Sci-Fi & Fantasy »
First Image from 'Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows: Part 1'
Filed under: Action, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Fandom, Newsstand, Harry Potter, Images
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Amidst all this nonsense over The Twilight Saga franchise, Warner Bros. does not want you to forget that they're gearing up for one helluva two-part finale when it comes to their just-as-popular Harry Potter franchise. The first official image from Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows: Part 1 has arrived online courtesy of USA Today, and right off the bat we have our three franchise heroes, Daniel Radcliffe (as Harry), Emma Watson (as Hermione) and Rupert Grint (as Ron). They look sort of determined in that image -- as if they're about to lay the wizardry smackdown on some unlucky evil soul.
Director David Yates tells USA Today, "It's going to feel very real. We're going for a vérité approach. Being away from Hogwarts, they're like these three refugees on the run. They're out in the big bad world, facing real danger, unguarded by those wonderful benign wizards at Hogwarts. They don't have a home to go to. We're kind of pulling away from the magic a bit and bringing more reality to it." The first installment, which hits theaters on November 19th, 2010, find our heroes dropping out of school and roaming the streets of London in search of Voldemort's remaining three Horcruxes. Says Grint, "They're paranoid. It's quite a scary world because the Snatchers and Death Eaters are running around everywhere. Harry, Ron and Hermione are just camping out in random places, living rough, in regular clothes."
Sounds pretty badass. I like the sound of a grittier, real-world Potter film -- how come they didn't get Michael Mann to shoot this one? Watch it when it drops in November; meanwhile the second (and final) installment will arrive in 2011.
Monday Night Poll: How Much Will 'Avatar' Make Opening Weekend?
Filed under: Action, Animation, Drama, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Box Office, 20th Century Fox, Movie Marketing, Oscar Watch
Avatar isn't being released until December 18th, but if you're already sick of hearing about it, you better plug up your ears. The hype machine for James Cameron's magnum opus has been hard at work leaking details, images, snippets, and trailers since way before this year's San Diego Comic-Con or the extensive profile in October's New Yorker. Cameron, who has never been one to bite his tongue, told Playboy, "We know from the exit polling that the response [to Avatar] was 95 percent ecstatic. Most of the five percent negative response is from the fanatic fans who imagined the movie in their minds but now have to deal with my movie." Also, that when it comes to giving birth to a movie, he's crowning. Yum!
Bon mots from Cameron aside, Avatar could be a real game-changer as far as 3D films go – and hell, it's a refreshing change of pace from the sequels, prequels, remakes, and re-imaginings we're forced to sit through. (Plus... giant blue cat people!!!). It's definitely in the running for numerous Oscars. In fact, Oscar experts at In Contention currently have the film for consideration in eight categories, including Best Picture and Best Director.
Not only that, Variety reported that James Cameron, stars Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana, and producer Jon Landau will be doing a live webcast on December 3rd that will allow fans the chance to ask questions of the crew and sneak peeks at previously unseen footage from the film. The webcast will be broadcast on MTV two days before Avatar hits screens.
So, are you a betting man or woman? How much do you think the Avatar exposure will pay off opening weekend? Will Na'ivish become the new Elvish? Let's start with under $20 million. Going once, going twice... Vote below!
First Glimpses of 'The Voyage of The Dawn Treader'
Filed under: Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Fandom, 20th Century Fox, Family Films, DIY/Filmmaking, Newsstand, Movie Marketing, Remakes and Sequels, Images
Over the holiday weekend, we received our first official glimpse of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. This is a film that hasn't really attracted a lot of fervent interest or rumor-mongering, something that seems to have marked the ill-fated series as a whole.
But Dawn Treader is coming, with Michael Apted at the helm and 20th Century Fox directing its trade wind. I know I've stated it a million times before, but this is one Narnia installment that I'm desperate to see. It was my favorite of the books, and the film might actually work on a level that Wardrobe and Caspian haven't. There was more to be mined from those first two books than the films managed, but Dawn Treader is rather glossy and adventurous, a series of "What's that -- oh no!" moments that should make for a pretty entertaining movie. Sure, there's the heavy handed morality tale of selfish cousin Eustace, but that's a pretty simple thing to translate since it's a lesson as old as Grimm's -- bad kids are punished, regardless of religious inclination!
Narnia has chosen to launch its first images in a very unlikely place: Facebook. A production blog has started up there, and the first images were tacked onto the end of it. It should be fun to follow along with as we inch closer to its release date of December 2010. Meanwhile, the photos are in the gallery, and they certainly are pretty to look at.
