If you're still trying to decide whether you want to go to see Speed Racer tonight, maybe this will help your decision. Yahoo has posted the first seven minutes of the film, which you can check out above. Man, if car races looked half that cool, I'd be a total fan.
I know, some of you aren't getting the whole appeal of this flick, and frankly, I've never been interested in the story until this movie. There's just something about a real-life cartoon that looks all sorts of cool. (I've always wondered what a cartoon-turned-live action film would look like if it was created in a more cartoonish manner.) And major props for making the theme song front and center. I remember how ticked I was when I left during the credits of Spider-Man and missed the theme song I had waited the whole film for.
Check out James' review of the film here, and stay tuned for Scott's review at 11:30AM.
I think it's kind of funny that in Eugene's post about T4's start date, he says: "barring some Terry Gilliam-scale disaster." I wonder if the disaster could be a long and arduous SAG strike? The New Zealand Herald (Reuters) pointed out today that the production is moving on despite the distinct possibility that the movie industry could get hit with another strike very soon.
Right now, the SAG contract expires on June 30, which could very easily become the start of another strike. (Union leaders say they hope to reach an agreement, and of course they do -- but that doesn't mean they'll get one.) Nevertheless, Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins has started filming in New Mexico this week, throwing caution to the wind.
But this doesn't mean they'll speed through it. A source told Reuters there is no intention to finish production by June 30, and that legal precautions have been taken in case the strike happens. But still -- stopping for an undisclosed period of time right in the middle of production is very far from ideal.
It seems a bit cocky to me, to go forward now rather than waiting, but what do you think?
Should T4 be moving full steam ahead regardless of the strike? Or, is this just a careless or cocky move?
I know that Ben Foster is a really talented actor and I'm quite sure that he will go really, really far in his career. I wouldn't even be surprised if he becomes a Robert Redford type -- hugely popular and long-lasting. But still ... whether he's got wings as a mutant, or helps some creepy vampires attack a small Alaskan town, to me he's always the cute, goofy kid from Disney's Flash Forward.
Although the show was after my time, I would always stop to watch it when flipping through the channels. It was tres cute and starred Foster as Tucker and Firefly's Jewel Staite as Becca -- two best friends and neighbors who have been close since birth and are now in middle school. Above you get to check out their nervous kiss and final moment of the show. Man, they were cute kidlets.
This one is even better to check out Foster as Tucker, but embedding was disabled.
I don't think it will be quite like the clip above, but we're about to get a new serving of William Tell. Variety reports that producers Fred Caruso and D. Constantine Conte are bringing Tell's story to the big screen in The Adventures of William Tell. Stunt coordinator and second AD Ian Quinn is going to make his directorial debut with the $60 million production, which was adapted from Friedrich von Schiller's play by Cornelius Schregle.
But here's the kicker, aside from probably hearing that super-speedy overture in a non-Lone Ranger setting -- it will star Charlie Chaplin's granddaughter, Kiera Chaplin. She will play Tell's wife in the film, although there's no word on who will play Tell himself. Now, we all know the music, but do you know the story? It's about the 14th century legend of a man who was forced to shoot an apple off of his son's head to win his freedom from some jerky Austrian occupiers. "The event is said to have triggered a rebellion by the Swiss against their Austrian rules and transformed Tell into a mythical freedom fighter." (... as well as one very sneaky and insidious song.) Production will start on the film this fall, with a release schedule for 2010.
You know, they say that you shouldn't go into business with family and friends. Yet many people still do, and many people also begin to take the advice to heart sooner or later. But what about people you meet in a support group? That sounds totally rational, doesn't it? Let's take it a bit further -- imagine you go into business with strangers you know all have anger issues. It sounds like hell in real life, but may make for a funny film on the big screen.
Variety reports that Heather Graham, Jennifer Coolidge, Matthew Settle (the cool art dad from Gossip Girl), and Amber Heard have signed on to star in a new black dramedy called Ex-terminators, which was written by Suzanne Weinert, and will be the feature directorial debut for Scrubs helmer John Inwood. So yes, this film will focus on "three women who meet in an anger-management therapy group and decide to form a traditional business using very untraditional methods."
This is feeling like one of those projects that could very easily be good, and just as easily be stereotypical and over-the-top bad. Whichever it ends up being, I imagine it will have a healthy dose of quirk involved, considering all the time Inwood has spent on Scrubs. Production began last week in Austin.
With every passing story I read about border control or security insanity, I'm beginning to think that once you have any responsibility for your country's safety, you go insane. Everyday objects become suspect (like a friend harassed in the US for having a couple pictures of an ex amongst the pics he was traveling with), and sometimes, objects are given extraordinary value. I was once charged a couple hundred dollars in Canadian tariffs for a Buffy DVD that was sent to me as a gift, and had to prove that the box set wasn't worth their astronomical estimated cost. But I guess I can consider myself lucky that "Buffy" didn't make the border powers that be think the discs were porn.
