Movie News: Is it a Bird? Is it a Plane? No… it’s that bloke from ‘The Tudors’ (A Superman Casting Update)

January 30, 2011 / saxonbullock2000 / 7 Comments

Zack Snyder’s new cinematic reboot of the Man of Steel just took a big step closer to actually happening, as he’s cast the title role. And who’s the actor stepping into the legendary blue-and-red spandex?

It’s Henry Cavill. And if your first thought is “Who’s that?” then you’re not exactly alone. Yet again, and fairly sensibly, they’ve gone for another fairly unknown actor (although nowhere near as unknown as Brandon Routh was when he was cast in Superman Returns) – British actor Cavill certainly can’t be described as a star, although he’s actually worked pretty consistently for the past ten years, and is currently best known for regularly getting his kit off in the luridly OTT historical drama The Tudors as nobleman Charles Brandon.

And my first thoughts? Well, only having seen one episode of The Tudors (I have what could be described as a ‘problem’ with anything that involves giving Jonathan Rhys Meyers the chance to either yell or pout), I can’t say that Cavill made a massive impression, and certainly isn’t as interesting as casting Andrew Garfield as Spider-Man. From the photos, Cavill’s certainly got the chin for the role, and he’s got that handsome if slightly anonymous thing down pat. Despite my dislike of Superman Returns, I thought Brandon Routh was the best thing in it and it’s a shame he’ll never get the chance to play the part again, but it does rather feel as if they’ve gone here for a safe relative unknown, rather than a risky out-of-nowhere blind-sider, which isn’t that surprising as Warner Bros really, really, really need this to work. There’s always the chance that Cavill may turn out to be really good , but to be honest, getting excited about this casting would involve getting excited about this movie in general, and I’m finding it rather difficult. The moment Snyder was signed, my interest in a new Superman film (even one being ‘shepherded’ by Christopher Nolan) plummeted – he’s a director who’ll certainly make something flashy and eye-catching, and I’m sure that his Superman film will, whatever the flaws, be better than the deeply misconceived Superman Returns (I admire Bryan Singer for attempting it, but good golly, that film didn’t work in a whole variety of ways), but ever since 300, he’s shown no sign of doing anything other than eye candy and visual bluster (even in Watchmen, which managed some good sequences, but fell flat as a piece of cinema). The new Superman will be slick and good-looking, but if it manages to capture a tenth of the spirit that the original two Richard Donner (and part-Richard Lester) films managed, I will be seriously surprised…

(Of course, it doesn’t help that one of the main reasons Snyder got Superman in the first place is that he’s good at doing projects quickly – Warner Bros not only need this film to be succesful, they need it to go into production pretty damn soon, otherwise their legal battle with the family of Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster gets even more complicated than before, and they risk losing the rights to one of the best-known superheroes in the world. It’d be nice to be optimistic, but I can think of very few examples of films pushed into production to meet a precise release date that have actually turned out well. But – I guess we’ll have to wait and see…)

UPDATE: It’s just been pointed out (by someone else) on Twitter that we now have a situation where three of the biggest superheroes are all played by British actors (the others being Andrew Garfield in Spider-Man, and Christian Bale in Batman). Not sure exactly what that signifies, but felt it was worth sharing…

UPDATE: Via www.slashfilm.com, it’s been revealed that the other contenders on the shortlist were Matthew Goode (best known as Ozymandias in Watchmen), Matthew Bomer (from TV shows Chuck and Tru Calling), Arnie Hammer (who played the Winklevoss twins in The Social Network), Joe Manganiello (Alcide in S3 of True Blood) and Colin O’Donaghue (now in daft-looking religious horror The Rite). While Arnie Hammer might have been interesting after his work in The Social Network, I think Cavill is actually the most potentially interesting of the bunch, and it certainly says what they were looking for – a late twentysomething absurdly handsome actor with the right kind of chin. And while Matthew Goode can be a good actor, after his oddball turn as Ozymandias in Watchmen, I’d rather not see him near any superhero characters for a while…

