Grant McCune, the visual effects artist who won an Academy Award for his model work for 1977′s  Star Wars, died Monday, December 27th of pancreatic cancer at his home in Hidden Hills, CA. McCune was part of the effects team that won the Oscar for creating the breathtaking visuals, joining John Stears, John Dykstra, Richard Edlund and Robert Blalack in receiving the gold statue. In addition to his work on Star Wars, he was also nominated for an Academy Award for 1979′s Star Trek: The Motion Picture. He was 67.

McCune got his start in special effects when his bachelor’s degree in biology landed him a job designing and building the mechanical shark with Bill Shourt for Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. Folling his work on Star Wars, McCune joined Dykstra as a partner in Dykstra’s fledgling special effects company Apogee working on over three dozens films including Big, Die Hard, Firefox, Lifeforce, Never Say Never Again, Spaceballs and Caddyshack. He would later form his own company, Grant McCune Design, which contributed to over 20 films including Speed, Batman Forever, U.S. Marshals, Red Planet, Sphere, U-571, Spider-Man and Serenity.

If you don’t want to know which member of the Avengers may show up in this summer’s upcoming Thor film before they officially join forces in 2011′s The Avengers, you may want to skip over this story, because that’s exactly what you’ll find out if you keep reading. (You may also want to just avoid the internet for the next day or two until everything dies down, what with so many sites trumpeting the spoiler in their headlines.)

If you’re still with us, you will probably be excited to know that The Wrap is reporting that Jeremy Renner, who will be playing the archer Hawkeye in The Avengers, has a cameo set for Thor. Their source is vague on details and didn’t elaborate how big or small the appearance is or exactly what happens in the scene(s) Renner is in, but The Wrap is taking his word as confirmation of the on-again/off-again rumor of Hawkeye making an appearance in  the Kenneth Branagh directed film.

So let the speculation begin. Will we see Hawkeye, aka Cliff Barton, in his traditional purple costume, or something more akin to the black outfit he wears in Marvel’s The Ultimates series? My guess would be probably his Ultimates garb as that seems to be where Marvel Studios is taking many of their creative cues from. Will we see him as a carnival performer, an agent of SHIELD, a criminal or something else?

We’ll find out whatever the truth is on May 4, when Thor hits theaters.

As director Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine goes into release today, we re-present our review of the film from when it screened at the Philadelphia Film Festival this past fall.

Blue Valentine is a devastating portrait of the disintegration of a marriage, a slow-motion car crash where you see things inevitably spinning out of control but are unable to stop the tragic tableau unfolding before you.

Whatever love Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams) had between them is gone. Although they’ve made a home together and are raising a precious little girl, the stresses of their life have taken their toll. Cindy’s dream of being a doctor has been reduced down to a job as a nurse, while the ambitionless Dean seems content with his job as a housepainter. They both know that their marriage is in trouble, but neither know what to do to fix things. In desperation, Dean books them a room in what could be politely described as a “honeymoon motel” with the hopes that they can reconnect on any level.

But as we watch them make a last, fumbling grasp at saving their marriage, the film flashes us back to five years earlier, showing us their chance meeting, courtship and then hasty marriage. Oddly enough, many of these beats can be found in typical Hollywood romantic comedies, but here they are played for a sweet realism, not the cloyingly cute tone endemic to that genre. And given what happens to Dean and Cindy, it is hard not to think that maybe writer/director Derek Cianfrance is critiquing if not outright rejecting the notion of the Hollywood happy ending.

The contrast between the couple then and now is stark and at times jolting, leaving the audience to wonder what happened between the two. While Cianfrance doesn’t show us the intervening years directly, we can make some good guesses as to why things fell apart the way that they did from what we do learn about the pair and their upbringings.

But for all the strength of Blue Valentine‘s script, it is the performances of Gosling and Williams that deliver the emotional heft of the story. The pair manages to simultaneously create a marvelous chemistry in the flashback scenes and an agonizing estrangement in the present day portion of the film. Williams continues to show that she was one of the most underrated actresses working today as she injects into Cindy’s inability to fully articulate the anger and frustration she feels at how her life has overwhelmed her a raw energy. Gosling’s Dean comes across as deeply conflicted, his male ego under attack whenever Cindy tries to voice her complaints to him. The two create a self-sustaining loop of pain from which they can not escape and which is heartbreaking to watch.

