Not surprisingly, the costume recalls the look that Cap sports in Marvel Comics’ “Ultimates” line of books and matches up with the costume designs that hit the web back at the beginning of the summer. While things look a little bit “plastic-y” to me, this could be down to the fact that these are basically set photos and won’t necessarily reflect how the costume will look in the film.

Not only do we get a look at Cap racing along on a motorcycle, we also get to see who he might be chasing/being chased by. If you don’t recognize the logo on the car and motorbikes, ask your nearest comics geek…

In a new interview with the LA Times’ Hero Blog, Campbell stated that they were still working on a script for the film, and that he wanted it to be “the Expendables of horror”-

Yeah, The Expendables, or more like the It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World of horror. I want to get so many horror movie stars that people can’t possibly not see the movie. I want to give them other stuff to do. I want to have Kane Hodder be very particular about what he eats. I want Robert Englund to be a tough guy, like he knows tae kwon do or something. I want to find out the hidden sides of all these people. Some will play themselves, some will play alternate characters as well. I may approach Kane Hodder to play Frankenstein. He could be Kane Hodder himself fighting himself as Frankenstein. It could be crazy. It’s a silly concocted story that we hope to do maybe in a year or so. My breaks between Burn Notice have been getting tighter because they’ve been adding episodes. They’re trying to trap me like a rat in the TV world, and I might just let them. There’s a script, it just kind of blows right now, so no one’s really seeing it. We gotta work on it. Definitely shoot in Oregon all on a stage. It’s like the 300 of horror comedies. We want to make it a whole world. Someone’s gotta take Frank down for good.

I have to admit that this certainly sounds like a fun idea if Campbell can get his horror film contemporaries to come out to play for this. Here’s hoping he can.

There are additional shots of Jones (and her stunt double) on location over at the London Daily Mail.

The Birmingham News quotes Shadix’s sister as saying, “He was having mobility problems, and he was in a wheelchair… It looks like he fell and hit his head in the kitchen, and that’s the cause of death.”

Shadix exhibited a flair for quirky, dark comedy that Burton capitalized on in his supernatural comedy, casting the heavy set actor as a decorator whose absurd plans for redecorating a home distresses the spirits of its deceased former owners. Shadix would reteam with Burton twice more – providing the voice for the Mayor of Halloweentown in The Nightmare Before Christmas, which Burton produced and the 2001 remake of Planet Of The Apes.

He appeared in numerous films and television roles, including the dark comedy Heathers, Demolition Man, Sleepwalkers and Dunston Checks In. After retiring from films a few years ago, he relocated back to his native Alabama to be closer to family.

However, today’s casting of Liam Neeson in the film as an admiral has made me sit up and think about the film a little differently. Could there be something a bit more to the script initially written by Jon Hoeber and Erich Hoeber, and rewritten by Brian Koppelman and David Levien? Certainly the casting of Taylor Kitsch, Alexander Skarsgard, Rhianna and and model Brooklyn Decker didn’t really make me think that there was anything to but a quickly produced, mindless summer action pic.

Neeson’s character, Admiral Shane, will be the father of Decker’s character, who is engaged to a naval officer played by Kitsch. Skarsgard plays Kitsch’s older brother, while Rhianna’s a naval weapons analyst is the odd woman out and not seemingly related to the other characters.

Filming began on Battleship began today in Hawaii, but the film won’t be in theaters until May 2012.

Initially, the project was set up at Universal Studios with Angelia Jolie attached, but after the studio put the project in turnaround, Jolie departed. Even after the film landed at Warner Brothers, Cuaron could not entice Jolie back.

Although she had met with producers and Cuaron about the project before, Portman landed the offer without even taking a screentest. Previously, Cuaron had met with and/or screen tested a number of actresses for the role including Sandra Bullock, Blake Lively, Marion Cotillard, Abbie Cornish, Sienna Miller, Carey Mulligan, Rebecca Hall, Scarlett Johansson, Olivia Wilde and Naomi Watts.

According to the Hollywood Reporter‘s Risky Business blog, the offer and the latest draft of the script have been sent out to Portman, who should giver her decision shortly.

Portman will play an astronaut stranded on a space shuttle after some debris strike it, killing the rest of the crew. Her only chance of survival is donning a spacesuit and heading towards the International Space Station, hopping from satellite to pieces of space debris along the way. The character will spend a majority of the film’s runtime on screen alone, so the movie will sit very squarely and heavily on whomever takes the role.

