1. The Last Airbender (Paramount, 3,169 Theaters, 103 Minutes, Rated PG): I don’t understand the logic for this release date. Films are usually released on Fridays and occasionally on Wednesday, and every once in a great while on Thursdays. We already have a film movie being released on Wednesday, the latest Twilight. Instead of going up against that film on Wednesday, or getting an extra day separation for a Friday release, this film is getting a Thursday release. Do they really thing 24 hours is enough time for it to escape Twilight: Eclipse’s shadow? Do they think opening it a day earlier would help it’s box office tally all that much? I doubt either would be true. 

Anyway, this is the live action adaptation of the popular Amerianime cartoon, Avatar: The Last Airbender (They had to change the title due to a modestly grossing, art-house film James Cameron put out last year). It is directed by M. Night Shyamalan, which seems like an odd choice.

Shyamalan is known for his own quirky mysteries with surprise twists at the end, And while Unbreakable was basically a comic book film without a comic book, he isn’t the first director you’d think of as a go-to guy for a genre adaptation.

The plot involves an immensely powerful boy who is called upon to stop a war amongst several elemental kingdoms.

Without a doubt, Andy Serkis is the preeminent motion-capture actor today. His work on Gollum in Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings films proved that characters could be fully realized through the process of using human actors to drive computer created visuals, a process he further further evolved on the human side of the equation with Jackson’s King Kong remake.

Serkis will be slipping back into a mo-cap suit for 20th Century Fox’s Planet Of The Apes prequel/reboot Rise Of The Apes. He’ll be portraying Caesar, the genetically altered chimpanzee who is the one responsible for the events eventually leading to the future that Charlton Heston discovers in Planet Of The Apes.

This should come as no big surprise as it has already been announced that most of the film’s chimpanzees and apes would be realized by WETA through CGI.

At least this bit of news coming to us via twitter is from Chris Petrikin, Fox’s VP of Corporate Communications and not from an actor possibly bypassing agents and management.

Serkis joins the already cast James Franco, John Lithgow and Freida Pinto. Filming is set to begin next week.

1. The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (Summit Entertainment, 4,416 Theaters, 124 Minutes, Rated PG-13): I know it really doesn’t matter what I say, this film will be a big hit as its legion of fans will go see it again and again and again. So, for something different, I will say something nice about the film.

The makeup on Edward has gotten much better. He looks creepier and more otherworldly. He looks like a vampire now.

Other than that, I’ve got nothing. I recently subscribed to Showtime, and Twilightis aired non-stop on the various Showtime networks. I tried watching it. Couldn’t make it through. Horrible acting, wooden characters, bad dialogue, ick.

But then again, I am obviously in the minority here. And since I am not a tweenage girl or her mother, I am not its target audience. I am not supposed to like it. And maybe things have gotten better since that film.

The plot revolves around the vampires teaming up with the werewolves that hate them to take on even worse vampires. Yay!

Although he played several memorable roles throughout his career, silent screen legend Charlie Chaplin is best known for his Little Tramp character. With a bowler hat and a toothbrush moustache, Chaplin’s hapless and lovable creation became one of the biggest box office draws of the silent era. For decades it was thought by film scholars that the first two appearances of Chaplin’s Tramp were the 1914 Keystone Studios shorts Kid Auto Races At Venice and Mabel’s Strange Predicament, but that notion has been overturned with the discovery of a Keystone Cops short where Chaplin makes an appearance.

The newly discovered film is A Thief Catcher, a Keystone Cops comedy found by film historian and collector Paul Gierucki at a Michigan antiques show. Upon watching the film, Gierucki realized that he had a previously thought to be lost film on his hands. And then he noticed the appearance of one Keystone Cop sporting a rather famous mustache and moving in a very familiar way. He showed the film to fellow Richard Roberts and the two agreed that they were looking at hitherto unknown Chaplin film appearance.

But this should not be construed as a starring role for Chaplin. The real stars are Ford Sterling, Mack Swain and Edgar Kennedy.

Although Chaplin headlined his debut film Making A Living, Keystone Studio boss Mack Sennett wasn’t too happy with the results. Keystone star and director Mabel Norman convinced Sennett to keep developing Chaplin and used him herself in Mabel’s Strange Predicament. Chaplin only appears on screen for about two of the short’s ten minutes of run time.

Released first, Kid Auto Races At Venice was actually the second film where Chaplin played the Tramp. Chaplin introduced the character in Mabel’s Strange Predicament, which was produced first but released a few days after Kid Auto. But A Thief Catcher actually started shooting the day before Mabel’s Strange Predicament. Roberts explains the significance of finding Thief Catcher -

It’s either his second moustache picture or his first. It cements the concept that he had the character before he came to Keystone and didn’t slap it together on the way to the shooting stage one day. Even when he’s doing a minor part he’s doing that character. It’s a new brick in the Chaplin biography. And this opens up the door to other unknown Chaplin appearances at Keystone.