The villainous Darth Vader revealing that he is the father of heroic Luke Skywalker, Jason Miller casting out the devil from young Linda Blair and a documentary on psychological trauma amongst World War Two combat vets are all celluloid moments that will be preserved by the Library of Congress on the National Film Registry. This morning Librarian of Congress James H. Billington announced that The Empire Strikes Back, The Exorcist and the documentary Let There Be Light are just three of the 25 titles named to the National Film registry this year.

This year’s list covers over a century of cinema from Newark Athlete, an experimental 1891 short film of a New Jersey teenager swinging Indian clubs shot at Edison Laboratory in East Orange, NJ to Study Of A River, a 1996 experimental film about the Hudson River from director Peter B. Hutton. Newark Athlete is also the Registry’s earliest film.

The complete list of films named to the Registry can be found below.

The list of 25 films has been released annually since 1989 and is composed of 25 films selected by Billington from nominations received by the general public. The aim of the registry is to preserve American films of artistic, cultural or historic significance. This year over 2,100 films were nominated.

“The most interesting thing for me is not seeing something I like make the list, but getting educated by the list that comes out of this process,” Billington stated in a press release.

Copies of each film named to the Registry will be stored at the Library of Congress’ cold-storage vaults at the Packard Campus of the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center near Culpeper, Va.

This year, the cinema of the 1970s seemed to dominate the list with five films – Robert Altman’s revisionist western McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), William Friedkin’s horror classic The Exorcist (1973), Alan Pakula’s docudrama adaptation of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s book All The President’s Men (1976), the documentary Grey Gardens (1976) and the smash hit disco musical Saturday Night Fever (1977).

The Empire Strikes Back (1980), directed by Irvin Kershner, joins its predecessor Star Wars, which was named to the list during its inaugural year. Empire Strikes Back is also only the third sequel to be named to the Registry joining The Bride Of Frankenstein and The Godfather Part II. Empire also marks the fourth film from George Lucas to make the list, who also landed on the Registry this year with his student short Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB. Previously his features American Graffiti and Star Wars have been placed on the Registry.

Houston’s documentary Let There Be Light was suppressed by the Pentagon for 35 years due to concerns over its unflinching depiction of the mental trauma many World War two combat veterans experienced after returning home.

In a sad irony, three of the films named this year had links to prominent cast and crew who have died in recent months. The Empire Strikes Back director Kershner passed away on November 29th, while Leslie Nielson, whose career was reinvented by his role in the comedy Airplane!, died on November 28. The Pink Panther helmer Blake Edwards passed on December 15.

The 25 films named to the National Film Registry are-

Airplane! (1980)
All the President’s Men (1976)
The Bargain (1914)
Cry of Jazz (1959)
Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB (1967)
The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
The Exorcist (1973)
The Front Page (1931)
Grey Gardens (1976)
I Am Joaquin (1969)
It’s a Gift (1934)
Let There Be Light (1946)
Lonesome (1928)
Make Way for Tomorrow (1937)
Malcolm X (1992)
McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971)
Newark Athlete (1891)
Our Lady of the Sphere (1969)
The Pink Panther (1964)
Preservation of the Sign Language (1913)
Saturday Night Fever (1977)
Study of a River (1996)
Tarantella (1940)
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945)
A Trip Down Market Street (1906)

Looking back on the cinematic year of 2010, I think this video from YouTube user genrocks elegantly sums up the breadth and scope of what was offered up to us. Editing together some 270 films into a six minute montage, genrocks manages to find some common themes and imagery in a wide variety of the year’s cinematic output. Though I suspect some studios may bristle at this thinking that there might be some copyright infringement going on here (there isn’t), I would suggest that based on this clip the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences get a hold of this person and have them compile all the montages for this (and future) year’s Oscar telecast.

