Filmonic

Will Black Cat be in Spider-Man 4?

Liam — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 08:42:40 PST

Sam Raimi said a few weeks ago that Spider-Man 4 will begin filming in March, which means over the upcoming months and weeks we should be hearing about casting, and what villains might be appearing. Dylan Baker revealed he would be returning to play Dr. Curt Connors, which rose speculation that The Lizard could be the main villain. However Mania are now saying that the villain could be Black Cat, the skilled cat burglar, and they apparently know which actress is the front runner to player her.

We can exclusively reveal that actress Rachel McAdams has met with the producers of the film for a major role. McAdams (of ‘Wedding Crashers’ and ‘Sherlock Holmes’ fame) is said to be a top contender for the role of Felicia Hardy, known to comic fans as The Black Cat.
Our sources tell us that the Black Cat’s story fits well with Raimi’s Spider-Man formula, which always finds the villains troubling not only the costumed hero, but also becoming entangled in Peter Parker’s personal life as well.

In other casting news actress Romola Garai (Atonement) wrote in The Observer that she recently audition for a role:

“Love is at the root of everything good that has ever happened and will happen.” This phrase swam into focus as I moved up the escalator at Oxford Circus tube on Tuesday morning on my way to put myself “on tape” for a part in Spider-Man 4. This is the acting equivalent of the London Marathon in that it’s important to try your best as long as you understand that you aren’t going to win.

It looks like Mary Jane may have some more competition in Spider-Man 4, that is, if the Black Cat rumour is true.

Deleted Half-Blood Prince scene

Liam — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 08:15:59 PST

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince will be released on DVD and Blu-ray next month (Amazon are currently selling the DVD for $10) and to gear people up Warner Bros. are starting to release some behind the scenes stuff, along with some deleted scenes that didn’t make it into the movie.

The scene below gives us an extended look at the students and professors as the clouds darken before the Death Eaters invasion. I can’t really see why it was cut down, but I’m sure they have their reasons.

New Alice in Wonderland poster

Liam — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 16:42:42 PST

Disney have released a brand new poster for Alice in Wonderland on The Disloyal Subjects of the Mad Hatter Facebook page. It features Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen, Anne Hathaway as the White Queen, Matt Lucas as Tweedledum and Tweedledee and the Cheshire Cat who will be voiced by Stephen Fry.

Apparently this poster is the first of three new “treasures for his subjects” so expect more Wonderland stuff soon!

While on the subject of Facebook, you can follow Filmonic on the site here!

X-Men 3: What could have been

Liam — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 13:43:31 PST

If on May 26th 2006 you walked out after seeing X-Men: The Last Stand and thought “well that was disappointing, I wonder what the film would have been like if Bryan Singer directed” then you’re in luck! As 3 years on, your question has finally been answered. Sort of.

Michael Dougherty, writer of X2 and director of Trick r’ Treat, recently appeared on the /Filmcast and spoke about a few ideas he and Bryan Singer had been thinking of before Singer left to direct Superman Returns.

Transcript from Geek Files:

“The idea was that you open up with Alkali Lake but it’s completely barren and dried up and there are these odd reports of strange phenomena going on around the world accompanied by bright lights in the sky.
“The idea would be that both the X-Men and the Brotherhood realise that essentially a very god-like force had entered their reality and that it was causing disruptions around the world, you know mutant prisons being decimated, I had pitched an idea about a fleet of cargo ships getting torn apart in the Atlantic and you found out that they were shuttling mutants as slave labour.
“You found out was that Phoenix was going round the world taking things into her own hands and that she had basically returned as a god, which they did in X3. She had viewed herself as above the conflict, that she was here to end things on her terms, she was sick of the fighting and she was going to take things into her own hands and she did not give a s**t what the X-Men or the Brotherhood had to say about it.
“And ultimately the way it was going to end, at least the version I was pushing for, would be that Phoenix was kind of like the Starchild at the end of 2001, she didn’t just get stabbed and die again, but she kind of chose to leave.
“The one idea that I loved, that I really wanted to do, was that Cyclops would build the Danger Room. He felt guilty that because the X-Men were too weak, they weren’t strong enough or fast enough, that was the reason Jean died. If they were a little bit better at fighting, then she might still be alive. It was all about this guilt he had about her death and he built the Danger Room to train them to be better. In the end it really was about him not being able to let go of her and that causes the chaos and disruption in the movie and in the end it’s about him letting her go.
“Ultimately she kind of becomes that cosmic force that Phoenix is known to be, she leaves Earth and becomes a god or at least a higher level of intelligence and she goes into the cosmos possibly to kick-start life somewhere else. The final scene for me would have been her telling Cyclops or her telling the X-Men ‘I’ll be watching.’”

