MEGAMIND gets a new trailer and character posters

Here are some new character posters and a ‘please-find-it-cute-and-funny’ trailer from DreamWorks’ next family-friendly animated comedy Megamind, featuring elements and style of just about every animation you’ve seen in the last decade.

Despite an impressive voice cast consisting of Brad Pitt, Will Ferrell, Tina Fey, David Cross and Jonah Hill, Megamind looks like more-of-the-same from a studio that knows how to churn ‘em out. I guess the box office thuds of those recent Shrek sequels haven’t deterred them in the slightest.

I have no problem admitting all of these celebrity-voiced glossy animation feature films are starting to blend together in one big ball of ‘meh’. Yes, even Pixar’s. (So many Pixar fan-boys on the web, it’s getting embarrassing).

Megamind is released to families willing to spend big at the candybar on 5 November, 2011 in the States. Aussies, we’ll likely have to wait for the Summer Holidays, so look for it around Christmas, probably.

Bruce Willis injured and Helen Mirren going lethal in this clip from RED

Check out Bruce Willis doing his classic in-pain-but-still-tough routine (complete with huffs, puffs and grunts) while Helen Mirren tends to him in this fun clip from their upcoming action comedy Red, co-starring Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich and Mary-Lousie Parker, directed by Robert Schwentke (The Time Traveller’s Wife).

If you haven’t already, be sure to check out the surprisingly funny and intense trailer for Red, which has been adapted from a successful graphic novel (that’s a comic book) by Warren Ellis and Cully Hamner.

Red opens 15 October, 2010 in the U.S., and a few days later on the 28th for fellow Aussies keen to check it out.

Stephen King’s THE DARK TOWER will be three films and a TV series, according to director Ron Howard

Are you ready for one of the most ambitious multi-media endeavours in the history of the universe? Ron Howard (once child actor, now pretty-good Hollywood director) is adapting Stephen King‘s opus, The Dark Tower, into:

1. a feature film.
2. a TV series.
3. another film, following on from the TV show.
4. a second season of the TV show, based on the prequel comics.
5. a third film finishing the story started in the first.

Howard’s planning to use the sets built for the feature in the TV series, so there’s every chance The Dark Tower will be the best-looking thing on the small screen. If you’re worried the TV show might just end up as filler, Howard has these words of consolation for you:

… if you committed only to films, you’d deny the audience the intimacy and nuance of some of these characters and a lot of cool twists and turns that make for jaw-dropping, compelling television

I’ve never read a single book by Stephen King, but even I’m kind of excited by this. The setting doesn’t really grab me — western / fantasy / alt-history mash-up — but I’m sure there are some compelling characters, stories and themes somewhere in the seven books in the series to mine for the adaptations.

I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure nothing like this has ever been attempted before, and if it has, it certainly hasn’t had someone with Ron Howard’s clout attached to it. As a big fan of both feature films and serial-style TV shows, I’m very interested to see how this pans out.

Ron Howard’s finishing up his latest film (comedy The Dilemma with Vince Vaughn) before starting work on The Dark Tower. It’ll probably take a long time to get going; plenty of time for me to read the books, then.

read the full interview at Deadline

LOVE AND OTHER DRUGS poster: knobbly knees and massive pillows

I think I get it. Get two well-known, attractive actors, take their clothes off, put them on a bed, sell a movie. But why is he covering his mouth? Why are their feet and knees so prominent in this shot? And where did they find pillows the perfect size to cover up their fiddly bits?

The trailer for Love And Other Drugs showed that the film would be a paint-by-numbers rom-com. I never really got on the Anne Hathaway bandwagon and I don’t know how I feel about Jake Gyllenhaal as a romantic lead, so I’m still pretty cold on the whole project (though I did like some of Ed Zwick‘s earlier films — specifically, the action films).

24 November 2010 is the day to see this one Stateside. Is that around the time of that Thanksgiving thing? No local release dates yet.

I’M STILL HERE clip is awkward, amusing

Joaquin Phoenix‘ sojourn into the bizarre is at its end, and we’re getting closer and closer to seeing the results. This clip works as a good set-up for the tone and direction of the film, and it’s pretty funny, too. Do you call him Diddy, or Mr Combs?

I’m Still Here opens in the States tomorrow (10 Sept 2010), in limited release. No other release dates; we’ll probably have to wait till the DVD release for this one.

New images of Ben Affleck’s thriller THE TOWN

Warner Brothers have released a bucket load of new images to promote their upcoming thriller The Town, the latest directorial effort from Ben Affleck.

Affleck also stars alongside Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker) and Blake Lively (Gossip Girl).

The trailer for The Town did look very interesting, despite the fact it felt like it gave too much away. Early buzz around the film has been great and, from what I have skimmed, it would seem the trailer is a safe watch. But I’m still cautious.

Images swiped from Collider, go there to see the rest.