Thief Catcher would be released on February 19, 1914, just ten days after Mabel’s Strange Predicament, but no one could have guessed at the significance of it at the time. It was only later in 1914 that Chaplin’s Tramp character would catapult the actor in to super stardom.

A Thief Catcher will be screened for an audience for the first time in probably 95 years on July 17 at the Slapstickon film convention Rosslyn, VA.

Source- Palm Beach Post

Be it coincidence or homage or the outright hope that they don’t get caught aping someone else’s movie, filmmakers have been replicating the work of those who have gone before them for some time now. Every now and then we like to stop and point out one of those instances.

Can a director swipe from themselves? Sure, they do it all the time and it is usually passed off as “directorial style” or as a trademark of some sort. But sometimes a director can copy something they did in an early film for a later one, and it has a deeper meaning within both. Such is the case with Ivan Reitman and scenes from his comedies Ghostbusters and Dave.

Through the 1980s and early 90s, Reitman was one of Hollywood’s kings of comedy both as a director and producer with Stripes, Twins, Kindergarten Cop, Dave and Ghostbusters to his credit. There was little that he could do wrong. (Though some would argue the point with Ghostbusters II.)

If one could find a theme to his films, it would be that of the loveable underdog rising up to make or inspire changes in the world around them. In Ghostbusters, it’s a trio of dog-eared and discredited academics starting a business and saving the world. In Dave, an average joe whose idealism in the United States hasn’t been soured by participation in the political process is called upon to impersonate the President and manages to avoid being manipulated by the real President’s staff long enough to get the ball rolling on legislation that would help numerous unemployed.

Interestingly, Reitman chose to stage the scenes where both films’ heroes take their first steps of their journey – announced by Bill Murray’s “Anybody seen a ghost?” and Kevin Klien’s spontaneous “God bless you! God bless America!” – at almost the exact same real world location, the entrance lobby to the Los Angeles Biltmore Hotel.

Like Reitman, the Biltmore had a pretty good film career in the 80s, appearing in films like  Rocky III, The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai: Across The Eighth Dimension, Beverly Hills Cop, Splash and Pretty In Pink. Built in 1923, its use as a film location goes as far back as Hitchcock’s 1958 thriller Vertigo and extends all the way to 2009’s The Soloist. For Ghostbusters it was the swanky fictional Manhattan “Sedgwick Hotel.” For Dave, it magically transports itself to Washington DC to appear as “The Monaco.” As you can see from the views of each scene, it appears that either they dressed the location a little differently for Dave or the hotel had gone through some renovations in the intervening time. However, in the wide shot (above) of Klein walking towards the door before turning back to the face the camera zooming in on him (below), you can definitely see some of the same architectural detail visible

But I don’t think that Reitman’s use of the location in both films was to draw a parallel between the two. On the Ghostbusters DVD commentary track he mentions that he liked filming there for Ghostbusters that he went back for Dave. At best, if there is any connection beyond that, it has its origins in Reitman’s subconscious. But that doesn’t make it any less of a swipe.

So the new full trailer for the Japanese live action adaptation of the classic anime series Space Battleship Yamato, known to most English audiences as Star Blazers, has no English subtitles. I don’t think we really need them here though to get a feeling for what the movie, hitting theaters in Japan in December, will look like.

Visually, director Takashi Yamazaki (The Returner) is going for the big, epic look needed for the film. True, the effects might not 100% photo realistic, but this is probably been made for a fraction of what Hollywood blockbusters are cranked out for. (I believe that the recent 20th Century Boys trilogy, where all three film were produced simultaneously, remains one of the Japanese film industry’s most expensive projects at a budget of 6 billion yen or approximately $67 million dollars.) But then again Japanese cinema isn’t plagued with the bloated, budget-inflating salaries that many big names in Hollywood command.

Via Twitch.

Marty McFly and Doc Brown will traveling through time on Blu-Ray disc this fall, as Universal has announced that they are releasing the Back To The Future trilogy in the high-def video format on October 26, 2010, the 25th anniversary of the first film’s original release.

Back To The Future superfan site BTTF.net got the scoop on whatto expect from the new releases directly from series writer/producer Bob Gale himself-

The HD transfers for all three films are simply breath-taking. They actually look better than they did in the theater because of the incredible job that was done on dirt clean-up. (And the film grain is preserved, so they still look like movies should look.) And hearing the sound in full dynamic range is — okay, I’ll say it — a blast!

Gale also promises that there will be new documentaries, even more comprehensive than the ones on the previous DVD release.

I’m sure fans will enjoy the new documentaries, which include interviews with cast and crew members who — for budgetary reasons — were left out of the 2002 documentaries. So there are some stories and anecdotes told on camera for the first time. And since everyone wants to know, there are three very brief snippets of Eric Stoltz incorporated into one of the documentaries.

