roger avary Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Usually the scenes we love are the ones that make us happy, or blissfully mesmerized. But sometimes they're those gut-wrenching moments that are painful to watch -- the ones created so perfectly that you can't help but appreciate them (like, say, the entirety of Requiem for a Dream).

But this is about Roger Avary's The Rules of Attraction. In a film rife with disaffected turmoil and dysfunction is this one scene where pretension has no play. The sad and rolling love song, the last pain-filled note, the carefully placed rings on the tub -- it all kills me each and every time I see it. The fact that it's the result of a girl liking exactly the wrong guy just makes it all the more sick, twisted and cringe-worthy.

Creepy Fact:

According to IMDb, the "End of the World" party was filmed on September 11, 2001.

And lady lovers can go here for a photographer's topless spin on Lauren's discovery of the body.

Warning: This is a dead girl in a tub, nude ... and there's blood.

It's a sad day when an anticipated adaptation loses a pair of talented scriptwriters -- and that day has dawned. Neil Gaiman told MTV that he and co-writer Roger Avary are no longer attached to Black Hole, the big-screen adaptation of Charles Burns' terrifying graphic novel. (You can check out a preview of it here on Pantheon's official site.)

They've been working on the project for two years. Originally, Alexandre Aja was set to direct, but then David Fincher claimed it as his own. And that's when Gaiman and Avary stepped aside. "Once they got David Fincher on, David explained his process consisted of having over ten drafts, done over and over, and Roger and I were sort of asked if we wanted to, if we were interested in doing that. And we definitely weren't."

Fincher is a notoriously demanding director (Robert Downey Jr. once compared working with him to being in a gulag), but no one can question the results. Then again, after spending two years on the script, the prospect of writing ten more drafts can hardly be appealing. If nothing else, Gaiman and Avary's work might stick around -- Gaiman says they left the last draft with Fincher, though he's unsure what will happen to it. "So we'll wait and see what happens. I just hope whatever happens, it's faithful to Black Hole." I think the graphic novel remains in good hands. The tone of the book seems a walk in the park for Fincher. And how far can a story about sexually transmitted mutations stray, really?

You know the old saying "You can't keep a good man down"? Well, it would appear that the same applies to big-budget video game flicks. Eurogamer recently spoke with id Software CEO Todd Hollenshead, and according to him the big-screen version of the popular first-person shooter Return to Castle Wolfenstein is still on and in development. It has been a year since Oscar winner Roger Avary was signed to write and direct, but in spite of the delays it looks like the project is back on the front burner.

Wolfenstein takes place in Nazi-occupied Europe and revolves around Army Ranger William "B.J." Blazkowicz. Along with another agent, Blazkowicz is sent to discover the truth about the SS Paranormal Division. Taking the role of Blazkowicz, the player must escape the Nazi stronghold while investigating the activities of the SS Paranormal Division, which include research on resurrecting corpses, and various secret weapons -- providing players with hours of gruesome fun.

A feature film version of the game has been a long time coming, with rumblings of a feature going back almost three years. According to Hollenshead, "With the writer's strike it took so long to get underway and Roger Avary, the writer, had a commitment that was in line before working the Wolfenstein stuff, but I've recently been in contact with Roger and he's actually working on the script right now." Avary hasn't had the best of luck lately, personal or professional, so for his sake I hope Wolfenstein manages to pull itself out of development limbo.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein is tentatively scheduled for release in 2010.

Robert Zemeckis's Beowulf took a lot of hits for its perceived silliness, a verdict I could never quite sign on to. First of all, silly compared to what? Have these people seen the 1999 space opera Beowulf starring Christopher Lambert? Compared to that, Zemeckis's Beowulf is a sober meditation on the human condition. Have they seen the Gerard Butler clunker Beowulf and Grendel? Come on, guys: considering what the movies have done to this story in the past, last year's high-tech effort seems like serious business to me.

What about the source material – the ancient Old English epic poem upon which these movies purport to be based? If you've ever read it (or tried to read it), the perversions of the adaptations shouldn't surprise you. It's both begging for action movie treatment and impossible to faithfully adapt into anything resembling a compelling action movie. The story is credited with generating many of the archetypes we see in our fiction, and indeed, it's so archetypical that by modern standards, it's a skeleton; there's nothing there.

Seriously – you know how people complain about movies whose plots can be fully described in one sentence? A faithful Beowulf would take this phenomenon to new heights. A synopsis would read something like this: Beowulf beats up Grendel, Grendel's mom, and a dragon, and dies. The end. Some complained that the Zemeckis version distorted Beowulf, but I'd have liked to see their reaction to an undistorted adaptation. Trust me, it wouldn't work. There's a reason that all these screenwriters have scrambled to add elements to the story.

Any time I hear news about a new project from director David Fincher, I get a little excited. Barring his debut, the studio-monkeyed Alien 3, Fincher has had a remarkably impressive run as a flick helmer: Seven, The Game, Fight Club, Panic Room and Zodiac, with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button on the way. So even though he already has a few projects in development, Mr. Fincher has signed on to direct an adaptation of Charles Burns' graphic novel Black Hole. Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary, who last collaborated on Beowulf, will bang out the screenplay for MTV Films and Paramount Pictures.

The Hollywood Reporter offers this as a plot synopsis: "The story follows a group of high school students whose lives are altered drastically when they come in contact with a sexually transmitted disease called the "teen plague" or "the bug." But if you head on over to the publisher's site, you'll find a much more thorough breakdown. To me it sounds like John Hughes meets (early) David Cronenberg ... and obviously that'd be just fine by me. Here's hoping Fincher makes Black Hole his very next project.