The Town releases in the U.S. 14 September, 2010. Fellow Aussies can see it 1 month later on 14 October, 2010.

TOMORROW, WHEN THE WAR BEGAN review

Ostensibly aimed at a relatively young audience, John Marsden’s Tomorrow novels were nevertheless dark, complex, and breathlessly intense – and spoke home truths about human nature to an audience struggling to come to grips with the dark, complex and stressful responsibilities of growing up.

The movie adaptation, penned and helmed by Stuart Beattie (one of those Aussies-in-Hollywood who’s scripted such mixed projects as Pirates Of The Caribbean [the first one], Collateral, 30 Days Of Night, and Australia), doesn’t nail all of the elements that made the books so special, but gets enough of them right to warrant lukewarm encouragement, if not outright praise.

Much effort is invested (in the film) in lending the characters and situation a sense of realism and sympathy. Many of these efforts just don’t play right. Protagonist Ellie’s disembodied voiceover is intrusive and superfluous; the talking-to-the-camera bookends feel like a failed attempt to carry some of the novel’s first person perspective over into the film; and a lot of the character-based jokes and gags hit the screen with all the pomp and circumstance of wet cardboard.

Even worse, the performances are mixed. Where the actors playing protag Ellie, anti-hero Homer, and beauty-queen Fiona (Caitlin Stasy, Deniz Akdeniz and Phoebe Tonkin respectively) are solid as a rock, the others (played by Rachel Hurd-Wood, Lincoln Lewis, Chris Pang, Ashleigh Cummings and Andy Ryan) are clearly struggling to inject life into flat line-readings, and get no help from debut director Beattie.

This problem is exacerbated by the fact that we’ve (that is, Australians) all grown up on a steady diet of Hollywood fluff, and have come to equate American accents with seriousness – or, at least, a veneer of seriousness (kind of like the way professional wrestlers are stacked like bodybuilders, but would go down after two seconds in the ring with a tae kwon do black belt) – and we read local, familiar, reassuring accents as calming and laid-back.

In an Aussie production like this, it’s hard to tell whether the source of a performance’s weakness is the actor, the director, or the accent itself. I don’t know what the way out of this predicament is, and neither does Tomorrow. As Ellie says in the film (about something completely different), it ultimately boils down to instinct. Do the performances feel real? In this case the answer is ‘yes, but not often enough.’

Action scenes aren’t something Australian filmmakers are generally known for, but in Tomorrow the action scenes work just fine. The explosions are big and cathartic, the chase scenes are loud and intelligible, the stakes are all laid out in impressive scope – and all this working with a budget a quarter the size of the average American equivalent.

The production is watertight. While some scenes are too desaturated, and much of the soundtrack’s pop music is naff, the sound design, cinematography, stunts and production design are world class.

The same can’t be said for the film’s pacing. The first hour trickles by at a snail’s pace, and so much slack piles up that the climactic third act struggles to pull it taut in time. This is a fairly big departure from the novel’s whiplash pace and mounting sense of escalation. While the film has a lot of expository ground to cover, it should have covered it more efficiently, leaving the final act with more room to breathe.

Another gripe I have with the film is the schizophrenic way it treats the audience. Some things – specifically, the characters’ individual emotional journeys – are treated with suitable subtlety, and play extremely well. Other things are repeated and enlarged and underlined and bashed over the audience’s head for no reason – “hey, look, a bridge. I bet that bridge is important. Look at them using that bridge! What can we do with that bridge, I wonder?” – and it all comes to a head in a handful of nauseating dialogue scenes complete with lines like “We thought we were safe. That turned out to be the BIGGEST FAIRYTALE OF ALL!” and “[being shot feels] like someone’s pulling barbed wire through you.” Nobody talks like that, Australian or otherwise, and for every line of dialogue Beattie gets right, there are two that fall flat.

Professional dollar priests have predicted that Tomorrow will rake in around US$15 million when it’s released over there. Put that together with its current takings here (AU$4m and climbing) and it’ll probably make its budget back – just. But why should the reception be so lukewarm over there? Do American audiences scoff as much at Aussie accents in serious situations as we do?

A big blow against the film’s financial prospects is the characters. The main character’s a girl – ew! – and she falls in love with an Asiatic bloke – gross! There are too many girls in the main cast (4 out of 7? They’ll want the vote next!), and none of the characters fit into the cookie-cutter stereotypes we’ve spent our entire lives cultivating in our minds (the pretty one is also the smart one? The greasy Mediterranean chap is the heroic one? The jock is a coward? What?).

Tomorrow, When The War Began (the film) is merely competent. Its source material, however, burns so bright that its light glows through the film’s mediocrity. The slack pace, the awkward performances, the superfluous voiceover – the film has its flaws. But the bits it gets right – the ethical arguments, the character beats, and the ever-escalating set-pieces – makes it a damn sight better than the average Hollywood explode-a-thon playing in the adjacent cinema.