Pass the Hanky: The Fall
Filed under: Drama, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Fandom
When I first saw The Fall, I was trying to slink out of the theater afterward without anyone noticing my red eyes and nose. Too bad someone caught me and asked me if I was okay. "Uh, sure," I stammered, and ran for the subway. Today when I revisited the movie on an airplane, I warned my seatmate that I would be sniffly and not to worry. About midway through, he took pity on me and handed me some napkins.
The Fall, directed by Tarsem Singh (he prefers to go simply by his first name), takes place in a hospitals in California in the '20s. Lee Pace plays Roy, a stuntman who had an accident that left his paralyzed from the waist down; his girlfriend left him for the smarmy star so he's broken-hearted as well. His costar is Catinca Untaru, who plays a mischievous, smart, adorable little girl named Alexandria, who has chubby cheeks and a broken arm from working in the orange groves. Untaru isn't an actor, and she's so young she's missing her two front teeth for most of the movie. She's also Romanian, and combined with how young she is, the way she talks is a pastiche of baby talk and broken English.
Roy begins to tell her a story about bandits who have been done wrong by the horrible Governor Odious and seek revenge against him at any cost. The magical scenes she imagines were filmed in real places around the world, and she pictures each bandit as people she knows or has seen in real life. The story starts out like an exciting tale but soon we all realize it reflects Roy's real-life story and deep depression.
Review: The Road
Filed under: Drama, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, New Releases, Theatrical Reviews
By: Eugene Novikov, reprinted from the Telluride Film Festival '09
Just before the kid was born, the world burned. We don't know why, and the characters don't talk about it -- perhaps they don't quite know themselves, or maybe they've decided that it no longer matters. The Boy's universe is grey, full of ash, dust, and the ruins of a civilization he never saw. This is all he knows. His mother, seeing no point in going on, killed herself shortly after his birth. She was not alone. Many of those who didn't take their own lives were soon murdered by the desperate and hungry.
Skip ahead nine or ten years. The kid and his father wander the barren roadways heading south toward the coast for no clear reason other than that it gives them a tangible goal toward which to strive. (And there's always the hope that the ocean will be something other than gray.) Every day is a knock-down, drag-out fight for survival. They run, hide, starve, and fight off attackers who want their food, or their clothes, or, at one point, their flesh.
I set the stage like this not to horrify you or to gross you out, but to give you a sense of the relentless, pervasive grimness of The Road -- and then to turn around and say that The Road may be the most profoundly optimistic and life-affirming film you will see this year. Those who have read Cormac McCarthy's novel of the same name won't be surprised by this. John Hillcoat's faithful, near-perfect adaptation beautifully captures McCarthy's synthesis of all-encompassing darkness and enduring hope.
Watch: Famous 'Matrix' Scene Re-Created with LEGOs
Filed under: Action, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Fandom, Trailers and Clips, Fan Made
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It's the day before a major holiday, and all you want to do is surf around looking for things to occupy your time before the boss finally lets you leave a drop early. Am I right? Well here's a little treat that will take up all of about a minute and a half of your time. Pieced together to celebrate the 10th anniversary of The Matrix, a group of freaks with 440 extra hours on their hands decided to recreate the famous "Trinity Help" sequence using LEGOs. This is the scene where Neo manages to dodge some agent bullets in super slow-mo before Trinity finally shows up to help her man squeeze out of a tough spot.
And yes, I wasn't joking -- it really did take a whopping 440 hours to put this together. The folks behind it even created a website dedicated solely to this project. In it, they describe the making-of process and include a side-by-side video comparison featuring both the real scene and the LEGO version (we included both after the jump). From their description:
Just in time for its 10th year anniversary, "Trinity Help" is a frame-accurate stop-frame animation of the famous bullet-dodge scene from the 1999 movie The Matrix, all done in Lego. By "frame accurate" we mean that we took all of the video frames from that part of the movie (that's nearly 900 frames for just 44 seconds of footage) and reproduced them all in Lego.
Early in the piece we decided we wanted to do everything "in camera". No wire-removal, no special effects, no crazy Photoshop tricks. We pretty much regret this now, but I guess it gives us bragging rights of some sort. We did do some colour correction and image stabilising, and at one point we edited a very small number of frames in one scene so that some minor background shake was taken out, but that's it.
Watch the video(s) after the jump.
Learn the Real Reason Darth Vader Wears a Helmet
Filed under: Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Fandom, George Lucas
Everyone loves the brooding, over-bearing look of Darth Vader; clad all in black, draped in a cape, wearing an almost featureless mask. We're given no glimpse of any speck of his flesh, forcing us to speculate what kind of person the embodiment of evil actually looks like, and when we're finally given a look at the man under the mask in Return of the Jedi, we understand the reason for his full-body suit: Vader is horribly disfigured, his body severely withered for reasons yet to be revealed.