Well here's some rotten news to brighten up your Monday morning: Oscar-winning screenwriter Roger Avary (best known for co-writing Pulp Fiction, although he also had a fairly big hit with last year's Beowulf rendition) was arrested late Sunday night for charges stemming from a car accident that took the life of 34-year-old Italian man Andreas Zedini.

Mr. Zedini was a passenger in Avary's car. According to Reuters, "Avary, 42, was charged with vehicular manslaughter and driving under the influence ... He was released from jail after posting $50,000 bail." Mr. Avary's wife also sustained serious injuries, although details on her current condition are unknown. Reuters further indicates that the fatal accident occurred "in the city of Ojai, 80 miles northwest of Los Angeles, at about 1 a.m."

Horrible news indeed. Here's hoping for some good news regarding Mrs. Avary.

With Beowulf, the latest motion-capture film from director Robert Zemeckis, one of mankind's oldest tales is hurled up onto the movie screen using the cutting edge of new technology. As in The Polar Express, Zemeckis's first foray into motion-capture animated moviemaking, the actors are first shot on a soundstage, wearing motion-indicating elements that allow computers to turn their movements and facial expressions into sets of data; then, that data is animated by computers and artists, so that real motion and facial expressions can be re-cast in fantastic settings and melded with wild imaginings. As if that weren't enough, the resulting movie in this case has also been enhanced so the theatrical experience is 3-D; swords, dragons and flame leap from the screen, hovering right before your very eyes. It all sounds wonderful.

But, as so often happens in life, the execution falls somewhat short of the expectation. I know it seems like a betrayal of the critic's job -- to look deeper, to see beyond the obvious -- to begin with complaints about the animation in the film, but it would be even more of a betrayal of the critic's job to not point out the most obvious and glaring fact about Zemeckis's technique. Namely, that it looks horrible. A scientist working in the burgeoning field of the human perception of virtual simulacra would talk Beowulf's animation in the context of the "uncanny valley," the phenomena where, when confronted with a robot or virtual avatar that has a high degree of match to human movement and appearance, the human mind flip-flops and instead obsesses about the smaller elements of mis-match, jarred by the mistakes in the image instead of thrilled by the accuracies. (Confronted with a 98% accurate simulacra, for example, most people instead fixate on the 2% difference.) But I'm not a scientist working in the burgeoning field of the human perception of virtual simulacra; as a layman, I can only offer that in Beowulf (as in The Polar Express), Zemeckis seems to have created a world peopled by drowning victims brought back to life after a three-week soak: Pale, puffy, slow-moving revenants with no light in their eyes.

It's almost been two years since buzz first started about the Castle Wolfenstein project. At the time, we posted that iD Software was lining up the classic video game as their next step into movies after Doom. That was pretty much the end of that for a while. Now, perhaps fueled by all the 80s remakes and recreations lately, they're back in the wolfie frame of mind. Producer Samuel Hadida has gotten the rights to another in the series -- Return to Castle Wolfenstein. I'm not a huge fan of video-games turned into films. (Although I really want a nice documentary on how the heck you play the old-school Labyrinth game without falling into the Bog of Eternal Stench or running out of time.) But is this a good idea?

While I've no clue how it all will turn out, I'm pretty intrigued by who he's tapped to direct the flick -- he's re-teaming with Roger Avary, with whom he worked on Silent Hill. Avary is one of the names behind Pulp Fiction and he's helped kill Zoe, so he's got the gun angle down-pat. I think this could potentially be a fun film if he whips up some of the aesthetic from The Rules of Attraction and makes this a classy, funky-looking adaptation. He says: "I've been playing the character of B.J. Blazkowicz sine the epic Wolfenstein 3D first bruised my brain and have ever since wanted to bring his adventures to life on the big screen. It's time to bust some dams, storm some bunkers and blow up some bridges." Call me crazy, but I'm not entirely hating the thought.

Given the fact that everywhere you turn at this year's Comic-Con you see something else with Neil Gaiman's name on it, it's surprising that I was able to corner him for an interview with Cinematical.

He had just arrived in San Diego and was busy signing boxes full of books for people attending the convention. I'm surprised his hand didn't give out after writing his own signature over and over. If I fill out the "memo" section on a check, my hand starts to cramp.

We cover all things Stardust, Beowulf, and Neverwhere, and he drops a few tidbits in about Coraline, Sandman, the Death movie, and the new novel he's working on, The Graveyard Book.

He just celebrated passing one million words on his own blog/journal, although one of his favorite moments on it was when his daughter Maddy took over and guest-blogged. Now, if he could just get her started on writing more books ...

Check out the audio interview here, or click on Neil's picture to hear what he has to say in his own words.

I was lucky enough to get a seat in the packed house last night for a viewing of the first ever released footage from the upcoming Beowulf film, directed by Robert Zemeckis (or "Z", as Roger Avary calls him), and is written and produced by Neil Gaiman and Avary. The film is 100% CGI, and they used motion capture for all of the performances in the film. So close your eyes and picture Anthony Hopkins wearing a mocap suit with white balls all over it, and it's like you're on set!

Gaiman and Avary came down (to thunderous applause) to introduce the footage. Avary started to explain a bit but Gaiman thought this was something that would be best viewed without any setup at all. We then saw a short "taster" of material from the film set to a power rock soundtrack. Oh, and everything we saw was in REAL D (a 3D format), so we had to wear big giant clunky glasses, making us all look a bit like the late, great Roy Orbison. Pretty hot.

So, how many of you out there saw The Polar Express in 3D? Well, the 3D is that good, or in some cases much better. It's not extremely overdone, like everything seems fairly flat and 2D and then suddenly AHH! -- Grendel in your face. It's much more understated and subtle, more of an immersive aspect than a gimmick. After awhile you (thankfully) forget you're wearing the glasses, and it just becomes another part of the movie.