Robert Downey Jr is already signed for a short role on the film, which is scheduled to go before cameras in January.

While we still don’t have much in the way of new news on the project, a short animation test from the project has surfaced. It’s set fairly early in the story and shows us a portion of the scene where Dorothy first meets the Scarecrow along the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City. Note that this is just a render test, to see how the designs look, rather than a full-on animation test.

Via Bleeding Cool.

Unfortunately, it now looks as if either Gilliam was downplaying the “hiccup” or it has grown to a size where it has scuttled the project for the time being… again.

Variety caught up with the director this past weekend at the Deauville American Film Festival and asked him what the status was of the off-again on-again project-

The financing collapsed about a month and a half ago… I shouldn’t be here. The plan was to be shooting ‘Quixote’ right now.

But Gilliam remains optimistic that this latest version he had all ready to go will still move forward.

Robert Duvall is Quixote, Ewan McGregor is also there, and we are looking for new financing right now. Don Quixote gives me something to look forward to, always. Maybe the most frightening thing is to actually make the film.

I have to admire Gilliam’s continued optimism in the face of yet another set back. Sometimes it is the only thing keeping this fan of his movies in believing that he will one day see it.

But the next month’s Blu-Ray disc release presents the film in the 2.35:1 aspect ratio for the first time ever on home video. There’s no word as to if Storaro has changed his mind about how the film should be presented, if Coppolla has over ruled Storaro or if Storaro’s wishes were just flat out ignored. You can see how the original aspect ratio looks in the film’s trailer -

And if that isn’t enough to get you thinking about next month’s release of the film, both original version and the 2001 re-edit Apocalypse Now Redux which restored 49 minutes to the film, on Blu-Ray, then check out these additional features.

Apocalypse Now (Two-Disc Special Edition)

• Apocalypse Now 1979 Cut
• Apocalypse Now Redux
• “A Conversation with Martin Sheen” interview by Francis Ford Coppola
• “An Interview with John Milius” interview by Francis Ford Coppola
• Complete Francis Ford Coppola interview with Roger Ebert at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival
• Monkey Sampan “lost scene”
• Additional Scenes
• “Destruction of the Kurtz Compound” end credits with audio commentary by Francis Ford Coppola
• “The Hollow Men,” video of Marlon Brando reading T.S. Eliot’s poem

Featurettes:

• The Birth of 5.1 Sound
• Ghost Helicopter Flyover sound effects demonstration
• A Million Feet of Film: The Editing of Apocalypse Now
• The Music of Apocalypse Now
• Heard Any Good Movies Lately? The Sound Design of Apocalypse Now
• The Final Mix
• Apocalypse Then and Now
• The Color Palette of Apocalypse Now
• PBR Streetgang
• The Color Palette of Apocalypse Now
• The Synthesizer Soundtrack” article by music synthesizer inventor Bob Moog

Apocalypse Now (Three-Disc Full Disclosure Edition)

All of the material in the two disc edition, plus –

• Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse
• Optional audio commentary with Eleanor and Francis Ford Coppola
• 48-page collectible printed booklet with special note from Francis Ford Coppola, never-before-seen archives from the set, behind the scenes photos and more
• John Milius Script Excerpt with Francis Ford Coppola Notes
• Storyboard Gallery
• Photo Gallery, including images from photographer Mary Ellen Mark
• Marketing Archive

• The prequel will be two films.
• The films will be shot in 3D, and Scott adopts an air of friendly competitiveness when he states  of James Cameron, who shot the Alien sequel Aliens -  “Jim’s raised the bar and I’ve got to jump to it… He’s not going to get away with it.”
• Lost co-creator Damon Lindeloff is currently polishing the script for the first prequel.
• The film will be set some 30 years before the original Alien.
• Exploring the origins of the titular alien killers, Scott promises that the prequel films will be ” really tough, really nasty… It’s the dark side of the moon. We are talking about gods and engineers. Engineers of space. And were the aliens designed as a form of biological warfare? Or biology that would go in and clean up a planet?”

While I am excited to see Scott returning to the franchise he created over thirty years ago, I have to admit to be less enthused about his return heralding an exploration of the aliens’ origins. A big part of what made Scott’s original film so powerful was the air of mystery about the alien that was stalking the crew of the Nostromo. We didn’t get a good look at it for a majority of the film, it striking out from the shadows. It was vaguely humanoid, but had a biology terrifyingly different than our own. It was an unknowable force of nature and that is what made it terrifying. Doing away with that mystery robs the alien of much of its power to frighten.

