Joseph Gordon-Levitt cast in DARK KNIGHT RISES
Mar 19Variety reports Joseph Gordon-Levitt has locked in a deal that will see him re-team with Inception director Christopher Nolan for Dark Knight Rises, the highly anticipated third Batman.
No official word on who he plays, but it is more than likely a villain.
Instant and unfair comparisons to the late Heath Ledger’s Joker performance inevitable.
No really, Christopher Nolan’s third Bat-film will be called THE DARK KNIGHT RISES
Oct 28
Batman Begins. The Dark Knight. The Dark Knight Rises. Huh. I guess it’s a fitting title for a third act, but somehow I envisioned something a little less… samey.
In related news, Christopher Nolan has confirmed that neither the Riddler nor Mr Freeze will be in The Dark Knight Rises, which narrows the list of potential Bat-villains down to approximately one billion. I don’t really care who the villain is, as long as the acting and direction remains as solid as it was in The Dark Knight. (That is, the first Dark Knight, the one where he just sort of wallowed about, as opposed to, you know, rising, or anything.)
Nolan doesn’t want to shoot The Dark Knight Rises in 3D, but he is pressing studio Warner Bros. to let him shoot (or at least release the film) in Imax. Good to see someone in Hollywood sticking to their guns.
Oh yeah, and Tom Hardy (Eames from Inception) has been cast in The Dark Knight Rises. Make of that what you will.
The Dark Knight Rises is due 20 July 2012.
New SUPERMAN guaranteed to be overly processed and glossy, 92% CGI: Zack Snyder is directing
Oct 05
If you’ve ever believed the problem with the last Superman movie was that id didn’t look cartoon-y enough (you know, to match the look of traditional comic books) then you might be chuffed with the news that Sony have appointed none-other than CGI devotee Zack Snyder to direct the next instalment.
Snyder’s CV currently reads like an orgy of slow motion CGI shots, all of which went out of fad about a month after 300 was released. 300, Watchmen, Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole, and his upcoming latest, Sucker Punch.
I can just see Superman himself flying into frame, then his cape flapping reaalllly slooooowwllllly as he passes us in slow motion… then zooming off real quick to fight the baddie– and overgrown alien thing, hugging an entire planet. But this is just my hunch, of course.
Both deadline and Heat Vision confirmed the appointment of Zack Snyder to direct Superman, which currently has the working title Man Of Steel. Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight, Inception) is overlooking the production (so, producing…?) and the screenplay was written by Blade and Dark Knight comic-book-adaptation extraordinaire David S. Goyer.
Winter review round-up
Sep 01
Spring has apparently sprung, despite the rain forecast for the weekend and the still pretty-cold nights. That can only mean one thing: it’s time to look back over the past 3 months and take stock of what movies we saw, and whether or not we liked them very much.
As usual, this season was a bit of a mixed bag. Being the American summer, a lot of big cash cow flicks were released — Sex And The City 2, The A-Team, Twilight, Predators, Inception, etc. — and only some of them were good. I like our summer better. We get stuff like Tron Legacy and Harry Potter, and we used to get The Lord Of The Rings.
Anyway, let’s get down to it!
“Quite apart from being one of the most offensive products ever manufactured, Sex And The City 2 is also outrageously surreal to watch. It is so surreal, in fact, that if asked “what was it about?” a mere ten minutes after watching it, you may find yourself hitting a mental blank (probably caused by the violent brain haemorrhage induced by how stupid the movie was). Did I already mention how forgettable it is?”
“How did so many ‘A-list’ comedians assemble in one place and not realise their jokes were falling completely flat on a deadweight script?”
“There’s no rhyme or reason to any single thing Aldous Snow does — and he does some bafflingly strange things towards the end of the film — and the sheer otherness of the central character damages Greek almost beyond repair.”
“A vast improvement over the last installment in the series, but that isn’t saying much.”
Pandorum (While the film didn’t actually see a cinematic release here, I finally got around to watching the Blu-Ray in July, so it counts. Barely)
“Right from the start of Pandorum, I felt a creeping sense of déjà vu. As the film progressed, the sense grew stronger, and stronger, until it became an overriding axiom of truth in my brain: Pandorum is exactly like a video game, but with all the gameplay removed.”
“What made the remake harder to endure was the fact that, for whatever reason, they’ve taken those same beats and stretched them out to a challenging 140 minutes. Almost 2-and-a-half hours is a damn long time to wait for something you know is coming.”
“It’s all here. Big guns, big fights, big arms, square jaws, car chases, explosions, sexy ladies in distress and, of course, witty one-liners. There’s even a bad guy ‘monologing’ at the end to complete the package. It’s all been done before and there’s nothing revolutionary for The Expendables to hang its hat on.”
“A dark streak permeates the plot, an aspect that probably would have helped the film if it had stronger characters, but in reality serves to alienate the audience from what little good Splice has to offer.”
“When there’s parachuting tanks, stereotypically jaded-but-still-in-love ex-girlfriends, and some jerkish CIA types involved, you know the bulk of the audience’s focus is going to be on the action rather than the characters. Here The A-Team is something of a mixed bag.”
“I can’t believe it’s the same kid from Kick-Ass. I’m glad I saw Kick-Ass before I saw Nowhere Boy, because I think that comparison helped underline how spectacularly perfect his performance is.”
“The performances are all — miraculously for this type of film – passable at least, and great at best. Adrien Brody stands out, of course, but Laurence Fishburne’s Apocalypse Now-informed performance as a bloke who’s been on the wrong planet for too long is refreshingly fun to watch.”
“I must admit that I was hoping to laugh out loud more. Heck, I think the audience I saw it with– a mix of mothers, fathers teenagers and early-twenties couples, wanted to laugh more, too– but we never did.”