Canoe reports that a new Canadian film from John N. Smith (Dangerous Minds) was held at the border because of its name: Love and Savagery. The romantic drama headed to Ireland last month to shoot some scenes, and then the footage was shipped to Montreal for processing, where it was stopped by the border patrol. Smith says: "There was a big kerfuffle and they suspected us of being involved in the pornography trade. They were insisting they were going to send it off to the RCMP lab to develop it to see if we were engaged in pornography." This created a bit of a panic as they worried about the potential damage RCMP processing would have on the footage.
When word hit last year that John Waters was going to make a children's movie, I was all sorts of excited -- the King of Sleaze branching out into new and impressionable territory! I imagined kid-ified versions of his past films, or just what was in store for a film with the name "Fruitcake." But then there was nothing, and the Waterific news seemed like a distant memory ... until now!
The Hollywood Reporter posts that Parker Posey and Johnny Knoxville have signed on to star in the film. This will be Ms. Posey's first foray into the world of Waters, which is ridiculously long overdue, while Knoxville is following John right out of A Dirty Shame. There's no word on who they'll play, but this is what we know of the story: It focuses on a boy named after his favorite dessert. (ew) "He runs away from home during the holidays after he and his parents are caught shoplifting meat, then meets up with a runaway girl raised by two gay men [My Two Dads!] and searching for her birth mother."
Parker and Johnny could be ma and pop itching for some free meat, or maybe he's one of the gay men and she's the birth mother. Whoever they play, there is absolutely no way I'll miss this movie. Not with Waters and Posey together. I just wish this was the sort of film that would have a set visit. You can definitely expect to hear more from me as the cast fills out, but it will take a little while to get to us -- John plans to film it over a real winter.
Oh, Ashton. He's the little train that just keeps on trying. At least this latest bit of news doesn't have anything to do with romantic comedy. That, at least, is a plus. According to Ace Showbiz, Ashton Kutcher visited Ryan Seacrest's radio show yesterday and told the host that he's starting to think about making a feature film of Punk'd: "I was actually walking down the street in New York yesterday and thought, 'What if I did Punk'd: The Movie? Like a full on feature film of Punk'd.'"
But it also seems to be more than just the passing notion that he suggests. Kutcher went on to say: "I got a plan. But if I reveal the plan then everyone's going to know when it's going down." To me, that says that he's planning one big, full-scale trick on a whole lot of his celebrity friends.
I must admit: I've watched a few episodes back in the day and they can be funny, in the same way any elaborate joke is. But can it make a good feature film? Sure, Jackass headed to the big screen a few times, but that's a whole different sort of film. Shocked celebrity faces and laughter isn't quite the same thing as rabid stupidity in action with crazy injury.
I just had to share this picture with you guys, which was nabbed from a collect of orange-tee pics up over at Just Jared. Doesn't it seem like we just went back in time? If Lindsay Lohan wasn't sporting the blonde locks in the picture above, it almost looks like this was taken during the good old days of Lohan, when she was a popular, upcoming actress, rather than a girl struggling with personal problems and tabloid frenzies.
As I told you the other day, Lindsay will have a short stint on the show, starting with the season finale this year. She's playing an old classmate of Betty's who was bitchy to Betty back in the day, but is now down on her luck.
I think this might just be the way for LiLo to work on her career -- not something that regresses her back to kid fare, but something that merges her pre-struggle past with the hopes of her present. I could be fooling myself, but it'd be nice to see the tide change for the troubled ex child stars we hear about so much these days.
Foster will play an army dude who is assigned to one of the crappiest jobs out there, aside from cannon fodder. He gets teamed up with someone he doesn't like and has to inform families when their loved ones have died in combat. Somehow, he ends up falling for a soldier's widow, which I imagine complicates matters. THR goes on to state that this is being billed as "a poignant, life-affirming road movie." As a "road movie," it could be that Foster drives around to tell these families. However, he needs enough time to fall for a widow, so maybe we're going to get some military Three for the Road type action? Whatever the case, the film starts production on May 20, so maybe we'll hear more soon.
Who would you rather be on the road with: Ben Foster or Woody Harrelson?
Cinematical has just received this exclusive, action-filled clip from Tarsem Singh's The Fall. The film is set in a Los Angeles hospital in 1915, where stuntman Roy Walker (Lee Pace) is recovering from a stunt-gone-wrong and the fact that his girlfriend dumped him for the film's leading man. Set on ending his life, he befriends the young Alexandria (Catinca Untaru) in order to persuade her to nab him the morphine he needs for his suicide. He begins to tell her amazing stories, full of people from his life and the hospital, to get her anxious for more, and to make her do his bidding.
The clip shares a scene from one of those stories, and is full of horses, dusty action, the freeing of slaves, and even some first-sight romance. This is definitely looking to be a rare gem -- a great story with a myriad of beautiful scenes. The film goes into limited release this Friday.
Since I posted back in March that we're getting a web short from Joss Whedon, one that stars Neil Patrick Harris, Nathon Fillion, and Felicia Day no less, I've been trying to keep an eye on news about Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-Long Blog. There have been little blips like this over at EW, where NPH mentions that there are plans for a DVD with extras, but the pressing piece of info everyone wants to know is: When in the hell will we get to see it!?