Juno

As a rookie Judge, Thirlby’s character will be shadowing Dredd around the crime-ridden streets of Mega City One. Karl Urban is already set to play the stone cold titular Judge of the movie.

Vantage Point helmer Pete Travis is scheduled to have cameras rolling on the $45 million budgeted film in South Africa by the end of the year. The film is slated to be produced in 3D. Currently, the production is in the process of locking down distribution deals at the Toronto Film Festival, so I suspect that we’ll hear more cast and release details shortly.

The Museum of Modern Art, in conjunction with HBO Archives and Turner Classic Movies, is celebrating 75 years of this groundbreaking news series by screening nine programs featuring news-worthy tropes like Beauty and Fashion, A World at War, and American Culture. (You can catch Turner Classic Movies’ special four-hour marathon this Sunday starting at 8pm EST.)

The series officially ran from 1935 to 1951 and in its heyday was seen by more than 20 million moviegoers each month. The March of Time mesmerized audiences with a fast-paced rhythmic style coupled with a deep-voiced narrative provided by Westbrook Van Voorhis. The series was unafraid to examine light topics like rising dog ownership, or hard-edged news like the human frailties of the Great Depression. For example, an early 1937 episode depicts the “Birth of Swing,” but a later episode talks about dogs, the Dust Bowl and Poland at war. War became a very profitable topic for De Rochemont and his crews, but it wasn’t always grim. 1943’s “Show Business at War” portrayed a cavalcade of celebrities doing their part for the war effort – Louis Armstrong performing for troops to Walt Disney directing Army and Navy instructional films.

However, no film in The March of Time series garnered more criticism than the profoundly controversial episode, “Inside Nazi Germany” from 1938. Theaters in New York banned the film, believing the film was pro-Nazi; other theaters across the country banned it for being too anti-Nazi. But many agreed that the film offered a fairly true portrayal of the Nazi Party and its escalating impact on the world for no could’ve expected that an American film crew would expose the ‘real’ Adolf Hitler or Nazi fanaticism. It gave Americans a foreshadowing, a harrowing look at was imminently coming. Some consider the film to be responsible for swaying America’s acceptance of the war. In fact, it was this single piece of film which affected how many would later approach motion picture news when detailing the events of the Second World War. “Inside Nazi Germany” was declared ‘culturally significant’ by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation by the National Film Registry in 1993.

The March of Time may have succumbed to rise of television in 1951, but it left an indelible mark on documentary filmmaking and the news broadcasting process. The series defined the worldview of Time magazine, even if at times it was ‘fakery in allegiance to the truth’ in order to reach the conscience of the American people. The Museum of Modern Art’s special presentations scheduled from now through September 10^th remind us that history, like time, marches on.

“Inside Nazi Germany” and “Show Business at War” can be seen at MoMA or on TCM. MoMA’s scheduled programs can be viewed here and TCM scheduled can be seen here.

Trejo’s character of a Mexican federale on the north side of the border was originally created years ago by Rodriguez after he first met Trejo, but didn’t come to lie until Rodriguez used him for a faux trailer as part of Rodriguez’s team-up with Quentin Tarantino to salute the exploitation movie going experience in 2007′s Grindhouse. After receiving much positive reaction to the clip, Rodriguez set about turning the series of barely related action beats into a coherent narrative. The resulting screenplay, which Rodriguez co-wrote with his cousin Alvaro Rodriguez, has Trejo’s former Mexican Federale hiding out in Texas from Mexican drug lord Torrez (Steven Seagal). Hired to assassinate an anti-immigration Senator (Robert De Niro channeling just a bit of George W Bush’s good ol’ boy persona), it turns out that he is merely patsy in a complicated scheme to raise the Senator’s public approval to help him win re-election and get a boarder fence erected that will help Torrez maximize his profits. Machette joins with the leader of an underground support group for illegal immigrants (Michelle Rodriguez) and an Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent (Jessica Alba) to stop Torrez and the Senator’s plans.