However, protecting his crippled frame is not the real reason behind Darth Vader's helmet and breathing mask. The following may be common knowledge for die hard Star Wars trivia masters, but for those of us casually in love with the original trilogy, it should come as an amusing bit of insight into the design of one of cinemas most iconic characters. SCI-FI Wire recently interviewed Ralph McQuarrie, George Lucas' conceptual designer responsible for the look of much of what ended up in Star Wars, including Vader's appearance, and the reason he gave is more mundane than menacing:
DreamWorks Puts 'Real Steel' In Their Ring
Filed under: Action, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Sports, Deals, Paramount, DIY/Filmmaking, Newsstand, Dreamworks, Steven Spielberg
If you held out faint hope that Hugh Jackman wouldn't be helping Shawn Levy box robots, and would abandon it for a feature film adaptation of A Steady Rain, kiss it goodbye now. Variety reports that DreamWorks' Steven Spielberg and Stacey Snider have green-lit Real Steel, making it the studio's first big financial project since it split with Paramount, and had to find its own money.Spielberg was attached to the project as executive producer when it was first announced, and it seems that it's been a real passion project for him. DreamWorks bought the project back in 2005, and it was one of the films they held onto after splitting from Paramount. "When we took it with us, we really highlighted it as something we would put the pedal to metal on," said DreamWorks co-president of production Mark Sourian. "It's a project that Steven always wanted to do. It just came together rapidly after we left Paramount." The film will be made for the relatively low budget of $80 million, and will begin production next June.
With a low budget to avoid Transformers excess, perhaps the magic of Spielberg and Richard Matheson can overcome the kiddie tendencies of Shawn Levy, and turn it into something special. A lot of commenters mentioned that Matheson's story was adapted into an episode of the Twilight Zone called Steel. Happily, it's online and I've embedded it below the jump. It really is a good episode, and while Levy keeps stressing that his Real Steel is grounded in its "father-son relationship," I hope it can retain a bit of Matheson's grit. I could be happy with a robot version of Million Dollar Baby.
In Defense Of: 'The X-Files: I Want to Believe'
Filed under: Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Thrillers, Fan Rant
*There are spoilers here.*
I've been meaning to write this for a while, but wanted to wait until I could give The X-Files: I Want to Believe a second viewing, which I finally did yesterday, on beautiful Blu-Ray. I am a long-time X-Phile; the show, which I started watching around age 13, is one of my formative viewing experiences; I trace my current love for things ambiguous, fantastic and otherworldly squarely back to Chris Carter's brilliant creation. And I dissent in a big way from both the layman and fan consensus on I Want to Believe. I still think, as I did in the summer of 2008, that the movie is a fantastic X-Files episode. But more importantly, I still think it is a genuinely moving farewell to two beloved characters, and one of the most satisfying pieces of closure that any long-running series or franchise has ever given us.
One thing that I suspect threw people off was the movie's snowbound melancholy, replacing the apocalyptic terror of The X-Files' last big-screen outing, 1998's Fight the Future. There's some excitement here, and a few laughs, but the overall tone is more akin to "Beyond the Sea," the beloved, somber first-season episode that was more concerned with personal demons than actual ones. It's hard to fault moviegoers for expecting something bigger and louder out of what was, after all, pitched as the popular series' triumphant return. But it's also hard -- or at any rate it should be -- to fault Chris Carter and his team for wanting to take the movie in a different direction. Rather than have Mulder and Scully go out with a bang, they chose to put them to bed, give them a hug, and tuck in the covers.
Watch This: A 'Twilight' Intervention
Filed under: Action, Drama, Romance, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, New Releases, Trailers and Clips
"Team Jacob!" roars a trio of dudes in a bar. Drinks are flowing fast. "A typical horrible Monday just became amazing," gushes a woman who's about to go see a private screening of Twilight: New Moon. The crowd moves from the bar to what looks suspiciously like a high school theater to get amped up for some muscle-bound shirtless werewolf action."C'mon, get out of your seats! Are you ready?" The fans, who are all most certainly of drinking age, are definitely out of their seats and screaming. They're so ready!
"Too bad!" cackles the emcee, and the curtains part to show a young comedian named Skyler Stone who's there to stage an intervention, via FunnyorDie.
"Ladies and gentlemen, you are not going to see Twilight: New Moon tonight." For some reason (I think it has to do with alcohol), the audience is still cheering, but this statement brings a solitary "NO!" Stone continues, "This is a vampire intervention because you clearly don't know what the f*ck a vampire is!" Is that male laughter in the background? Wooing begins. Is this real or is it fake? Stone berates the audience and insults Rpatz with aplomb. Still, the cheering continues!
"Why are you cheering?!" he yells at them. "Do you understand you're not seeing Twilight tonight?"
Will there be a riot? Bloodshed? Will Stone leave the theater intact? Find out what happens after the jump.
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