Movie News: The Unstoppable Craziness of Bollywood Sci-Fi Action Film “Enthiran”

January 26, 2011 / saxonbullock2000 / Leave a comment

There are some things in life that need to be seen to be believed – and quite obviously, upcoming Bollywood SF action blockbuster Enthiran is one of them. Found via www.slashfilm.com (and tweeted by @jessnevins), words simply cannot describe the level of WTF insanity on display here, in a ten-minute clip that appears to be from a Russian dub of the original Indian dialogue. But trust me – you really don’t need the dialogue to enjoy the hell out of this kind of overblown ludicrousness. Strap yourselves in, and prepare for your jaw to hit the floor in sheer amazement at the fact that this film actually exists…

News: X Marks The Spot (X-Men: First Class – The Photos…)

January 19, 2011 / saxonbullock2000 / 7 Comments

Following on from the Batman post, we’ve also recently gotten our first proper look at upcoming X-Men prequel X-Men: First Class, charting the beginnings of the rivalry between future baldy Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and master of magnetism – and slightly daft helmets – Erik Lehnsherr, aka Magneto (Michael Fassbender). Things have been remarkably quiet on the X-Men: First Class front publicity wise, especially considering it’s out this Sunmer – it’s being directed by Matthew Vaughn, who does have a good eye as a filmmaker (although don’t get me started on Stardust), and does at least seem more promising than the frankly borderline diabolical X-Men Origins: Wolverine, but there’s lots to play for, and these first publicity shots… well, they’re not exactly instilling major confidence, but neither are they absolutely screaming “Disaster”.

I mean, let’s be honest – group shots of more than about five actors almost always end up looking cheesy. And it might have been nice if they’d gone for something a little more dynamic than “Let’s get them to put their hands on their hips on an empty black set!” Anyhow, here we have (from left to right) Fassbender as Magneto, Rose Byrne as Moira McTaggert, January Jones as Emma Frost (and yes, that costume is completely true to the comics), and Jason Flemyng as the terrifyingly coiffured Azazel, a character of whom I know nothing thanks to the mind-buggering complexity of X-Men chronology and mythology (outside the Chris Claremont and Grant Morrison runs, I’m basically lost).

And here we have Hank McCoy, aka Beast (Nicholas Hoult), Havok (Lucas Till), Angel Aslvadore (Zoe Kravitz), Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence, stepping into the skimpy prosthetics of Rebecca Romjin from the original films) and Charles Xavier himself (McAvoy). The one thing I am liking from these shots is the visual approach they’re going for – they’ve set the film in the Sixties (the original setting of the comics, although it doesn’t fit in with the first film’s chronology in the slightest, with X-Men, made in 2000, being set ‘A few years from now’), and they do seem to have embraced the groovy comics vibe (especially with Emma Frost’s costumes). The management at 20th Century Fox have an extremely bad reputation for micro-managing franchise films and ending up with bland messes (X-Men: The Last Stand being a case in point), and there are a lot of characters here to fit comfortably into one movie (with the sheer number of cast members being a constant problem that only Bryan Singer seemed able to handle). I am going to do my best to remain cautiously optimistic – something that even just got near the quality of X2 would make me extremely happy. Of course, whether I’m still feeling like this once the first trailer hits is a completely different story…

And – literally as I finished writing this post, more photos have just hit the net, via this set report online at Hero Complex:

January Jones as Emma Frost looking very… well, very Emma Frost, with a sleazy-as-ever Kevin bacon as Sebastian Shaw. Nobody rocks the sideburns quite like the Bacon.

James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender as Xavier and Magneto in full “Yes, we are having a friendly chess match, but by the end of the movie we shall be BITTEREST ENEMIES!” mode. And is it wrong that I find the carpet in this shot fascinating?