Part of me wishes I never read that. That’s what X-Men 3 should have been. It should have focused on Jean/Phoenix and Cyclops and not have her stand around like a lemon for 20 minutes during a battle. Dougherty also mentioned that it would have set things up for more sequels, and there was talk way back about possibly filming X3 and X4 back-to-back.

I’d like to take this time to blame a few people. Firstly, I blame 20th Century Fox for not signing Bryan Singer up straight after X2. Secondly, I blame Warner Bros. for offering Singer Superman Returns. You don’t steal directors who are mid-way through a franchise. It’s not cool! Thirdly, I blame Singer himself for abandoning the franchise. Singer apparently wanted to make X3 after Superman, but Fox didn’t want to wait and I can understand why. One man can’t and shouldn’t hold up a franchise.

I’d also like to blame 20th Century Fox again for getting too involved with the creative process, hiring writers who can only write your typical popcorn fluff, and for hiring Brett Ratner as director. The guy directs Mariah Carey music videos for Christ sake!

REVIEW: Precious

Dave — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 07:32:28 PST

Precious has once again put me in the uncomfortable position of debating just how much I can really enjoy “inspirational” tales about situations slightly too horrific to be believable. Yet, simultaneously, the film that relies on the audience recognizing physical, sexual and emotional abuse in a way that falls just out-of-bounds for cinema stereotype. It’s a mixed bag that is saved by its performances even when the sloppy assembly of the film makes itself obvious.

Precious is the tale of Claireece “Precious” Jones (Gabourey Sidibe), a obese 16-year old living with her abusive mother (Mo’Nique). We pick up on her life in 1987 in Harlem right as she’s been impregnated by her rapist father for a second time and as she gets kicked out of her public school in lieu of a more specialized GED education at an alternate schooling center called Each One, Teach One. Her teacher, a lesbian named Blu Rain (Paula Patton) encourages Precious to write everyday in her notebook, a assignment that eventually leads to the poor girl coming into her own.

The film is directed by Lee Daniels, who brought Cuba Gooding Jr to Shadowboxer in 2005 (Mo’nique plays a character named ‘Precious’ in that film). Shadowboxer wasn’t the most masterfully constructed tale, so it’s not a surprise that Precious shows some strides forward in terms of character and storytelling. However, if one thing didn’t work for me in Precious, it was Daniel’s directing.

From the rape scene that focuses on sweat and fried food to Precious’ fantasy sequences, Daniels is visually inconsistent and doesn’t seem to trust his narrative to tell the story. There are points where Daniels’ little tricks work, like when the heavy-set, dark-ebony Precious looks in the mirror and imagines she’s a skinny white girl, but there are also a handful of cutaways and fantasies that don’t contribute much more to the story than the sparse voiceover.

It may seem like a weird aspect to point out, but: for a film that has such great performances, it plays like it was made by a director that didn’t trust those performances and instead had to make sure the audience is “getting it” with broad strokes when silence or minutia could have said so much more.

If we take a similar sort of cinema, really any of the countless movies where a child in an unfortunate situation finds a teacher that is able to connect to her, and start drawing comparisons, Precious starts looking a little too bold-faced in its intentions. Take a film like Half-Nelson, where the teacher is a white guy with a crack addiction and the student is an African-American female. They both bond in a quiet and realistic manner and the whole time we understand that both parties are in impossible situations and looking for companionship. Part of the problem with Precious, the character, in this film is that she takes so much abuse before she finally cracks that it makes the lesser abuse stereotypical and therefore less effective. Someone who gets frying pans thrown at them has a hard and horrible life and someone who has a seconds child by her father has a horrible life, but as soon as we get to the incest, the pans seem lesser. I know that’s horrible, but that’s how it plays.

There is a tipping point for Precious, another roadblock of life that eventually makes her emote (Hint: the movie IS set in the 80s when this roadblock was the talk of the nation…God, I can’t keep calling it a “roadblock;” it’s HIV). Up until that point, the brilliance of Gabourey Sidibe’s performance is the subtlety, even when that subtlety works against the shock we are supposed to be feeling.

I know it’s not fair to watch a movie then pretend you had seen something different, but Precious was a great drama when all it was showing me was the chronological progression of the main character. A scene where she steals a tub of fried chicken showed me more about the character than the fifth cut-away to a fantasy world where Precious is a celebrity with a whiter accent.

