We continue our celebration of the shortest month of the year with a look at some movies featuring Hollywood’s shortest actors…

There’s a scene in Under The Rainbow that had I seen the movie in its original 1981 run would have made me love it forever. In it, Carrie Fisher cowers in slinky underwear while two little people sword fight through a hotel’s kitchen. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the pre-teen me who first saw this movie, but one entering his fourth decade on the planet and is having a hard time forgiving all the rest of the crappy film that brackets this great scene.

It’s hard to decide which is the fatal factor that contributes to Under The Rainbow‘s failure as a film- the screenplay or the direction. The script is a muddled mess. The year is 1938. We are first introduced to Rollo, a little person Rollo (Cork Hubbert), who hopes to head to Hollywood to become an actor. We then cut away to Chevy Chase as a Secret Service man protecting a European Duke and Duchess (Joseph Maher and Eve Arden) from assassination attempts while they cross the country by train. Everyone converges on a Hollywood hotel where studio employee Carrie Fisher is housing the 150 little people who will be playing the Munchikins in the upcoming production of The Wizard Of Oz but seem more occupied with just running amuck. Added into the mix is midget Nazi spy Billy Barty, who is supposed to receive a map of American coastal defenses from Japanese spy Mako. However, Mako appears to be indistinguishable from the bus load of stranded Japanese tourists also staying at the hotel.

That’s a lot of plot, but the film never lives up to its potential, story-wise or comedicaly. For having all the makings of a screwball comedy of mistaken identity, Under The Rainbow is a paceless mess. Director Steve Rash seems to be totally adrift here, not building any kind of comedic momentum to any scene. Take the below scene from early in the film in which many of our characters first start to intersect with each other. The shot choices are poor and none of the action, a word I use in its loosest definition here, seems to build to anything.

When a movie announces its comic ambitions in its opening reel by having a midget Nazi give a “Heil Hitler” salute that results in the Fuhrer doubling over from a shot to the nuts, you may suspect you’re in for a rough, low brow ride. By the time you hear one of the little people come out of a room remarking, “That’s the first time I’ve ever gone up on someone,” your suspicions should be confirmed. Even the normally quippy Chevy Chase seems relatively sedate here. Add in the most racist caricature of the Japanese since Mickey Rooney in Breakfast At Tiffany’s and you’ve got the makings of a picture that managed to earn itself two Razzie Award nominations.

Of course, the film’s big draw, if we are to believe the advertising, is a hotel of little people gone wild. Needless to say, nothing like that ever remotely happened during the actual production of The Wizard Of Oz. And I have to wonder how the producers managed to snare original Munchkin actor Jerry Maren for a few scenes, given his vocal denouncements of the film after its release.

There are a few things, though, that will make film fans smile. In the film’s climax, as the cast runs amuck through MGM Studios’ backlot, the little people disrupt the shooting of Gone With The Wind, causing Clark Gable to yell out, “Hey Victor (Flemming), I think you should leave this scene in the picture!” In various scenes of the little people partying hard in the hotel, you can see some of them swinging from chandeliers as if they were trapezes and walking on balcony railings tightrope-style. This would be in keeping with the fact that many of the Munchkins had been circus performers in Europe before coming to America.

But as bad as the film was, I didn’t actively hate it until the very end. It attempts to ape a certain 1939 MGM classic (and shame on you if you need three guesses to figure out which one), but while the ending makes internal sense in the original, it stands out here like as an illogical sore thumb.

Interestingly, until recently, Under The Rainbow has been missing on DVD since the format’s inception, especially when it seems as if every other studio film from the past 30 years or so has gotten at least a cursory, bare-bones edition issued. But when you look a little closer, maybe that isn’t so surprising. Although produced by Orion Pictures, Under The Rainbow was distributed by Warner Brothers, who still own the rights. Warners also distributes The Wizard Of Oz on DVD for Turner Entertainment. As Oz is a perennial money-maker for they studio and Turner, I would think that Warners might be hesitant to do anything that would jeopardize their relationship with Turner. Still, it has recently been added into the list of films that are available on burned-on-demand DVD from the Warner Archive program. It’s up to you if you find the #19.95 price tag justified, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

1.Shutter Island (Paramount, 2,500 Theaters, 138 Minutes, Rated R): Usually, when a film has its released date moved back like this one has (it was supposed to come out in October 2009), that is usually a sign that movie is bad. But this film has a mitigating factor. And that would be Martin Scorsese.