You read that right!After years of being tantalized by just a picture or two of Eric Stoltz’s four weeks of working on the film before being replaced by Michael J. Fox, but no actual footage of his work has ever been released before. Reportedly, Stoltz was playing Marty much more dramatically then comedically, so I am intrigued to see what the foot age will reveal.

Additionally, Gale promised a host of other extras-

We’ve included an animatic storyboard of the nuclear test site sequence from the early drafts of Part 1; the galleries of stills and artwork have been rescanned at a higher resolution, and we’ve included just about everything from the previous releases as well.

With all the new material added for this release, including the Eric Stoltz footage, I don’t think most fans who already own the original DVD release will mind ponying up for the new blu-ray version.

Trigger, the faithful steed to film and TV cowboy Roy Rogers for nearly three decades, will be put up for auction next month. The horse, who was stuffed and mounted by Rogers after its death 45 years ago this July 3rd, is one of 300 items up for bid that were once part of the collection at the Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Museum, which closed its doors last year. Trigger is expected to go for somewhere between $100,00 and $200,000.

Trigger, a golden palomino, made its movie debut as Olivia de Havilland’s mount in the 1938 swashbuckler The Adventures Of Robin Hood. Later that year, Rogers picked the horse out of several potential steeds for his first lead film role, Under Western Stars. Rogers was so impressed with the horse, that he bought it and renamed it Trigger. Reportedly, Rogers had Trigger trained to respond to 150 trick cues and to walk up to 50 feet on its hind legs.

Via CMT.

Last year, commercial director Carl Rinsch became the latest in a long line of directors stretching back to the ’80s to attempt a remake of Universal Studio’s classic Creature From The Black Lagoon. He replaced Breck Eisner on the project, who walked away from the project after spending nearly four years trying to get it in front of cameras.

Eisner recently talked to Shock Till You Drop and spoke candidly on the factors that killed his version – “It suffered from the realities of development hell and a writers strike.”

Understandably disappointed after putting so much work in to the project, Eisner was enthusiastic about what his version of the film could have been. “It would have been risky and amazing,” he stated. “The design of the Creature by Mark ‘Crash’ McCreery was awesome. True to the original, yet obviously updated for today’s technology. The journey on the Rita, the boat design, it was ready to go.”

Eisner got as far as scouting South American jungles for location shooting. “Scouting Peru, Brazil, Columbia. We went into the jungle of mirrors. It was an amazing experience. I didn’t come out of it empty-handed but I didn’t come out with a movie, which is what I would have wanted.”

And though the project now has a new director, Eisner is skeptical of The Creature From The Black Lagoon‘s chances of ever reaching cinemas. That isn’t a slam against Rinsch, though. Eisnerplaces the blame on two things – The amount of money spent on development over the years and the poor critical and box office reception for another Universal Studios monster remake, The Wolfman, earlier this year.

Between [the Wolfman failing] and spending a lot of money in development, it’s money against the movie. When a movie is that close to happening, it takes a long time for people to forget about spending that money and to be re-engaged in it. I’d love for somebody to make that movie. It won’t be me.

As a first time feature director, Rinsch has a difficult task ahead of him in finally getting Creature to the screen. Rinsch is also hard at work for Warner Brothers on their similarly long-in-development redo of Logan’s Run. He’s ambitious, I’ll give him that. Let’s see if that ambition can actually get either of these two projects on the screen.

At the beginning of the week, we told you about a new, top secret project that director M. Night Shyamalan is currently shopping around to the major studios in Hollywood. In typical Shyamalan fashion, there has been lots of security around the project, with an assistant to the director showing up at a studio executive’s office with a copy of the script, handing it over to be read and then waiting until the exec finishes it to take it back.

Seems like there isn’t much of a chance of the script’s storyline getting leaked is there? May be yes, maybe no.

Deadline has a story about the producing side of Shyamalan’s career a few days ago, and buried within was this little tidbit -

[Universal Studios], coincidentally, is the major that so far has shown the most interest in the untitled Shyamalan-scripted thriller that CAA is shopping as his possible next directing project. I’m told Bradley Cooper would play a father on a desperate search for his missing child.  It might stray into Taken terrain, but the father taps into some supernatural powers to aid the search.

It should come as now surprise that Shyamalan’s film would involve the supernatural. Personally, I would like to see the director take a stab at a thriller that had no supernatural elements to it whatsoever. But I think that the strength of The Sixth Sense have lead the general movie going public to expect big twists towards the end. But when subsequent movies haven’t had something as strong as the reveal of The Sixth Sense‘s, audiences have voiced their displeasure. I think that Shyamalan has been placed in a box and he is going to have to work hard to get himself out of it. And even with the likes of Cooper, Bruce Willis and Gwyneth Paltrow being loosely attached to this current project, I don’t think that this will do it.