Personally, I would've loved Jerry Seinfeld's Bee Movie to have been live action, in crazy costumes, like the spoof trailers we previously shared with you. There's nothing quite like Chris Rock and Seinfeld battling the elements on a fake windshield. That being said, I have to agree with Erik Davis -- the animated version looks pretty damned spiffy. The movie finally comes out on November 2, and Seinfeld has been making his rounds to promote the flick. The Globe and Mail has reported that just the other day, he was in Toronto for a red carpet event for the movie, and talked with the audience about the making of the film.

During the screening, he did some stand-up, chatted about families, and also about the bee crisis: "Since we started writing this four years ago, there has been a bee crisis. Have you heard of this? Colony collapse disorder. Bees have suddenly stopped working, following the exact plot line of the movie. It freaks me out. What we were writing about actually happening. I have to be more careful about what we write." Somehow, I don't think they're following the exact plot, unless there's a lawsuit I'm missing.

Bee Movie is about a bee named Barry who has just graduated from college, which is pretty redundant since he has one career choice: making honey. He leaves the hive and befriends a human named Vanessa (Renee Zellweger). While on a shopping trip with her, he discovers the world of packaged honey -- Ray Liotta's brand of honey, to be exact -- and decides to sue humans. What happens after that? Well, you'll have to see the movie.

Unfortunately, those of you living in the UK and really looking forward to the much buzzed-about directorial debut of Ben Affleck, Gone, Baby, Gone, will have to wait some time before seeing the film. That's because Buena Vista International UK has suspended the release of the film indefinitely due to similarities between the flick and the real-life case of Madeline McCann, the British girl who's been missing since early May. Though the case is a fairly popular topic here in the States, I gather it's a much bigger deal in Britain -- especially now that the two parents have become official suspects in their daughter's disappearance from a Portuguese apartment.

Based on a book by Dennis Lehane (Mystic River), Gone, Baby, Gone follows two detectives tracking the case of a missing four year-old girl, and how it subsequently affects them both professionally and personally. It stars Casey Affleck, Ed Harris and Morgan Freeman, among others. By total coincidence, the name of the actress portraying the missing girl in the film is Madeleine O'Brien, which I'm sure would just add fuel to the fire across the pond. Affleck, who is totally behind the decision to pull the film, had this to say while at the Deauville Film Festival: "We are acutely aware of the situation. We have a greater concern for that than the release of our film, which is just a commercial matter, whereas this is a matter of life and death." Gone, Baby, Gone was also scheduled to have, what Variety calls, a "splashy" Oct. 26 Times London Film Festival gala screening, but it's since been pulled from the lineup. No word on when the film will arrive in the UK; I imagine it will depend on where the McCann case goes from here. Gone, Baby, Gone will arrive in US theaters on October 19.

Since World War II spawned its share of war-themed movies, both direct and indirect, it's only natural that our era does the same, especially given that the Iraq War has gone on for several years now. A lot of movies over the past four or five years have dealt with the attacks in New York, soldiers in war, prisoners of war, and endless variations on these and other themes. Even the recent Western 3:10 to Yuma, hidden underneath its character-driven gun slinging, has a little something to say about the occupation. Most movies tackle their subject head-on, such as the numerous documentaries of the past few years and films like United 93 and World Trade Center as well as war films about other eras like Letters from Iwo Jima and Days of Glory. How refreshing, then, to see a movie like Richard Shepard's The Hunting Party, which has on its mind the topic of war criminals still at large. It wants to know why the U.S. has been unable to find certain outlaws, when just about any civilian with a passport, the price of a drink and a line of B.S. can do it. But instead of grousing or hand wringing, it becomes a spry, surprising and intelligent comedy.

The movie is told through the point of view of a TV news cameraman nicknamed Duck (Terrence Howard), who once worked together with reporter Simon Hunt (Richard Gere) in any Third World war zone worth covering. Their lives together were dangerous and exciting. They dodged explosions, drank in dive bars and romanced local girls. But when the tragedy got to be too much for Simon, he melted down on the air, effectively ending the relationship. Duck has since been promoted to a highly paid New York studio job, while Simon works for increasingly desperate TV stations so far off the radar that he eventually disappears. For the five-year anniversary of the end of the war in Bosnia, Duck, a polished TV anchorman (a perfectly cast James Brolin) and a network executive's son, Benjamin (Jesse Eisenberg), arrive to cover a routine press conference. Simon is also there, and he convinces Duck to help him cover the story of the decade: finding an infamous war criminal known as The Fox (Ljubomir Kerekes) with a $5 million bounty on his head.

It was almost a year ago when Jette brought us a first look at some of the behind-the-scenes for the big-screen version of 30 Days of Night. Since then, there have been teaser posters, fancy websites, the promise of new short films, and the R rated trailer released in August ( who could forget, of course, the image of Josh Hartnett hacking at a child with an ax -- something like that tends to stay with you). Shock Til You Drop is now hosting three new posters for the vampire flick. Fans of the graphic novels have been pretty eager to see what Ghost House and director David Slade (Hard Candy) have planned for the story of a group of vampires descending on a small town in the wilds of Alaska for a 30-day feeding frenzy.