A horror film, even a psychological horror film like this one, doesn’t seem like Scorsese’s forte. Many still think of him as director of the modern film noir. But he has branched away from criminals and gangsters in the past, like 1993′s The Age of Innocence and 1997′s Kundun. So it would not be surprising if he performs admirably here.

Leonardo DiCaprio stars as a U.S. Marshall investigating a inmates disappearance at an inane asylum. He goes undercover to find out the truth and what he finds is that the asylum is what could be driving the inmates insane.

The premise added to the delay could equal up to a rotten movie in the wrong hands. But Scorsese has never steered me wrong in the past. It should be interesting to see which side wins.

The Academy Awards will take a few moments during their broadcast next month to pay a special tribute to the late writer/director John Hughes, who passed away last August. It’s an unusual move for the awards show, which normally confines their honoring of filmmakers and actors who have passed away in the preceding year to a single montage segment.

The fact that both Oscar hosts Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin have worked with Hughes may have something to do with it. But it may also have to do with how Hughes’ films managed to be both rooted in the 1980s while at the same time addressing themes that transcend their decade, making them accessible to audiences of following generations.

It is not known who will be taking part in the tribute, but the possibilities are endless, from the actors who worked with him to the filmmakers who were inspired by him.

In the meantime, the latest issue of Vanity Fair has an in-depth profile of Hughes. As the director himself was fairly reclusive after he quit Hollywood in the early 1990s, it is possible that a piece this insightful could have only been written after his passing. I would recommend the online version as it contains some additional material not found in the print version.

Via Deadline Hollywood.

Leo Howard, last seen this past summer as the young Snake Eyes in the flashback portions of GI Joe, has been cast in Lionsgate’s upcoming new Conan film, playing the sword-swinging barbarian as a youth. Reportedly, Howard will feature in the film’s opening 15 minutes or so, making his performance the one that will or won’t hook audiences into the picture.

With this, his role in Joe and Robert Rodriguez’s kid comedy Shorts (2009) as well as the upcoming dramedy Logan, Howard has become one of the busiest new young actors out there.

This new version of Conan, with Marcus Nispel directing, is set to start production in Bulgaria next month. Jason Momoa will be playing the adult Conan.

Via Latino Review.

Bad news Mamma Mia! Fans. If you were hoping for a return trip to that Greek island where everyone spontaneously breaks into ABBA songs, you may have to cancel your travel plans. While making the publicity rounds for Percy Jackson And The Olympians, Pierce Brosnan told Empire that “I don’t think it’s happening,” when asked about the possibility of a Mamma Mia! sequel becoming a reality.

Although it opened opposite box office juggernaut The Dark Knight in the summer of 2008, Mamma Mia! still managed to pull almost $610 million at the worldwide box office against its rather small $52 million budget. That kind of return automatically triggers talk and speculation of a sequel. And the talk has flowed in the last 18 months or so about a sequel with even a rumor circulating that the proposed second film wouldn’t even feature the music of ABBA!

I can’t say that I’m too disappointed by this news. I wasn’t that impressed with the film outside of the production of the music. And sequels to popular film musicals never really seem to work out. Grease 2, anyone?

By Elizabeth Wright Shapiro
Draft Dated March 2, 2009

The old saying about politics making strange bedfellows is apparently the springboard for Allie With Benefits. With perhaps the first Meet Cute to take place at the G8 economic summit, Allies With Benefits managed to squeak its way on to this year’s Black List with five votes. But even with its unique protagonists, Allies With Benefits is still a romantic comedy at its core and while it bends some of the genre’s rather stiff conventions, it does manage to succumb to its pitfalls.

Jo Brooks is the first woman President of the United States, a position she worked hard all her life to achieve. But she suddenly finds that it all might be in jeopardy when she realizes that the newly appointed Prime Minister of England, Alistair Chadwick, “Ali” for short, is a collegiate one night stand from 25 years earlier. Having a bit of a reputation as a lothario, Ali doesn’t recognize Jo out of the parade of women from his past at first. But once he does, it isn’t too long before sparks are flying between them again, and this time it is no one night stand. Of course, a personal relationship is the worst thing politically that could happen for the two of them.

