Cinematical

I was glad I opted to watch the opening night shorts program at this year's Sundance Film Festival because it was packed with four fantastic short films. One of those (arguably the favorite of the bunch) was an animated film called Logorama, written and directed by the French duo of François Alaux and Herve de Crecy. Now nominated for a Best Animated Short Oscar, Logorama takes place in a world full of corporate and brand logos (in which roughly 2,500 appear), and it follows a few different stories that all intertwine with one another. Honestly, it's bloody brilliant, and I guarantee it'll be the best thing you watch all week.

At Sundance, a bunch of us wondered how these guys could get away with making something like this without facing hundreds of lawsuits, and then we wondered whether legal matters would ever stop it from existing in some form online. Perhaps someone with a law background could chime in here, but in the meantime you simply must head after the jump to watch this film. My favorite part is the Joker-esque Ronald McDonald, but it's also the tiniest details that truly make this film a work of art. You may normally not pay attention to the short film categories at the Oscars (partly because they're not as widely distributed as the feature films), but after watching Logorama I think you'll be rooting for it come March 7th.

Check it out after the jump and let us know what you think.

It's a bird, it's a plane ... it's Warner Bros. asking Christopher Nolan to pretty please resurrect their Superman franchise and do something cool with it! According to Deadline Hollywood, Nolan has been asked to come in and sort of "mentor" the next Superman movie, and it won't be a sequel to Superman Returns, but instead the beginning of a brand new franchise. Furthermore, DH says Nolan probably won't direct -- especially since David Goyer, Jonah Nolan and Chris Nolan are all busy planning and writing the next Batman installment as we speak -- so what will he do, exactly, when it comes to the new Superman? That's not clear yet, and DH stresses that the film is still in its real early stages of development (ahem, I think they're bringing him in to lay the groundwork for a Justice League movie, but we'll see ...)

Still, knowing Nolan is somehow involved in the rebirth of Superman should at the very least breathe some excited life into a franchise that a lot of folks have kinda lost faith in because, let's face it, the fans feel Warner Bros. had lost faith in it, too. One insider told DH, "We know what we don't want to do. But we don't know what we want to do. We learned a lot from the last movie, and we want to get it right this time." Obviously Nolan has success in rebooting a DC Comics franchise, as evidenced by the work he's done with Batman. But Superman is a different beast all together, and one imagines they'll start with trying to ground the franchise a bit more with a freakier set of villains and perhaps a more relatable, down-to-earth storyline. Not that we need Clark Kent making MySpace references for 120 minutes, but I could see them focusing more on the burden Superman is carrying -- that "weight of the world" angle -- and less on his little romance with Lois Lane.

What do you think? What would you like to see them do with the new Superman?

It's either this year's The Wrestler, or the film equivalent of that nasty drunk at the bar who's just slowly making the biggest ass of himself with each passing minute. In the works for 10 years now, Mitch Glazer's Passion Play has just wrapped production and star Mickey Rourke sat down for a brief chat with Entertainment Weekly in which, among other things, he calls Megan Fox "probably the best young actress I've ever worked with" and at the same time bashes one or both of his Wrestler co-stars by saying "there wasn't much chemistry there." Oh Mickey, what will you say next?

In Passion Play, Rourke plays a down-and-out trumpet player who looks to a young winged angel for redemption in 1950s Los Angeles. On Fox's character, Rourke notes, "She has wings, so she was sort of an oddity trapped in a carnival act. She's been a prisoner her whole life, and she has no understanding of trust. She's very vulnerable and delicate." It's not hard to see similarities with Rourke's character in The Wrestler, but he tries to distance himself from that film and its story (in an odd way) by criticizing the lack of chemistry on set and then noting: "As far as the redemption is concerned, it's almost fate. It's not so much that my character is seeking redemption, it's almost like it falls in my lap by accident. And I try and hold on to it as much as I can."

Check out the rest over at EW. Passion Play will most likely debut at some point in 2010.

