Cinematical

Another day, another snafu on the ol' political correctness front. It seems that adoptive parents and adoption agencies are up in arms because of a line in the trailer for Warner Brothers' forthcoming thriller, Orphan: "It must be hard to love an adopted child as much as your own."

A full ABC News report has parents calling for the studio to remove the line from the trailers, which it did, despite the fact that the trailer can only play before other R-rated films. But that's not enough, because apparently, the film itself can be and has been taken as one big campaign playing up the stereotypes and exploiting the fears of adoption.

I can't speak for everyone, but I'd like to think that any potential parent who finds themselves scared off from real-world adoption because of something they saw in a heavily exaggerated movie probably do not have the proper judgment to serve as a parent in the first place. As for the effect that line and the whole premise might have on adopted kids specifically, I really can't speak to that, as I don't know how exposed to the film's marketing they'd be if watching appropriate channels and seeing appropriate movies.

What are your thoughts? Over-reaction? Just right reaction? Or are we simply overdue for this summer's next big controversy?

[Thanks to Shock for the heads-up.]

Dear... uh, well... Woody Allen, I suppose:

So here you are, with Whatever Works, which is something like your 44th feature at the age of 73. That's really something, but I'm sure you already know that. As if it wasn't enough that we can credit you with the likes of Annie Hall and The Purple Rose of Cairo... But I digress, although maybe that's the best strategy at the moment, because I can't exactly talk about Whatever Works just yet. It doesn't open in my neck of the woods until tomorrow today, and well, they refused to screen it for press.

Actually, they kinda did screen it, and, apparently, it's all kinda your fault.

Pixar and everything else - them's the breaks when it comes to judging computer-animated fare these days. Although Pixar has rightfully earned themselves the lead among studios, and by a significant margin, it's all too easy to then marginalize the performance of others.

DreamWorks has certainly raised their game beyond pure pop-culture recitation with the inventive and entertaining likes of Over the Hedge, Kung Fu Panda, and Monsters vs. Aliens (and Aardman or no, I'd even include the winning Flushed Away among their finer efforts). For every Open Season, Sony has given us a Monster House (okay, so that's just one-for-one at the moment). And every time that Fox bequeaths to unwilling audiences something like Space Chimps or Everyone's Hero, Blue Sky has nothing to do with it.

Fox/Blue Sky, however, is the precise pairing that gives us the visually engaging and moderately amusing outings like Robots, Horton Hears a Who!, and the Ice Age films, with the latest of which -- Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs -- falling right in line with that modest-yet-reliable tradition.

The way casting announcements and pics of a pudgier Matt Damon had come down the pike, one had every reason to think that Steven Soderbergh's The Informant! (now with exclamation point) was going to skew more serious than its newly debuted trailer sells.

It's not that there's anything wrong with telling the real-life story of a bi-polar whistle-blower (Damon) with a more decidedly comedic bent, but 'thriller', this does not scream. Then again, maybe Soderbergh just wanted to lighten things up after the epic Che and the austere The Girlfriend Experience, and if that's indeed the case, things do seem to be heading more towards the Ocean's Whatever lark end of his spectrum.

Although most sites seem to have The Informant! with an October 9th release date, the trailer and the page around it (you know, with the 40-Year-Old Virgin-like possible poster art) both state September (in line with a 9/18 date we've seen floating around elsewhere). Either way, I suspect that an appearance at one of this fall's high-profile festivals will help assure us that the film does indeed merit its especially enthused punctuation and that the Damon does indeed merit his schlub-tastic appearance.

Back at last year's Fantastic Fest, I was privy to a conversation between Scott Weinberg and screenwriter Marcus Dunstan about the latter's latest project (he'd just done some Saw sequels and was in town for his Feast follow-ups). It was called Midnight Man at the time, and if I could remember what it was about, I'd tell you. (Honest!) I just remember being vaguely psyched for it.*

Well, the film's done now, under a new name of The Collector and accompanied by a bunch of solid buzz from genre sites all over and none other than Alamo Drafthouse head honcho Tim League himself. Thusly, Fantastic Fest and our own Horror Squad have teamed up to bring an early screening of the film to Austin before its July 31st theatrical run.

For more details on this free (!) sneak peek, head on over to Horror Squad.

*"Vaguely psyched!" - Go ahead, put that on the poster.

Us critics, we don't hate Michael Bay. Well, not all of us, and not all the time. I wasn't a fan of his Transformers, nor Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, and I haven't watched The Rock or Armageddon in their entirety in years, but I distinctly enjoyed 2005's The Island during its ill-fated theatrical run (gross: $35 million, cost: between three and four times that), and I still do as a decent sci-fi/action matinee outing.

But how?, I've been asked. It does after all bear every other trademark of a Michael Bay outing: explosions, rampant product placement, blatant racial stereotypes, explosions, perpetual dusk lighting, explosions, and a female lead constantly flattered by her wardrobe (yeah, a real woe-is-us scenario).

Let me make this clear: when I say that I'm compiling a list of the most contrived rom-com scenarios, I'm not saying that they're automatically the worst -- although a glance at the titles doesn't exactly stray far from that correlation. Tomorrow's The Proposal finds Sandra Bullock forcing Ryan Reynolds into marriage for the sake of holding off immigration authorities and keeping her/their jobs (I guess it's not too soon to remake Green Card and Picture Perfect after all), so we're talking about seven plot points along those lines of high-concept, close-quarters thinking, with some (dis)honorable mentions along the way...

Just when it seemed that October might be super-serious with its horror and dramatic offerings -- Shutter Island to Sorority Row, The Stepfather to Saw VI -- we get our first look at the fun-looking Zombieland, an action-horror-comedy in which Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone (!) and Abigail Breslin all team up in the post-apocalyptic wasteland and whoop some undead ass.

The tone of at least the trailer (I could see the narration carrying over to the film) strikes me as something like Shaun of the Dead crossed with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and I for one don't think that intersection's a bad place to be.

Read the rest over at Horror Squad ...

On a recent visit to the Chicago-based set of the A Nightmare on Elm Street remake, producers Brad Fuller and Andrew Form gave us online types a good hour with which to poke and prod about that film and countless other projects in the works. The Elm St. stuff will have to wait until the time is right, but at the moment, you're just a hop, skip and jump away from finding out where Platinum Dunes currently stands with a Friday the 13th sequel, their present involvement in reported remakes of The Birds and Rosemary's Baby, and how exactly the little-seen Horsemen ended up slipping through the cracks last spring...

Read the full interview at Horror Squad!

Duncan Jones cut his teeth on the sets of Labyrinth and The Hunger, but for his directorial debut, he opted for something that didn't star his dad (I'll let you guys and girls mull over the common thread).

Rather, Moon is a showcase for star Sam Rockwell, who gives what is surely one of the year's more uniquely layered performances. As the film opens today in NY and LA before rolling out in the weeks to come, Jones spoke with Cinematical about shooting sci-fi on a small budget, releasing an indie in a season of blockbusters, and cracking his skull out of pure giddiness for a movie.

Which one, you ask? We'll tell you after the jump...