There are some things that Allies With Benefits does that break with traditional rom coms. Refreshingly Shapiro doesn’t hobble Jo with a female best friend/ confidant character. While it doesn’t seem to be a major thing at first, it does serve to show her isolation in the Oval Office. The closest character to fill that role is her chief of staff Max, but the gender difference automatically dictates a different sort of dynamic between them. In fact, with the exception of two characters who only show up in a scene a piece, Jo is the script’s sole female character, a reminder that the halls of power are still pretty much a sausage party. It becomes a point mined for laughs when the G8 leaders get behind closed doors and away from advisors, aides and security. The atmosphere quickly devolves to frat house levels with good-natured ribbing of each other and drunken karaoke. It’s a funny scene, and it almost makes me wish for a spin-off with these world leaders getting into some crazy, Hangover-ish hi-jinks. But the scene also grows out of the fact that these world leaders carry burdens that no one outside of similar positions could really understand and the chances that they get to truly relax with peers are indeed limited.

While Shapiro manages to craft serviceable voices for the leads, outside of a few exceptions (Jo’s remark about a “nuclear arm candy race” being the most notable) it doesn’t have much verve. One particularly jarring moment comes when Ali tells Sidney that the drunken kiss he shared with Jo was “hardly second base.” Jarring, in that the baseball metaphor for how lucky one gets on a date is culturally distinct to America and seems wrong coming from a British character.

Probably much to the disappointment of conservative pundits who enjoy painting Hollywood as nothing but Republican-bashing elitists, Shapiro has made Jo a member of the party of Lincoln and Reagan. The specter of Reagan actually factors in to a subplot about the renegotiation of an environmental treaty and the reduction of pollution emissions. Ali points out to Jo that the Republican Party used to have a much stronger environmental stance by quoting a speech of Reagan’s. He then challenges her to use her political juice to get a Republican-dominated Congress to pass the new treaty calling for an unprecedented 50% emission reduction by 2020. This is about as far as the script dips into political wonkery, though. The fact that Jo is Republican is almost coincidental. She could just as easily have been a Democratic President trying to convince a Republican heavy Congress of the same thing with the same argument.

But while the script’s first two-thirds contains both good and bad moments, it goes totally off the rails when it enters into the home stretch, beat for beat unfolding directly from the rom-com instructional manual. Jo and Ali split. Jo mopes, then comes to a realization before speeding back to Ali’s side to declare her love, scandals be damned. Definitely romantic comedy boilerplate. But setting the big climax against the signing of the aforementioned environmental treaty and the high cheese factor of the confessional speech Jo gives to Ali in front of the world media pretty much dispelled the feelings of good will that the script, uneven as it is, had begun to engender in me.

I have to give Shapiro credit, though. Audiences have been inundated with work place set romantic comedies, but she came up with the ultimate (high) office setting. She even manages to do a few interesting things with the story and plays with the ideas of the loneliness of high office and the small, strange fraternity that world leaders share.

But for its moments of inventiveness, Allies With Benefits knuckles under the limiting structure of its genre, making it tough for its transgressions to be pardoned.

This really isn’t film news related, but as a man of sizable size and girth, I think it bears repeating.

Kevin Smith was kicked off a Southwest Airlines flight on Saturday. Why? For being fat.

The airline used its long-standing  ”Customers of Size” policy, stating that the comfort of their customers is paramount and they believed Smith needed an extra seat due to his fatness.

This didn’t sit well with Smith, and since he’s is regularly on Twitter, he let the world know. Robot 6 has the best details about the dust-up, including Smith’s NSFW tweets (which, I say as a fan, is some of his best work as a writer), including his resonse to Southwest Air’s trying to get in front of the story.

Kudos for Smith to sticking up for people of a certain size. From one fatty to another, I salute you.

Last week, Imagi Studios, the CGI animation group behind the recent Astro Boy big screen adventure, was closed by its owner, Hong Kong-based Imagi International Holdings Ltd. Over 300 employees are now out of work due to the closure. The studio had been hemorrhaging money and had seen the shuttering of its US studio in Los Angeles last month.

What is unknown at this time is the fate of the studios currently in production feature Gatchman, based on the 1980s anime TV series syndicated in the US as Battle Of The Planets.  Imagi did state that would continue to develop ideas for films, but outsource the actual animation production to more cost-effective (i.e., cheaper) studios in China and other countries. However, the Gatchaman project was not mentioned by name, leaving its fate up in the air. It seems to me, though, that Imagi International Holdings’ vow to keep developing film ideas sounds more like something to appease stockholders. I have little hope that we will actually see Gatchaman ever be completed.

Imagi’s first release, 2007′s TMNT, featuring the popular Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics and cartoon characters, pulled in a respectable $95.6 million at the worldwide box office. However, last year’s Astro Boy tanked and tanked hard with only $23 million in worldwide ticket sales.

Although Imagi hasn’t officially released any footage from Gatchaman, they did have a teaser on display at last year’s Anime Expo, which some nice people have captured and placed on YouTube for the rest of us to look at and speculate over how the movie may have turned out.