There’s a point in the movie where Precious is bringing a baby back to her mother’s place and the entire audience around me started turning up the tension, knowing that things were about to go horribly wrong. That’s about where I disconnected from the film. I realized that I was in a sold out theater with a full-balcony and at least half of the theater came to see a sixteen year old girl in the worst situation imaginable.

Lee Daniels could have turned Precious into something more like torture porn where the audience comes to see the horrors of the real world enacted on the unfortunate. Daniels also could have side-stepped some of the more extreme abuse and let these characters bounce off each other. What Lee Daniels did was land somewhere in-between, sometimes making a fetish of Precious’ fantasies and other times lingering on the abuse.

The bottom line is that Precious is a good film saved by fantastic performances from all its actors and actresses. It’s probably going to grab one of the Best Picture nominations and litter other Oscar categories with its cast. But like other films that exist to show a mainstream audience the worst of the “other half,” it sometimes swerves too close to exploitation of the minority experience. The end result is a film that will jerk tears out of you if you’re prone to opening your heart to inspirational cinema but will leave you feeling ambivalent if you’re judging the film based on what you see.

No Related News

Kick-Ass trailer coming next week

Liam — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 05:19:53 PST

Last week we saw Lionsgate’s first bit of marketing for Kick-Ass with the release of 4 new posters, and now the official website for the film iamkick-ass.com has been launched, revealing a countdown to when we will get our first glimpse at a trailer. According to the timer the trailer will debut on MySpace on November 15th at 1 AM EST. Make a mental note.

Joe Johnston talks Jurassic Park 4

Liam — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 05:18:11 PST

For years there has been talk of a Jurassic Park 4, however it has never moved out of the development/scripting stage. In the past we have heard rumours of it revolving around the extinction, and another about dinosaurs with guns attached to them, however it seems those ideas have been scrapped.

While promoting The Wolfman Jurassic Park III director Joe Johnston spoke about a possible return to the franchise:

Joe Johnston: Well, there is a great story for the fourth one that I would be interested in getting involved with and it’s nothing like the first three. It sort of takes the franchise off in a completely different direction, which is the only way I would want to get involved.
Harry: Another movie about a group of people struggling to survive a dinosaur attack is…
Joe Johnston: We’ve done that and it’s been done three times and I figure it’s…
Harry: Stay away from that island. Don’t go there!
Joe Johnston: Why would anybody go back to that island? It was hard enough to figure out the second and third reason for them to go, but it would take it off in a whole other trilogy basically, but when it gets to that level it’s sort of about studios and Steven’s thing and who knows. I think we are at that point where we are due for another one if we are going to do it. They had what four years between them? 1992… 1996 or 1997, and then 2001, so we are past due. I don’t know, but we will see.

We haven’t had a good dinosaur movie in years, so I would welcome a Jurassic Park 4 with open claws. No silly dinosaurs with guns though. I’m glad that script didn’t get the greenlight.

New Avatar trailer! This one’s for the kids!

Liam — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 15:37:08 PST

From all the promotional material 20th Century Fox have been throwing at us recently I wouldn’t really expect to see kids in the audience when Avatar is finally released next month. The film will be over 2 and a half hour long, will feature a few scary beasts and battles, and it will have an environmental message behind it all. While it hasn’t been rated yet it’ll probably get a PG-13 rating in USA, however that won’t stop Fox marketing to the youngsters. They have toys and merchandise to sell.

The trailer below appeared on Cartoon Network recently, and instead of big aerial battles and missiles the kids get cute creatures, uplifting music, and a voice-over that makes you feel warm inside.

Would James Cameron approve?

The Wolfman has got Emily Blunt up against a tree again

Liam — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:04:16 PST

Two new posters for The Wolfman have appeared online. One features Emily Blunt tree bound and popped up over at Cinematical. The other shows us the face of the furry one and comes courtesy of AICN.

Cool 2012 marketing in a Brazilian subway

Liam — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:39:41 PST

2012 must be a fun movie to market. Columbia don’t have to satisfy a fanbase or photoshop peoples body parts, as their only focus is scare the crap out of people in the hope they go and see a disaster movie about the end of the world. Most of the posters we have seen for the film have featured drowning cities and falling landmarks, which were eye catching enough in there average form, however from the image above you can see the marketing folks went a little bit further to promote the film in a Brazilian subway.

If only they covered the ceiling too. That would really get peoples attention!

[via adsoftheworld]