Just when we started to get used to what could become a really fun Halloween box office to-the-death match-up between the Saw franchise and the up-and-coming Paranormal Activity franchise comes word that in all probability Saw VII will mark the final installment in the franchise. Speaking to a UK radio show, Saw IV, V, VI and VII co-writer Patrick Melton revealed that while the plan was to continue making Saw films until at least part eight, the lackluster box office showing for Saw VI has pretty much put the nail in this franchise's coffin.

Melton says (via Latino Review), "I think it's going to end with Saw VII. I have a very strong feeling its going to end with Saw VII. That's something we're debating now. You saw in previous interviews or discussions where we thought Saw VIII would be the last one where we had the first trilogy and the second trilogy and then sort of a grand finale wrapped up in two films. But frankly because Saw VI hasn't performed as well as we anticipated, the idea is well why make two movies when we can make one really excellent movie that wraps up as best we can? And it's going to be in 3-D which sort of adds to the spectacle. So if you had to ask me, I don't own the franchise, nor do I run the studio, but I have a feeling, a strong feeling that it's going to be Saw VII which will be also known as Endgame. And nothing's official yet, but that's where we're hoping things will go."

As the writers slave over another draft of the Ghostbusters 3 script -- with production hopefully beginning later this year -- some more news regarding the film's storyline has slipped out across these internets, with one aspect being an exclusive to Cinematical.

Possible spoilers for Ghostbusters 3 to follow ...

First up is the news that Bill Murray has confirmed his other-worldly role in the film. A few months back, Sigourney Weaver had let slip that Murray was going to be playing a ghost in the film -- a rumor that was later squashed by folks who claimed that particular storyline was featured in a very old draft. However, Murray has now gone on record as not only disliking the second Ghostbusters movie (something he's said before) and thinking that Groundhog Day should've been a bigger hit, but also noting that he would only return to the Ghostbusters franchise if they made his character a ghost. He says, "I said to them, 'I'll do it if you kill me off in the first reel.' So now they are going to have me as a ghost in the film." Murray as a ghost? I hope it works. What do you think?

Meanwhile, as most talk revolves around the returning actors and the identity of the new recruits, little has been said about the film's mythology and who (or what) the Ghostbusters will be battling this time around. Well, Cinematical has it on very good authority that as recent as this past summer, the central mythology of the sequel was being based on Zoroastrianism, which is one of the earliest religions on record. Like with most religions, the war between good and evil is at its central core, and in terms of evil there's Ahriman: the god of darkness, the eternal destroyer of good, personification and creator of evil, bringer of death and disease.

Is Ahriman the film's villain?

Pictured: Saw creators Leigh Whannell and James Wan [photo credit: Sahlan Hayes]

While Paramount and Lionsgate battle it out for the top spot at the Halloween box office with Paranormal Activity and Saw sequels in 2010, the original creators of both those properties are actually teaming up on a new low-budget film called Insidious. Following the grassroots success of Paranormal Activity, producers Oren Peli (who also directed), Jason Blum and Steven Schneider signed a five-picture deal with Alliance Films to produce low-budget genre pics. As such, the first film under that deal will be Insidious, which comes from Saw creators James Wan and Leigh Whannell.

Wan will direct the film off a script by Whannell, and while they're currently keeping the story under lock and key, Wan said that Whannell's script "took a haunted house movie with all the usual conventions and twisted it on its head." Shock had reported at the end of January on the film when it was under the title The Further, and here's how they described it: "Further tells the story of a young family that makes the terrifying discovery that the body of their comatose boy has become a magnet for malevolent entities, while his consciousness lies trapped in the dark and insidious realm known as The Further."

No word yet on how low budget these films will be, but considering that Paranormal Activity clocked in somewhere around $11,000, there's a chance these could be really low budget genre films, which is good because, in my opinion, it'll force these folks to get creative and find ways to freak us out on the real cheap instead of having millions of dollars and endless amounts of special effects to cover up a weak script.