I firmly expect that there will be some who will read way too much into Machete’s illegal immigrant storyline and pontificate that the movie has some ulterior liberal political agenda. Sure, there’s a moment where a couple of suited lunkheaded bodyguards discuss immigration policy and a variation of Malcolm X’s “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock landed on us!” quote pops up. But like the blaxpolitation films of the 1970s, Rodriguez is merely using a fact of life relevant to a portion of his audience and of his own background as a Texan of Mexican descent as a setting to ground his story of revenge in. Is Rodriguez making some sort of political statement about immigration? Probably no more so than Michael Campus was endorsing prostitution when he directed 1973′s The Mack. This is Mexploitation, not a message picture.

As an exploitation film, there are thrills, gratuitous violence and a splash of nudity for spice. Don’t let the appearance of an A-lister like DeNiro fool you in to thinking that there may be more art here than there is. Big name stars have appeared in exploitation pictures before. Oscar winner Shelley Winters in Cleopatra Jones springs to mind. They will again. If anything, DeNiro gives a better performance here than he has in some of the comedies he has appeared in over the last several years, never letting his villainous Senator get too hammy or cartoonish.

For Rodriguez, who isco-directing with his editor Ethan Maniquis, Machete is an extension of his work on his half of Grindhouse, Planet Terror, refining what he learned on that picture. And in many ways, I would say that this is even a better film than Planet Terror. Moving away from the superficial esthetic of faux scratchy prints and missing reels, he is freer to concentrate on the genre’s ethos – stylized and often over the top mayhem, some titillation, all delivered at a breakneck pace designed to entertain and give its audience value for their admission. And in that, he succeeds.

Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, with help from the Film Society of Lincoln Center, has brought together fourteen of the studio’s most beloved films like All About Eve and M*A*S*H back to the big screen on Labor Day Weekend to celebrate the studio’s 75^th anniversary.

One of the most anticipated highlights for the weekend is Saturday’s screening of M*A*S*H. This year marks the film’s 40^th anniversary and Fox is celebrating in style, rolling out a new print of the revered crackpot military satire. A Q&A session will follow; cast members Elliot Gould, Sally Kellerman and Tom Skerritt, and Kathryn Reed Altman (widow of director Robert Altman) will be available to answer all questions.

Some early Fox favorites have been dusted off and had the scratches removed – restored prints of Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), Elia Kazan’s stern look at American anti-Semitism, Niagara (1953), featuring Marilyn Monroe in one of her first leading roles, and the film that redefined ‘winning an Oscar’, 1950’s All About Eve will also have center stage at this weekend’s gala.

Rounding out the weekend, the 1963, over-the-top spectacle, Cleopatra, along with the intense star-spangled picture, Patton (1970), will be shown in a colossal 70mm widescreen format – as if you needed to see them any bigger!

Twentieth Century Fox has made it a habit of capturing audiences hearts since 1935. Whether you recall Shirley Temple rocketing to fame at a very young age, or had a pin up of Betty Grable, 20^th Century Fox was responsible. The studio gave you admirable gentleman like Henry Fonda and Tyrone Power and let you danced all night to the King and I, and Oklahoma. Oh, and admit it, you may have even embraced your inner geek with Fox films like Star Wars or Alien. Whatever your story is, you may not want to miss out on this weekend.

Full details about this weekend can be found here.

That being said, is there enough to build a movie around. Granted, in the romantic comedy genre, there is a desperation for something fresh and new that audiences could quite possibly give anything the benefit of the doubt. But the concept, or at least how the film seems to execute it, appears to be lacking in romance and comedy.

Drew Barrymore and Justin Long are charming actors, although I can do without their “real life relationship” being mentioned in every article about the film. Maybe they can make the material better than it appears.

2. Machete (Fox, 2,670 Theaters, 105 Minutes, Rated R): I love the fact that this film got made. I don’t know if the fake Machete trailer that appeared during the combined Grindhouse showings was my favorite, but it was high up there.

Apparently, it was popular with a lot of other people as well because they sewed a complete film around the edges of the trailer. Danny Trejo play an ex-Federale who might be in the U.S. illegally who decides to get vengeance on corrupt politicians who set him up.

The cast is fantastic. You have Trejo in the lead, which is a good thing. You have A-listers like Robert DeNiro and Jessica Alba with roles, you have reclamation projects such as Lindsay Lohan, Steven Seagal and Don Johnson, and you have true B-movie actors like Jeff Fahey. Not your typical Grindhouse cast, but exciting to watch.

Although, while I loved loved loved Grindhouse, audiences stayed away, scared by the “cinema verite” approach the directors took (missing reels, grainy footage, etc). It appears that those stylistic choices are gone here, and all we have it pure Mexploitation, but will moviegoers be wary?