Based on the graphic novel by Steve Niles, Night stars Josh Hartnett as the local sheriff and Melissa George as his wife -- it's up to both to save their town before the vampires wipe it clean. Ben Foster (3:10 to Yuma) also stars as "the harbinger of the vampires. Well really a scout who was sent into the town because he can be out during the day. He is tentatively known as a "bug-eater", not a vampire but something akin to a ghoul. They find him snooping around town and trespassing so they arrest him" -- at least according to the message boards at IMDB, and since I haven't read the original graphic novels, I'm just going to have to take their word for it. 30 Days of Night is set for release on October 19.

[via Solace in Cinema]

Margot at the Wedding is a film torpedoed by its own self-indulgence. The film starts by offering us a thin premise -- a frosty, New England writer named Margot comes to town for the occasion of her quasi-bohemian sister Pauline's wedding to a slob -- and then more or less does nothing in the way of development, opting instead for ninety minutes of hints and innuendo. Nothing in this family dysfunction drama ever rises to the surface, even in the third act. Usually, you at least know what the director was going for, whether they succeeded or failed, but not here. Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh have to be given some amount of credit for doing the requisite character-building work, playing past the obvious physical dissimilarities between them and creating a workable, sisterly dynamic that can go from warm to freezing in an instant, but there's so little in the way of compelling events for them to react to that it's almost hard to maintain interest. Margot at the Wedding is a ninety minute film, with about twenty minutes worth of content.

Jack Black is the third lead as Malcolm, Pauline's soon-to-be-husband who has no job and no ambition to do anything except possibly commit infidelity. It's hard to say whether Noah Baumbach hired Black to play a thinly-disguised version of himself or whether he intended to have him do heavy lifting, acting-wise, because there's an odd mixture of both on display. There are moments when he's simply playing his part with none of his usual verbal or physical affectations, and there are other moments, such as in a late scene where he's supposed to be doing some crying, when he's unwisely allowed to lapse into a light version of Jack Black schtick. Both incarnations of his character seem to be a noticeably bad match for Jennifer Jason Leigh, by the way. Her natural gravitas doesn't mesh well with his absurdist persona, and whenever they are together on screen, there's a palpable sense of 'acting' going on that undermines Jason Leigh's seemingly honest attempts at character development. Theirs is just one of several of the film's actor pairings that don't seem very natural.

New Line was nice enough to provide Cinematical with the exclusive one-sheet for Love in the Time of Cholera (click on the poster for a larger version), based on Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez's novel of the same name. Adapted for the screen by Oscar winner Ronald Harwood (The Pianist) and directed by Mike Newell (Donnie Brasco, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire), Love in the Time of Cholera tells the tale of two lovers, Florentino Ariza (Javier Bardem) and Fermina Daza (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), one more obsessed than the other, who part ways at an early age to live two very different lives. The film then tracks each over the years (we're talking late 19th century through the first decades of the 20th century), while Fermina settles down with a doctor (Benjamin Bratt) her father forces her to wed and Florentino engages in 622 affairs (not kidding about that) in an attempt to mask the pain he feels due to the one that got away. Also starring in this sure-to-be-an-Oscar-contender are Liev Schreiber, John Leguizamo, the very lovely (and talented) Catalina Sandino Moreno and Hector Elizondo. Love in the Time of Cholera (which also happens to be one of my favorite titles of all time for a number of reasons -- love is but a disease, after all) arrives in theaters on November 16.

I'm not really connecting with the appeal of The Brave One, which looks like just another revenge film elevated slightly in prestige by the Oscar-winning talents of Jodie Foster and director Neil Jordan (as well as the Oscar-winning talents of Mary Steenburgen and cinematographer Philippe Rousselot and the Oscar-nominated talents of Terrence Howard, composer Dario Marianelli and production designer Kristi Zea -- hey, maybe the movie is worth seeing). But I tend to disagree with the tastes of the majority, so the movie is probably connecting better with mainstream audiences. Even if it fails at the box office, though, one of its screenwriters, Cynthia Mort, will come out just fine. Aside from being executive producer of a new sex-filled HBO series, Tell Me You Love Me, which she is also writing, and aside from scripting that Nina Simone biopic, in which Mary J. Blige is starring, the writer has just sold a pitch to Oscar-winning producer Graham King (The Departed).

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the pitch was for a murder-mystery thriller. Of course, it currently has no title and there isn't anything yet known about the plot. All that was said of the idea is that the film will be a "fast-paced morality tale" and "akin to the thriller genre films of the 1980s" (not sure what films The Hollywood Reporter is referring to with that description). King, who will produce the film, once scripted, through his GK Films, did admit the story pitched is one of the most dynamic and provocative he's heard in awhile and that it is an idea he thought must be brought to the screen. He referred to Mort as being, "at the top of her game." The Brave One is premiering tonight at the Toronto Film Festival, and Tell Me You Love Me debuts on Sunday, so we shall soon find out if King is correct about Mort's status.