And a “Let’s do the show right here!” group shot – I suspect that, at some point in this scene, someone will look at an old building and say “Hey- you know, this would make a brilliant school for the gifted with added underground lair and Thunderbirds-style hatches, don’t you think?”

Okay, moderately more impressed now. But we shall see how this all turns out… (*rubs hands together in suspicion*)

*UPDATE*

(And as a final addition to this post, here’s the first teaser poster. Because nothing says X-Men like… a whacking great Photoshopped ‘X’.)

*UPDATE – AGAIN*

Okay – via http://www.slashfilm.com, it seems like Matthew Vaughn didn’t like those shots either. A couple of helpful quotes:

“I freaked out on them yesterday. I don’t know where the hell that came from. I don’t think it’s a Fox image. It’s not a pre-approved image. When I found out, I said, what the fuck is this shit, and Fox is running around trying to figure out what happened as well. I agree. It’s like a bad photoshop, which maybe it was by someone. It didn’t reflect the movie. I was shocked when I saw it. I was like ‘Jesus Christ’…

“I’m a fan of X-Men We’re not bastardizing X-Men, I’m trying to get them back to being whole again.”

“The costumes are blue and yellow as well, because fuck it, lets take it back it the original. Also, by the way, those costumes are hardly in the movie. The main costumes are like these cool 60’s James Bond…”

Plus, from there, a couple of new pictures:

HELMET!!!

CONCENTRATION!!!

Movie Review – Schizopolis

January 14, 2011 / saxonbullock2000 / 1 Comment

CAST: Steven Soderbergh, Betsy Brantley, David Jensen, Eddie Jemison, Mike Malone ~ WRITER/DIRECTOR: Steven Soderbergh ~ YEAR: 1996

What’s it About?: Fletcher Munsen is a low-level corporate drone, part of the machine that keeps lifestyle guru (and author of the earth-shattering manifesto ‘Eventualism’) T. Azimuth Schwitters on the rails. He has a speech to write. He has a wife who’s having an affair. And he also has an exact duplicate – a dentist named Jeffrey Korchek – with whom he suddenly switches lives, leading to some extremely bizarre consequences…

The Film: Even with his wildly eclectic filmography (going all the way from the intense indie drama of sex, lies and videotape to the crime capers of Ocean’s Eleven and the sci-fi of Solaris), there’s very little in Steven Soderbergh’s work that will prepare you for Schizopolis. Filmed in 1996 as a stripped-down, guerilla-style filmmaking endeavour (after his last Hollywood film, The Underneath, proved to be a creativity-sapping disappointment), Schizopolis is a freewheeling mix of corporate satire, sketch comedy and absurdist insanity that’s a hell of a lot sharper and more complex than its initial scattergun structure would make you think.

Right from the opening, where Soderbergh addresses the audience (explaining that ‘in the event you find certain sequences or ideas confusing, please bear in mind that this is your fault, not ours”), the whole film has a seriously anarchic feel. It’s one of the most deliberately playful and comic things Soderbergh has ever done, with the film divided into three specific sections, and various scenes intercut alongside news reports, random cutaways (including a running gag of a man, naked except for a ‘Schizopolis’ T-shirt, constantly trying to escape from white-coated officials) and bizarre intertitles. It’s the cinematic equivalent of Soderbergh letting his hair down and just running wild – and for all the moments where Schizopolis is fantastically off-the-wall and undisciplined, there’s a surprising level of conceptual weirdness holding it all together.

Above everything, it’s a film about communication. From the way that randy insect exterminator Elmo Oxygen talks in fractured doublespeak to the housewives he seduces (“Jigsaw. Uh, fragment chief butter. Chief surgery mind?”) to the meaningless exchanges between Munsen and his wife (“Generic greeting!” “Generic greeting returned!”), Schizopolis is a film about human communication and how rarely it actually works – the fact that events can have a completely different perspective for different people, and that we rarely seem to know even the people who we’re supposed to be closest to. That this is wrapped up in a loose narrative alongside Philip K Dick-style reality shifts and news announcements about the state of Rhode Island being sold and turned into a gigantic mall just makes the whole film a bewildering and yet oddly fascinating experience.