Whedonesque linked to a new interview with Day yesterday, and if she's right, we shouldn't have to wait very much longer. While talking with Patrick Rothfuss, she said: "I believe he said it will be released on the internet before Comicon." Bring. It. On! Oh, it better be on a site that doesn't block Canada, or I'm going to go on a rampage.
If you need a refresher: The short series was created by Joss during that whole writers strike, and it follows a wannabe villain, Dr. Horrible (Harris), who has fallen for a cute girl at the laundromat (Day), but keeps getting beaten up by superhero Captain Hammer (Fillion).
This should be an awesome taste of Whedon before Dollhouse hits the boob tube. (Unfortunately, Joss' new show isn't planning to hit TV until mid-season.)
I'm itching to see Milk. It's not because of the cool initial production still above, which comes from Entertainment Weekly. It's not because of Gus Van Sant, since he has disappointed me many times. It's because of Sean Penn -- but not because of fandom. He does so many heavy roles, and is so known for his seriousness, that it's hard to remember sometimes that he is Jeff Spicoli. But now he's also Harvey Milk.
Playing the first openly gay man to win an election in a major U.S. city, Penn has got to get happy, and as producer Dan Jinks explained to EW, he "is playing a guy who's not at all like him, way beyond the sexuality of the character. Harvey was this guy who wants everybody to love him, and he loves everybody else. Sean just completely became that guy. It's a real transformation."
If he really hits this out of the ballpark, it'll be a change to see a serious man get award cred for getting happy, rather than vice versa. Now if we could only get him in another Ridgemont sort of flick...
Finally! Hot Docs might have snuck away with my opportunity to see Green Porno, but now it's available online. Well, it's available for people in the States through SundanceChannel.com, or people who read the comment section of Boing Boing. To give you a taste, check out the YouTube clip above, and pics at TreeHugger.
When I first heard about this, I imagined Isabella Rossellini's voice over gruesome pics of bugs in the act. It wasn't my cup of visual tea, but with Rossellini, I couldn't resist. But oh no, it's so much better. Dressed in different buggy garb, Isabella acts out the mating rituals of these buggy beings -- the bee, the dragonfly, the earthworm, the firefly, the house fly, the preying mantis, and the spider. There's the decapitation by way of the mantis, the broken-off penis of the bee, and more insane mating rituals that make human romps seem downright boring.
Last month, James Caan quit David O'Russell's Nailed because the two had a blow up over a cookie. Russell said he should choke and cough on this cookie at the same time, while Caan said it wasn't possible. I don't see why Russell wouldn't just show him, if he was convinced it was possible. Then again, the director isn't the most rational and level-headed man out there. Nevertheless, production moves on with a new man -- The Hollywood Reporter posts that James Brolin has replaced Caan in the role, and that Kirstie Alley and Olivia Crocicchia have also signed on.
As we know, Jessica Biel is playing a woman who gets accidentally shot in the head by a clumsy worker with a nail gun. The nail hits her noggin in such a way that she begins to have wild sexual urges. But she's uninsured, so she goes on "a crusade to Washington to fight for the rights of the bizarrely injured." The naughty congressman Jake Gyllenhaal, meanwhile, takes advantage of her urges.
So we've got Brolin now as the speaker of the house who chokes on a cookie. (Coincidentally, as his son chokes on a pretzel as Dubya.) As for Alley, she'll play a veterinarian aunt of Biel's character who fails to remove the nail. (No insurance = vet treatment, I guess.) And Crocicchia, she'll play a "disgruntled youth" who helps the nailed woman fight for health care.
I am so dying to see this. If it's even half as fun as Huckabees, the production turmoil should be worth it.
I think it's kind of funny that in 
You know, they say that you shouldn't go into business with family and friends. Yet many people still do, and many people also begin to take the advice to heart sooner or later. But what about people you meet in a support group? That sounds totally rational, doesn't it? Let's take it a bit further -- imagine you go into business with strangers you know all have anger issues. It sounds like hell in real life, but may make for a funny film on the big screen.
With every passing story I read about border control or security insanity, I'm beginning to think that once you have any responsibility for your country's safety, you go insane. Everyday objects become suspect (like a friend harassed in the US for having a couple pictures of an ex amongst the pics he was traveling with), and sometimes, objects are given extraordinary value. I was once charged a couple hundred dollars in Canadian tariffs for a Buffy DVD that was sent to me as a gift, and had to prove that the box set wasn't worth their astronomical estimated cost. But I guess I can consider myself lucky that "Buffy" didn't make the border powers that be think the discs were porn.
When word hit 
Oh, Ashton. He's the little train that just keeps on trying. At least this latest bit of news doesn't have anything to do with romantic comedy. That, at least, is a plus. According to 
Oren Moverman's upcoming directorial debut, 
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_thumbnail.jpg "Governor Odious (Daniel Caltigarone)")
-_thumbnail.jpg "Alexandria (Catinca Untaru(")
Since I posted 
Last month, James Caan quit David O'Russell's 
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Full 'G.I. Joe' Cast Photos!
Fan Rant: The Selling Out of Heath Ledger