A flawed beginning, then, to a promising franchise.

Liam Neeson will star in Peter Berg’s BATTLESHIP

Most know him as ‘That Guy From Schindler’s List‘, ‘That Guy in The Phantom Menace‘, or, more recently ‘That Guy From Taken or The A-Team‘. Soon, Liam Neeson will also be ‘That Guy From Battleship‘ as Deadline Hollywood confirms the actor has signed on to Peter Berg‘s action-thriller board game adaptation. They reveal:

Neeson will play Admiral Shane, the Naval officer whose daughter (played by Brooklyn Decker) is engaged to a young naval officer (played by Taylor Kitsch).

Last week the first images hit the web of singer Rihanna on set of the film, dressed in uniform and looking confused.

Just to confirm, yes– this is a spin-off of Hasbro’s Battleship game you played as a kid–but in name only, apparently.

Battleship isn’t pencilled for release until 18 May 2012.

Sort-of update on those ALIEN prequel movies: Gemma Arterton edition

Ridley Scott is returning to the Alien franchise 30 years after its inception. He’s making a pair of 3D prequels to the original xenomorphaganza, which promise to solve the mystery of who that large fellow in the chair was at the start of the first film.

The films are also about terra-forming, which, if you don’t get enough science-fiction in your diet, is the seeding of a barren planet with human-friendly organisms in the hopes of creating a hospitable world for colonisation.

Anyway, Scott has previously said that he’d like a female protagonist for the film, and is apparently set to meet with Gemma Arterton to discuss the project with her.

Before everybody freaks out about how she was the worst thing about Clash Of The Titans, remember two things: she’s been in other films, and shows real acting potential, otherwise she never would have made it this far in the industry; and, of course, Ridley Scott can coax a good performance out of a cardboard box, so in his hands, Arterton might prove a force to be reckoned with. Or, at least, a good actor.

While we’re on the topic, Scott mentioned in an interview with The Independant that

The [Alien prequel] film 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?

Don’t expect an Alien prequel till late 2011 / early 2012 (at the earliest).

How about a live action adaptation of MULAN starring Zhang Ziyi?

THR have revealed the story of Hua Mulan, popularized in 1998′s Disney animation Mulan, will be brought to life in a live-action adaptation directed by Jan de Bont (Speed, Tomb Raider) and starring Zhang Ziyi (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Memories of a Geisha).

Disney are not involved in this production at all, it’s a completely independent venture. It will be based on the original 6th Century poem about Hua Mulan joining an all-male army and kicking ass, showing boys up like only girls can.

It’s been far too long since I saw Disney’s 1998 animation (like, I think I saw it one time in 1998 and that’s it). Animation isn’t really my bag, but I do recall it being a compelling story. A live action adaptation, with some added spice and drama, and less signing, could really play well if handled right. Definitely one to keep an eye on.

Mulan will shoot in Shanghai, China, over the coming months. The production is currently seeking supporting cast in the region.

Exaggerated violence trend continues: HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN official trailer (NSFW)

There’s no doubting the trend of over-the-top, exaggerated violence in feature films is making a comeback, albeit with permission to look cheap and be classed as B-grade.

Playing on cinema screens in the States right now are  gory newcomers Machete and Piranha 3D, with a slew of direct-to-DVD zombie films that thrive on blood and guts filling video shelves and streaming devices.

Coming soon is Jason Eisener‘s feature adaptation of Hobo With A Shotgun, which promises to be an equally bloody, gory affair. Feature adaptation? Yes — like Machete, Hobo started as a faux trailer between the films of Grindhouse (on rare prints only), released by Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez in 2007. After the internet created buzz about the retro-cool trailer, a feature was quickly developed and is now close to ready for cinema screens.

Helping director Jason Eisner get the Hobo feature get off the ground was the worldwide success of his similarly violent and grindhouse-gritty short film Treevenge, which collected a bunch of awards at short film festivals in 2009.

No exact dates have be announced yet, but expect to see the feature for Hobo With A Shotgun in 2011.

Here’s a look at the original grindhouse trailer that started it all.

New images from HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS show Bill Nighy in character

I realize it’s all very exciting that the Harry Potter saga is coming to an end with an epic two-part blockbuster, starting with The Deathy Hallows Part I in November, but honestly– the pics, the trailer, the posters– they all look the same to me. You could tell me they were from Harry potter 2, 3, 4, 5; I wouldn’t know the difference.

Fans of the series know the difference, though– and they’re ready to dump millions (potentially a billion?) to flock to cinemas and see Harry Potter and the gang fight dark wizardry forces all over again. Personally, I’m looking forward to seeing Bill Nighy extend his franchise resume beyond Pirates of the Caribbean. Appearing in both the Pirates and Harry Potter franchises is an impressive feat.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I (say that ten times in a row as fast as you can…) opens worldwide between17-19 November, 2010.

images via Collider