It looks like Imagi was developing a Tetsujin 28/ Gigantor film as well-

Via Associated Press.

Filmmakers have been trying to figure out how to bring Isaac Asimov’s epic Foundation trilogy to the big scree for three decades with little success. But now Roland Emmerich, the latest helmer to be attached to the project thinks he has the answer.

In an interview with MTV Movie Blogs, the director of Independence Day and 2012 stated that he was going to use the same motion capture-driven computer generated animation that James Cameron used to bring the alien Na’Vi to life in Avatar to life. “It has to be done all CG because I would not know how to shoot this thing in real.”

Having actually read Asimov’s series, which retells the fall of the Roman Empire as the demise of a galaxy-spanning Empire, Emmerich’s quote caught me by surprised. Unlike Avatar, Asimov’s Foundation series takes place in a galaxy where humans are the only sentient life. There are no aliens who may be vaguely humanoid but need to be realized through computer animation, so I am perplexed as why he feels the need to go this way. Surely he could shoot live actors in front of green screens and then add Trantor, Terminus and the other fantastic worlds of Asimov’s series in during post-production?

Emmerich is expecting to receive the latest draft of the script from screenwriter Robert Rodat today. Rodat, who scripted Saving Private Ryan for Steven Spielberg and the upcoming Warcraft for Sam Raimi, worked with Emmerich previously on 2000′s The Patriot. The film has not been given a greenlight yet from the studio.

1. Valentine’s Day (Warner Brothers, 3,665 Theaters, 125 Minutes, Rated PG-13): When viewing the ads for this film, you are struck by the magnitude of the cast. But, just to put it into perspective, here is what this cast has done. It has been nominated for 16 Oscars and has won 4. It has been nominated for 45 Golden Globes and has won 15. It has been nominated for 24 Emmys and won 2. Members of the cast have appeared on the Maxim Hot 100 list 15 times, FHM’s Sexiest women 13 times and Stuff’s 102 Sexiest Women three times. You have two former actors of the TV show Alias, two former actors of That 70s Show, and three actors that appeared on Grey’s Anatomy.

To expound on that last fact, every member of the “beginning credits” cast save Julia Roberts has acted in a role on TV series at some point of their careers. Perhaps that’s why former TV guru Garry Marshall works so well with them. That and the fact that Marshall has worked with a number of the cast in other projects.

On paper, this film looks like it can’t help to be awesome. But, really, it looks like it might not be the best romantic comedy ever. I mean, if there is a plot point where Jennifer Garner is unable to get a date, how good can the movie be? There’s suspending disbelieve and then there’s throwing it out the window.

2. Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief (FOX, 3,356 Theaters, 119 Minutes, Rated PG): When my wife saw the ads for this film, she blurted out “Great, another film that is trying to rip off Harry Potter.” Considering this film is directed by the man who directed the first two Potter films, Chris Columbus, and is adapted from a line of kid-friendly books, I feel my wife’s judgement was pretty close to spot on.

Of course, and I say this will all due respect for Mr. Columbus and his abilities as a director, but a bowl of tapioca pudding could have directed the first few Harry Potter films and fans of the books would still come out and see it. The success of that film franchise, as the post Columbus films have shown, do not depend all that much on who’s directing it.

As the numerous attempt we have seen in adapting other kid-lit favorites to the screen in attempt to capture that Harry Potter magic, it’s not all that easy. Although this film has a Clash of the Titans junior feel to it that might put it over the top. It focuses on a teen who finds out that he is descended from the Greek gods. Adventure ensues.

3. The Wolfman (Universal 3,222 Theaters, 125 Minutes, Rated R): Do you know what’s a bad sign? They were promoting this film at the 2008 San Diego Comic Con for a February 2009 release date. Now, a year later, the film is finally hitting theaters. Movies are not like wines. They do not get better with age.

This is the fourth of Universal’s remakes of its classic horror films, arriving 11 years after the last one, 1999′s The Mummy. That one was a blockbuster success, spawning a couple sequels. 1994′s Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein wasn’t and 1992′s Bram Stoker’s Dracula was an ambitious film that was moderately successful. Certainly, Universal spent so much time tweaking the film so it was more like The Mummy than Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but they will probably be lucky if it ends up like Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

That’s because when a film is delayed so many times, a stigma develops around it. They could have crafted a film so awesome that it is the most perfect werewolf film of all time. But all audiences think is that is must have stunk to be tweaked so often. Let’s see if that is the case now.