that Dale meets Andrea and Amy, seen where that relationship began. I also felt it would be a great way to get Emma Bell back into the series for a moment, because she was so wonderful and we were all so sorry that her character died and she had to leave the show. (Of course if this “brush with established characters” idea didn’t work in the script stage, I’d have tossed it out. You try a lot of ideas like that as you go, see how they play. But I thought this one stood a pretty good chance of being engineered to work well.)
So the story follows these soldiers through hell as the city falls apart and the squad implodes, with Sam’s soldier being the main character and the moral center of the group. He becomes the last survivor of the squad, and he finally gets to the map coordinates they’ve been trying to get to from the start: it’s the barricade at the Atlanta courthouse intersection from the pilot where Rick later finds the tank. The soldier is still alive when he gets there, but he’s been bitten. He’s accomplished his “simple” mission, but he’s gone through seven kinds of hell to do it (including being forced to frag his squad leader), and now he’s dying. And he crawls off into the tank just to get off the street and under cover. As his fever builds and the poor guy starts to hallucinate, he pulls his last grenade and considers ending his life. He sets the grenade down on that shelf for a moment to reflect on all the shit and misery that brought him to this sad end-point of his life, and to dredge up the courage to pull the pin...but before he can act, the fever burns him out and he dies.
The kicker comes in the last moments of this episode:
After the soldier dies this squalid, lonely death...and after a quiet lapse of time...we do a shot-for-shot reprise from the first episode of the first season: Rick comes scrambling into the tank to escape the horde...blows that zombie soldier’s brains out...now Rick’s trapped...fade out...the end.
The notion was to take the “throwaway” tank zombie Rick encountered in the pilot, and tell that soldier’s story. Make him the star of his own movie, follow his journey, but don’t reveal who he is until the end. The idea being that every zombie has a story, every undead extra was once a human being with a life of his/her own...was, in a sense, the star of his own life’s movie. And we’ve followed this one particular guy and seen how his life ended; we witness his struggles, see his good intentions and his failures, and we experience his godawful death in this tank. That’s why I cast Sam as that tank zombie in the first place instead of just casting some extra. I had this story in mind while filming the pilot, and I knew I’d need a superb actor to play that soldier when the time came.
And then starting with Episode 202, we’d be back with Rick’s group and back in step with the flow of the established story from last season.
I always had in mind to throw in a “wild-card” episode every season, maybe as a season opener or closer. Just a separate story more in the feel of an anthology series, one that appears completely off the track of the regular series but actually does wind up tying in somehow by the fade-out. They did that sort of thing on LOST on occasion, and I really respected it. It always seemed like a bold choice that trusted the audience and rewarded their loyalty with a totally unexpected surprise episode every so often.
That’s it from me. I hope things are well on your end.
If any of you are like me, you probably have continued to watch The Walking Dead this year. While the show is still decent, I can't help but notice the quality from the show's first season is just blatantly missing; and I feel it all has to do with Darabont's departure. He was the vision behind the show, and without him, it has suffered.
In what has become a norm in Hollywood these days, when a low-budget comedy turns out to be a surprise hit (i.e. The Hangover, last year's Bridemaids), the natural thing to do is simple: sequel.
Yup, fresh on the heels of today's news that Bridemaids 2 is in the works (what Kristen Wiig is suddenly too big to star in a sequel to the one hit movie she's made?) word comes from the Hollywood Reporter that last year's other breakout comedy hit, Horrible Bosses, is getting the sequel treatment as well.
The screenwriting duo of John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein - who penned the original - have just closed a deal to work on the sequel.
Jason Bateman, Charlie Day, and Jason Sudeikis are expected to return with the first film's director, Seth Gordon, in early negotiations to come back as well.
No word on when it will be released but it's safe to say we'll be seeing this baby in theaters by Summer 2013.
I thought Horrible Bosses was a smart, dark little comedy that had a great take on the all-but-forgotten killing your hated boss routine.
The one thing that bothers me about this is what story is there left to tell? I mean, all three successfully got rid of their bosses (well except for Jennifer Aniston but they pretty much got her in the end), which leaves me with the question of where else is there to go? Is this going to be just another Hangover 2 where the same characters and premise are used from the first film because the studio knows it will get asses in the seats and make tons of money? I sure as hell hope not, but, well...we all saw how the aforementioned "Wolf Pack" sequel turned out.
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Mon, April 9, 2012 