Heavily influenced by Monty Python and the films of Richard Lester (best known for his work on Superman II and III, but also for directing the classic Beatles movie A Hard Day’s Night and other energetic works of Sixties cinema), Schizopolis is the kind of film that goes out of its way to confuse, but is also frequently hilarious, with Soderbergh himself (in his only onscreen acting role) turning out to be surprisingly good at deadpan comedy. The film gets an even weirder real-life twist with the knowledge that Munsen’s wife is played by actress Betsy Brantley, Soderbergh’s wife of the time (who he was in the process of divorcing while Schizopolis was made), and the tangled relationship between Munsen and his wife does have an odd sense of melancholy that you wouldn’t expect in such an off-the-wall movie.

It’s little seen, but Schizopolis is one of the key films to understanding Soderbergh as a director – it freed him up, and you can clearly see how his wild experimentation here impacted on almost all his future film work. The sheer level of energy and invention in Schizopolis is something to behold, and above everything, it’s a great example of a filmmaker heading off in an unexpected direction and simply trying to have as much fun as he possibly can.

The Verdict: Soderbergh’s surreal low-budget experiment is quite definitely not for everybody – but the mixture of broad comedy, bizarre satire and reality-bending weirdness makes it an absolute must for any lovers of cult cinematic oddities.

[xrr rating=4.5/5]

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Movie Review – TRON: Legacy

January 12, 2011 / saxonbullock2000 / Leave a comment

YEAR: 2010 ~ CAST: Jeff Bridges, Garrett Hedlund, Olivia Wilde, Bruce Boxleitner, James Frain, Beau Garrett ~ WRITERS: Edward Kitiss & Adam Horowitz ~ DIRECTOR: Joseph Kosinski

The Backstory: In 1982, videogame designer Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) tried to break into the system of his ex-employers ENCOM, but instead was transported into the world inside the computer – a realm of adventure and danger, where he fought against the Master Control Program with the help of a program named Tron (Bruce Boxleitner).

What’s it About?: Twenty years after Kevin Flynn vanished, his rebellious 27-year old son Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund) follows a possible clue to his disappearence, and ends up inside another world. Flynn has created a self-contained digital universe – the Grid – but he’s been trapped inside it for twenty years by his alter ego, the program CLU, and now there’s very little time before the only escape route closes forever…

The Film: We are quite definitely living in strange times. The quest to re-sell and repackage the 1980s (whether it’s TV series or resurrected movies) over the last few years has been an exceptionally bizarre experience, but nothing so far has been quite so odd as Disney’s decision to do a massive-budget, 3-D blockbuster sequel to – of all things – Tron. The 1982 cult curio has built up a strong reputation thanks to its kooky story and the fantastically stylised early-CGI visuals (which, despite the technical limitations, seem to somehow get more stylish the older they get), but it was a box-office flop at the time, and nobody’s idea of a dead-cert for a major-league franchise revival.

That we’ve simply gotten a TRON sequel is strange and wonderful enough – but after watching the film in brain-scrambling IMAX 3D, I can’t help feeling that we’ve ended up with this generation’s version of the 1980s screen adaptation of Flash Gordon. That’s not exactly what Disney set out to acheive, admittedly, and it’s also true that TRON: Legacy isn’t anywhere near the campery or sheer unadulterated fun of Mike Hodges’ absurdly colourful 1982 spectacular (partly because the central concept of TRON is, to be honest, so wonderfully ridiculous that it does need to be taken very seriously in order to work).

TRON: Legacy is, however, the closest anyone’s come in a long time to the style of pulpy adventure films that were so common during the 1980s, managing to be thrilling in a way that isn’t quite the usual adrenaline rush that modern Hollywood specialises in. TRON: Legacy is absolutely an Adventure film, rather than an Action film – in the same way as Avatar, it’s all about the worldbuilding and the environment (with story and character coming a slightly weak second place), and both films also use a hefty dollop of classic Joseph Campbell-style storytelling in order to transport us to into their universes.

