"Every year I get half as pretty and twice as drunk."
— The only good line to come out of Burton’s wretchedly abysmal Dark Shadows.
Goodnight, Ray.
Watching Ray Harryhausen movies expanded and pushed the boundaries of my childhood imagination past the known limits, and I am a better, infinitely more creative person today because of his stop-motion wonders, marvels, creatures, dinosaurs, skeleton armies, gods, monsters, and chess playing monkeys.
“You will give the people of Earth an ideal to strive towards. They will race behind you. They will stumble. They will fall.
And in time, they will join you in the sun.
And in time, you will help them accomplish wonders.”
I was not a fan of the first teaser and trailers for Man of Steel. I think “Clark Kent, Lonely Fisherman” was pretty much the worst way to sell Superman.
But, the first minute and forty seconds of this new trailer are incredible.
I want to see that movie.
I got into an argument a while ago, regarding Gwen Stacy in The Amazing Spider-Man movie, specifically her costumes and boots. It was my belief that the costumes/boots were perfect; they were true to the style of Gwen Stacy in the comics, as she appeared in the 60’s through the early 1970’s.
My arguer said they made her look like a hooker/whore, and didn’t fit the character, and were, at the end of the day, the worst, most abhorrent choices for boots/costumes one could make for Gwen Stacy. This person isn’t a comic book fan, they don’t know the history (and didn’t care), and, icing, they work in costumes/wardrobe in film and television.
We went back and forth about it, until finally I just shut up and let it drop.
But you don’t get to call Gwen Stacy a whore, you don’t get to accuse her of having or wearing hooker boots. You just don’t get to do that. Not to Gwen Stacy.
And if the costume of the character in the movie is being true to the character from the original source material, then fuck you, they got it right.
Gwen Stacy in The Amazing Spider-Man was perfect. Gwen Stacy, almost always, is perfect.
And her boots are perfect.
This was yesterday, Saturday, at WonderCon in Anaheim.
It’s a living, breathing, real, life-size, noise-making, arm-moving, track-rolling WALL-E.
There were TWO of them.
They were built and controlled by Mike Senna, and his website is here, and he also builds R2 units that are just as fantastic.
I saw a lot of amazing things at WonderCon; I saw a copy of Amazing Fantasy #15 and I saw a man dressed as Robocop and I saw a lot of really terrible an really awesome cosplay, but watching Wall-E roll around and speak and EXIST…
It was the greatest thing I’ve ever seen.
Okay.
You can check out The Wolverine international trailer here. (Domestic one is here.)
(And, of course, all these are Property Fox Promotional Use Only.)
"
Everyone, sooner or later, gets a thorough schooling in brokenness. The question becomes: What to do with the pieces? Some people hunker down atop the local pile of ruins and make do, Bedouin tending their goats in the shade of shattered giants. Others set about breaking what remains of the world into bits ever smaller and more jagged, kicking through the rubble like kids running through piles of leaves. And some people, passing among the scattered pieces of that great overturned jigsaw puzzle, start to pick up a piece here, a piece there, with a vague yet irresistible notion that perhaps something might be done about putting the thing back together again.
Two difficulties with this latter scheme at once present themselves. First of all, we have only ever glimpsed, as if through half-closed lids, the picture on the lid of the jigsaw puzzle box. Second, no matter how diligent we have been about picking up pieces along the way, we will never have anywhere near enough of them to finish the job. The most we can hope to accomplish with our handful of salvaged bits—the bittersweet harvest of observation and experience—is to build a little world of our own. A scale model of that mysterious original, unbroken, half—remembered. Of course the worlds we build out of our store of fragments can be only approximations, partial and inaccurate. As representations of the vanished whole that haunts us, they must be accounted failures. And yet in that very failure, in their gaps and inaccuracies, they may yet be faithful maps, accurate scale models, of this beautiful and broken world. We call these scale models “works of art.”
—
There’s a lot more at the link. (Thanks to Fraction.)
The Stomping Ground Kickstarter is now live! Check out the video above for your first glimpse at some footage from the film, as well as some great behind-the-scenes moments. Then give the campaign a look, and if it interests you maybe throw in a few bucks and help us reach our goal, finish this film and get it to you!
Hey guys, PLEASE PLEASE donate to this if you can. It’s a film I worked on last fall, it’s AMAZING, and it just needs a little kick to get finished in post. Even if you can’t, just spread the word far and wide. THANKS!
I thought, I really really thought, this movie would be terrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrible.
And you know what? I kind of loved it.
The night before watching Oz The Great And Powerful, I rewatched the 1939 Wizard of Oz, for, perhaps, the first time since college. If not longer.
And that movie holds up and is completely great in almost every way.
And I was worried that a movie shot in 1939 would look better than a movie shot in 2013. And yeah, there is a scene in Oz The Great with Franco and Mila in a field of sunflowers that looks like the shittiest CG scene ever put on film, and it’s a wonder, because the same shot in 1939 looks beautiful because it’s all real, and the Oz The Great scene was clearly shot in an empty room in Burbank when they needed a shot and realized they ran out of FX budget so they hired Gary the temp to do it in Mario Paint.
But, so much of Oz the Great looks FANTASTIC. There is some beautiful stuff here, some great backgrounds and animal waterfalls and scary forests and it all is, truthfully, magical.
And there’s a lot that doesn’t work, too. But it might be one of the best movies of Sam Raimi’s career. (Well, it’s better than Spider-Man 3.)
And so much that I thought wouldn’t work at all, things I thought I would hate, worked spectacularly. The monkey? FANTASTIC. That talking monkey saved the movie. The doll girl? BEAUTIFUL. Her intro scenes are just perfect.
There’s a lot that they try to smush into the story, a lot of “let’s introduce all the residents of Oz in the last 45 minutes so they can set up the last 30 minutes”, and the witches are… interesting…
But man, that climax works. And for every nit picking moment where I’m like “But that doesn’t line up with The Wizard of Oz!” there are other moments where I’m genuinely happy with things that do line up.
Oh. And the music is uneventful and tragically so. The song over the credits by Mariah Carey is, what, the worst song ever put over end credits in cinema history? And that’s the only song in the movie, a movie that is a spiritual predecessor to a musical.
And it’s a shame that Disney can’t really tie into the 1939 Wizard. No ruby slippers, no…other things. But the things they can do, if they do it well… I’m genuinely interested in returning to this Oz.
Anyways, there’s a lot to love about Oz The Great And Powerful. And it’s worth seeing large and in 3D. I went in with low expectations, and three drinks deep, and it was great.
After wrapping photography on The Avengers (you know, the third highest grossing film of all time), director Joss Whedon took two weeks off before he returned to the editing process.
And in those two weeks, he shot another movie.
An adaptation of Shakespeare.
In black and white.
In his house.
With his friends.
And then he went back to The Avengers and it made a billion dollars.
That, my friends, is how you do it. That’s how you debate.
And this trailer is fantastic.