“It’s clear that director James Mangold is fluent in the language of cinema. He conducts the ballet between screen and speakers, actors and audience with startling precision.”
“Every shot, every cut, every sound effect and musical cue is distinctly Nolan-ish: the sound design is sharp and punchy, the visuals are moody and gorgeous, the music is as subtle as a brick and twice as threatening, and the performances are exemplary across the board. In fact, the only real problem here is the script.”
“Pilgrim’s strongest selling card is its humour, which, thankfully, isn’t content with the kind of geek jokes that make people like me roll their eyes.”
Today marks ReelThinker’s nine month anniversary. Incidentally, this is approximately the period of time required to cook a functioning human being the old-fashioned way. Probably not relevant, but worth mentioning anyway. Thanks for reading, and here’s to another 9 months!
For previous review round-ups, go here:
Top 7 twist endings that sucked
Jul 24
A good twist will immediately set your mind spinning. You sit there in the darkened theatre with your jaw agape, breathlessly going over the last two hours of your life and combing through those memories for some kind of clue. The best twists will encourage repeat viewings; the very best twists will serve to enrich the thematic conent of the film.
The other side of the coin is the bad twist: the kind of twist that makes you go “Huh?” The worst case scenario is that the final twist is a cheap shot, a retread of a dozen other twists, or an obviously easy way out of a tricky situation. The very worst twists invalidate the entire film’s existence — such as the rightly-hated “It was all just a dream!” twist.
Here is a list (by no means exhaustive) of the film twists that annoyed me the most:
7 – Remember Me (2010)
Robert Pattinson spends a most of the movie trying to un-estrange himself from his distant father, Pierce Brosnan. He finally manages to pin him down for a meeting, to reconcile their differences. They agree on a time and a place. Pattinson arrives early, but Brosnan, as always, is late. Pattinson looks out the window, and the camera tracks out to reveal he’s halfway up the World Trade Centre. We find out the date — 11 September 2001 — and the film fades to black. I guess that’s one way to solve familial relationship problems, but it’s no way to end your movie.
6 – Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull (2008)
The infamous “space between spaces” line came after the all the fridge-nuking and monkey-swinging, and as such isn’t the target of as much vitriol as those earlier indications of inanity. But it is still mind-bogglingly stupid. The Indiana Jones movies have always had a creeping sense of the supernatural about them – Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull took it a step too far.
5 – Planet Of The Apes (2001)
People often forget that Tim Burton made The Planet Of The Apes. They’re too busy swooning over Edward Scissorhands and … well that’s it, actually. People often forget how awful the twist ending of The Planet Of The Apes is, too, because it doesn’t make a lick of sense. Mark Wahlberg travels into the future, hangs out with some cranky apes, comes back to his own time, and finds … the planet overrun by cranky apes. This sucks twice as hard because the twist of the original Apes was so much better.
4 – Saw (2004)
The first time I watched Saw, I guessed that the genial old fellow in the hospital was the killer, purely because the camera lingered a beat too long on him in the first act. What I didn’t know was that he could paralyse himself for extended periods of time, and stop his breathing, in order to convince two people in the room with him that he was a corpse. That’s an impressive skill. So impressive a skill, in fact, that it’s quite clearly bullshit.
3 – Inception (2010)
Inception was such a cortical strain that it really needed a powerful finish in order to validate all the hard work your poor cerebellum did over the past two and a half hours. What we got instead was a cheap trick, a sleight of hand that denied the film a real sense of purpose or higher meaning. Nolan delivered such a satisfying twist in Memento that we all thought he couldn’t possibly fail. Then, he did.
2 – Most M Night Shyamalan movies (2002, 2004, 2008)
It started with Signs: aliens for whom water is like acid is to us. It’s like humans landing naked on Venus and complaining about all the sulfuric acid everywhere — that is, outrageously stupid. Plus, biologists have shown that water is one of the few reliable mediums for live to get started in. So chances are, any alien life-form (especially if it looks suspiciously human-shaped) we come across will be water-dependant, not -intolerant.
Then there was The Village: all those monstrous beasts you spent the entire film evading were just people in fake-looking suits! And also you’re living in the modern world, but you’re trapped in the woods so that you’ll never escape and find out that science can cure all your illnesses! The twist ending ruins the movie, drains any sense of horror, and causes your empathy for the characters to dissolve in seconds.
Finally, there was The Happening: turns out all plants everywhere in the world have evolved a very specific airborn neurotoxin that breaks down the brain’s inhibitions! And it only applies to one species out of ten million — us! There are so many things wrong with this — including the implication that plants are sentient — that The Happening officially destroyed what little faith I had in M Night Shyamalan to deliver anything resembling a half-decent movie any more. I didn’t even watch The Lady In The Water — did that have a stupid twist as well?
1 – All those mid-noughties thrillers that tried to copy Fight Club
People watched Fight Club. A lot of people. Some of them were filmmakers. Forgetting that so many other people had also watched Fight Club, these filmmakers decided to pull the same final-reel twist over and over again in the following decade that it became something of a running joke.
Hide And Seek: the menacing killer is the protagonist’s (Robert DeNiro) split personality. Secret Window: the menacing killer is the protagonist’s (Johnny Depp) split personality. The Number 23: the menacing killer is the protagonist (Jim Carrey), before he got amnesia. Perfect Strangers: the mancing killer is the protagonist (Halle Berry) — the kicker is that she knows what she’s doing — and keeps doing it anyway.
The rash of mid-00s twist-based films has finally abated, and hopefully we can look forward to films that offer decent, rather that deficient, twists.
What final-reel twists bugged the hell out of you? Did you think Inception‘s twist was that bad, or am I crazy? Any thoughts are welcome and appreciated.
OPINIONS COUNT