It’s true that TRON: Legacy doesn’t manage this as succesfully as Avatar did (with one of that film’s true strengths being the fact that it is a deeply immersive spectacle), mainly thanks to some very clunky storytelling. It’s also true that Garret Hedlund largely falls into the same category as Flash Gordon’s Sam J. Jones in being a slightly engaging but mostly rather oaken lead actor. In fact, TRON: Legacy is packed full of problems, and frequently feels like it’s only a couple of scenes away from collapsing in on itself, while being as unlikely a franchise-starter as I’ve ever seen. The occasionally sluggish pacing combined with some very incoherent story choices don’t help in the slightest, and TRON: Legacy is certainly a long-way from being a top-notch blockbuster film.

And yet… it’s actually stuck with me a lot longer than Avatar did, and I’ve got the odd feeling that I actually prefer it, despite Cameron’s 3-D opus undoubtedly being the more polished and well-structured film. Much of this is that TRON: Legacy is such a tremendous visual spectacle, one that really needs to be viewed on the biggest screen available, while also being a film that does take us somewhere new, even if it’s just in terms of style and visuals. The way it expands and realises the world of TRON is never less than impressive – there’s a lush, faintly ludicrous and yet undeniably sexy style to the production design and costumes, a European comic-book visual sensibility that keeps the eye candy at a truly glorious level, from the head-whirling disc combat to the climactic air-battle. The look of the film is backed up with the sound – and again, as with Flash Gordon and its timelessly over-the-top Queen music, TRON: Legacy would be much weaker if it wasn’t for the sharp, driving and surprisingly powerful score from Daft Punk, a soundtrack that’s snapping at the heels of Hans Zimmer’s work on Inception for the ‘Best of 2010’ award.

Ultimately, what I really liked about TRON: Legacy is that it’s actually trying to tackle some interesting philosophical questions about life, creation, freedom of information, and the kind of future the digital world offers us. Yes, it’s doing it in a frequently garbled and half-baked way, but the screenplay does a good job of mirroring certain aspects of the real world in the universe of the Grid, and the apparent ‘Hey kids- Piracy is cool!’ subtext in its first twenty minutes isn’t anywhere near as simplistic as it first appears. It’s true that much of the ‘meat’ of the film is thrown at the audience in a single massive flashback sequence, and there’s so much thematic material in the screenplay that I can’t help wishing screenwriters Edward Kitiss and Adam Horowitz could have managed another rewrite, or at least smoothed out some of the clumsier dialogue and exposition (especially in the extremely weak opening sequence, where Kevin Flynn explains the Grid to the 7-year-old Sam as a bedtime story).

However, for all its flaws – the occasionally hard-to-follow battle scenes, the overplayed one-liners, the fact that the CGI used to de-age Jeff Bridges to play CLU is still a few years from being consistently photorealistic – I’d still far rather see a film like TRON: Legacy aim high and fall short, than just getting another immersive yet unsurprising fantasy journey like Avatar, no matter how well-executed it is. A continuation of the saga seems deeply unlikely (and slightly frustrating, considering a couple of very deliberate flapping plot threads at the story’s climax), but despite all its flaws, there are kids out there whose minds will be blown by TRON: Legacy – and I can’t help feeling this is yet another slow-burning cult movie just waiting to happen.

The Verdict: Ignore any of the Star Wars prequel comparisons some negative reviews have thrown around– TRON: Legacy may be loaded with issues in its storytelling, pace and dialogue, but it’s also one of the strongest visual experiences to hit the screen in a long time, backed with the brilliant Daft Punk soundtrack, and a story that’s smarter than it first appears. Plus it’s got Olivia Wilde looking hot in a rubber catsuit, which simply can’t be a bad thing…

[xrr rating=3.5/5]

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Saxon Bullock

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