We know a lot of our readers (and even some of our writers) like to partake in AMC's annual tradition of showing all of the best picture nominees on one day, which is why every year we like to give you the details on it when they become available. Of course, the whole 10 best picture nominees thing has thrown a small wrench in the usual one-day marathon, and, as such, this year AMC has decided to break it up into two days: February 27th and March 6th, both Saturdays.

The exact schedules haven't been announced yet, but AMC is currently asking you to vote on which four movies they should show alongside a 3D version of Avatar on February 27th. (If it was up to me, I'd vote District 9, The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds and Up, this way you start out with fantasy, move toward sci-fi, and then back-to-back war films, capping it all off with a nice, sweet adventure story. The perfect program, in my opinion ... but what do you think?)

Details can be found over on the AMC website. The tickets for this event will run you about $60 for a two-day pass (if purchased online; $50 at the box office), and $30 for a one-day pass. That ticket gets you entry to the theater, as well as a free large popcorn and unlimited refills. Not a bad way to spend your Saturday, no?

So who's going this year?

Let's face it: The only reason most of us are actually watching the Superbowl this Sunday is because of the commercials. Unless you live in Indianapolis or New Orleans, and/or you're a die hard fan of one of those teams, you could honestly care less about the outcome of the actual football game. Instead, we're more interested in who is spending millions of dollars in an effort to sell us on their product in under a minute.

Good news is at least Fox doesn't have the Superbowl this year, so we won't have to spend four hours staring at that stupid robot football player dancing on the left side of the screen. But we still need to deal with the same old game coverage, and wouldn't it be nice if for just this one day (and game), some of Hollywood's most prolific filmmakers could get behind the camera? The folks over at SlateV imagined just that -- and they've put together a pretty hilarious video showing us what the Superbowl would look like if Quentin Tarantino, David Lynch, Wes Anderson, Jean-Luc Godard and Werner Herzog directed it. The only thing that's missing is a nod to Michael Bay, though something tells me they couldn't find enough Superbowl video with helicopters, explosions and half naked drugged-up dancers.

Check out the video after the jump, then let us know which famous directors you'd like to see helm the Superbowl.

Cinematical has just received three brand new exclusive stills for Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer, which will world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival this month. Based on the novel by Robert Harris (who also penned the screenplay), Polanski's latest stars Ewan McGregor as a professional ghost writer who's brought in at the last minute to help the former British Prime Minister (Pierce Brosnan) finish his memoir after the PM's previous ghost writer (and close friend) mysteriously drowned. When he begins to discover some dark secrets the PM may have been trying to hide, our ghost writer suddenly finds this chance of a lifetime slowly turn into a life and death situation. The film also stars Kim Cattrall, Olivia Williams and Timothy Hutton.

We've posted the recently-released trailer for this stylish-looking, noir-ish political thriller after the jump, and you can scope out Polanski's latest for yourself when it reaches theaters in limited release on February 19th (after premiering in Berlin on February 12th). Click into the gallery below to check out the three exclusive photos.

I'll admit that there's probably only a few of you who are freaky enough to find this newsworthy, so I'll just address you and the rest can skip on over to a post with a little more meat on its bones. Our friends over at Urlesque have dropped us a line to let us know of a very peculiar moment during one of the final scenes of Back to the Future III that up until now has gone unnoticed by myself and probably most of you, too. It's a moment that has to do with one of those creepy kids that Doc Brown had with his gal Clara, and it occurs when they're standing on the time machine train while Doc goes all "Wizard of Oz" on Marty and Jennier ("You can do anything you want to do in life, just click your heels together three times and forget this sequel ever happened!")

I'm not going to ruin the moment in the post, so you'll have to head after the jump to watch the video for yourself. And then I want you to come back and tell us just what the hell is going on here. Was this kid trying to tell us something? Warn us of some impending street race with Needles? I have no idea - this completely stumped me (and I'm a huge Back to the Future fan). Watch it after the jump and let us know what you think.