As he doesn’t make many, a new film from Terence Malick is always something to look forward to and the fact that the auteur has a new feature coming next spring is one of the things that has us excited about the new year. Fox Searchlight has just released the first two views of that film The Tree Of Life, which stars Brad Pitt, Sean Penn and Jessica Chastain. The studio’s official descpition of the film is as follows -

From Terrence Malick, the acclaimed director of such classic films as Badlands, Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line, The Tree of Life is the impressionistic story of a Midwestern family in the 1950′s.  The film follows the life journey of the eldest son, Jack, through the innocence of childhood to his disillusioned adult years as he tries to reconcile a complicated relationship with his father (Brad Pitt).  Jack (played as an adult by Sean Penn) finds himself a lost soul in the modern world, seeking answers to the origins and meaning of life while questioning the existence of faith.  Through Malick’s signature imagery, we see how both brute nature and spiritual grace shape not only our lives as individuals and families, but all life.

Click on each picture for a larger version.

The Tree Of Life is scheduled to open on May 27, 2011.

We’re ten months away from Summit’s release of dorector Paul W. S. Anderson’s adaptation of the classic swashbuckling adventure The Three Musketeers and the studio has just released the first photo from the upcoming 3D production. (Click on the picture below for a muchlarger version.)

We see going from left to right Matthew Macfadyen as Athos, Logan Lerman as D’Artagnan, Ray Stevenson as Porthos, and Luke Evans as Aramis. Personally, this picture is doing absolutely nothing for me. I don’t get any sense of the Musketeers’ camaraderie. And Porthos looks particularly slim. I’ve never been a fan of Anderson’s work – Event Horizon, Soldier and Alien Vs Predator all just messy films – so I’m inclined to dismiss this upcoming film. I would live to see a great Musketeer adventure in 3D, but I have a hunch this won’t be it.

One of the more pleasant surprises of the past cinematic year has been director Kevin Smith actually getting to make Red State. For some time Smith has been talking about his idea for a horror film and for those of us who are fans of his comedies, the idea of him writing a script that Harvey Weinstein deemed too dark to invest in was pretty intriguing.

But Smith managed to get the cash he needed to make the film and this past fall he rolled cameras. Editing each day’s work in the evening, he had Red State almost entirely locked by the time shooting wrapped at the end of October.

And with the film heading to next month’s Sundance Film Festival, Smith has released a trailer for the film and it is like nothing we have ever gotten visually from the director before. If I were to have seen the trailer without knowing what it is was for, identifying it as Smith’s work would have been the last thing that I would have done. As he has no distributor for the film, the trailer hasn’t gone through the MPAA so it may be a bit unsafe for work.

1. Gulliver’s Travels (Fox, @2,400 Theaters, 85 Minutes, Rated PG): I’d have to say that this is one of those “your mileage may vary” films. What do I mean? Well, let me explain.

This is pretty much Jack Black for 85 minutes. He was kind of shoehorned into the classic story because some Hollywood executive (or Black’s agent, or perhaps Black himself) thought that the concept could be a good showcase for Black’s unique brand of humor.

So, if you are big Jack Black fan, then you’ll probably love this movie. If you hate Jack Black, then you’ll probably hate this movie. If you don’t have an opinion either way, this film film would probably sway you to one side or the other. Therefore, your mileage may vary.

Regardless, Emily Blunt passed on doing Iron Man 2 to do this film. It would be interesting to see how big of a mistake that was.

Yeah, no.

When cameras start rolling on Marvel Studios’ superhero extravaganza The Avengers next April, they will be rolling in New Mexico. The state’s governor Bill Richardson and Marvel Studios Co-President Louis D’Esposito announced today in a press release that the bulk of the film will shoot in the state utilizing available sound stages at Albuquerque Studios in addition to shooting on location in different parts of the state. Additional location work will be done in Michigan and New York.

In the press release Richardson stated -

In addition to being our biggest production to date, The Avengers will be the most technologically advanced and will provide cutting-edge training opportunities for our crew. I’m announcing this as a Christmas present of sorts to the people of New Mexico.  This is a perfect example of the incredible job creation, economic impact and global visibility this industry has brought our state over the past eight years, and of the need to keep it moving forward.

While I have to admit that I am disappointed that more of the film won’t be shot in New York City, where presumably much of it will be set as Manhattan has been the traditional home for the super team, I can’t argue with the economics of the decision. New Mexico has some fairly aggressive tax incentives designed to lure Hollywood production dollars into their state. Marvel took advantage of them for this coming summer’s Thor and presumably liked the welcome they got in the state. Marvel will need all the cost-saving steps it can take as The Avengers is shaping up to be the most expensive production yet from the fledgling studio.