1. Larry Crowne (Universal, 2,972 Theaters, 99 Minutes, Rated PG-13): So, my question is, why is a summer film starring Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts getting so little promotion. I have seen maybe two ads for this on TV. Granted, a lot of that might have to do with my TV watching habits, but still…

I did not even know that Tom Hanks directed and co-wrote the film (co-writing it with Nia Vardalos, most famous from writing & starring in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, a film Hanks co-produced with his wife Rita Wilson). Maybe that’s why the film is keep such a low profile–Hanks doesn’t want to come off like a complete egotist.

Regardless, it tells the story of a middle aged man (Hanks) who returns to college after losing his job. While there, he develops a crush on his teacher (Roberts).

I loved Hanks last writer/dirctor/star turn, 1996′s That Thing You Do!, and I like both Roberts and Hanks as actors. So this should be right up my alley.

2. Monte Carlo (Fox, 2,472 Theaters, 109 Minutes, Rated PG): If I heard little about Larry Crowne, I’ve heard even less about this one. Not that I’m complaining, because this film seem awful.

The film appears to be a gender-switching updating of “The Prince and the Pauper” starring Selena Gomez as an American whose boring Paris vacation (Flaw #1 of the film, because if you are bored by Paris, you’re doing something wrong.) gets more exciting when she is mistaken for a look-a-like member of British royalty. I’m sure a romance

This appears to be a way for Gomez to reach a older audience while still keeping her tween fanbase along for the ride. I’m saying this not just because of the creepy, if poorly photoshopped, upskirt poster to the left, but also because her film BFF’s (or at least the actresses who play them) are six years older than her.

In a year when successful comic book movies get more than half of their money from overseas ticket sales, how a comic book film gets promoted internationally becomes very important. It becomes even more important when the lead character is a biologically enhanced superhuman soldier who wears an American flag as a costume. Therefore, the international poster for Captain America: The First Avenger becomes worth a look.

There is a lot of telltale signs of how Marvel is altering their marketing slightly for the international market. The “From the Makers of Iron Man and Thor” at the top tells potential patrons “Hey, this guy might be wearing the colors of a country you’re not that big a fan of, the film is done by the same company as those other two you liked.”

Having the larger cast feature also allows British actress Hayley Atwell, who plays Peggy Carter, and JJ Feild, who plays Mongomery Farnsworth–the comic book alter ego of Britain’s answer to Cap, Union Jack–to get some face time with an audience that they might appeal to.

And while there is no way to completely do away with all the America in Cap’s costume, taking of his mask and giving the people a straight on look at Chris Evans’ handsomeness could take many a person’s mind off the costume.

Captain America: The First Avenger, according to IMDB.com,  opens on July 22 in the U.S., Poland, Italy and Canada, July 22 in the U.K., Brazil, and Mexico, August 5 in Spain, August 17 in France, August 18 in Germany, and October 15 in Japan. It opens in the rest of the world between July 21 and October 15.

Just when you thought awards season was long over, David Fincher’s The Social Network has won another four prizes tonight to sweep the 12th Annual Golden Trailer Awards. The two-and-a-half minute clip promoting Fincher’s film about the founding of Facebook won in the categories of Best Drama, Most Original, Best Music and the overall Best In Show.

“The trailer for The Social Network lures you into the drama of the movie without any of the usual selling points in a trailer — its famous writer, or even the name of its famous subject—but you come away knowing exactly why you want to buy a ticket,” stated Golden Trailer Awards Executive Director Evelyn Brady-Watters in a press release. “We congratulate Sony Pictures and trailer house Mark Woollen and Associates.”

Other winners include Inception for Best Action trailer, Rango for Best Animation/Family trailer and Blue Valentine for Best Romance trailer.

Deadline: New York is reporting that Marvel has announced that not only will they be going ahead with a sequel to this year’s Thor, but also that the film is scheduled to arrive in theaters on July 26, 2013. The good news is Chris Hemsworth is back as the title character. The bad news is that director Kenneth Branagh will only be back in a “producing capacity.”

Thor has done more than half its $437,003,116 take from overseas ticket sales (which account for $259,561,239 of that total). You can probably chalk this up to the popularity of the concept in Europe and its truly international cast, but part of the reason might be due to Irish-born Branagh’s popularity overseas as an actor and director (he’s recently appeared on British TV in Wallander)

This is the second Marvel franchise to change directorial hands as Jon Favreau stepped down from directing Iron Man 3, handing the reins to the relatively unproven Shane Black. Coincidentally, Iron Man 3 is set to be released in May 3,2013. Favreau apparently will return as Happy Hogan in the new film.

No replacement has been named and no candidates have been mentioned. If I was a betting man, however, I’d expect an announcement, oh, sometime between July 21st and July 24th, at a little get together they hold each year in San Diego called Comic-Con.

In the future, when we settle down to watch a superhero movie from Marvel Studios will the main feature be proceeded by a short film starring another one of the numerous heroes that the studio has access to?

It’s possible, at least according to a story from Film School Rejects today that cites unnamed sources “on the periphery of Marvel Studios” as saying that the studio has some writers working to develop short films around a number of characters in the Marvel Comics stable. The ultimate goal would be to use the films as a way to gauge public interest in various characters to see if they warrant either placement in an upcoming film as a secondary character or as leads in their own blockbuster.

The source also states that Marvel has already produced two short films featuring Clark Gregg’s SHIELD agent Paulson character to be included on the DVD/blu-ray releases of Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger.

If this story sounds a bit familiar it is because this rumor floated around about a year ago. At the time Marvel Studios head honcho Kevin Feige denied that they were working on any short films, but that the studio did “like the idea.” Is this just a resurrection of that rumor or has Marvel gone from just liking the idea to actively developing it.

Personally, I like the idea of short, live-action superhero films running before a feature-length movie. PIXAR has had much success with the shorts that they attach to the front of their feature films, which have also served as a way for them to develop directorial talent for a future feature. Ratatouille co-director Jan Pinkava got his start with the company directing the 1997 short Geri’s Game, which was featured before A Bug’s Life.

Additionally, Marvel’s superhero rivals over at Warner brothers have been getting positive reaction from fans with animated short films featuring some of DC Comics’ second-tier heroes that have appeared on recent installments of their direct-to-home video animated features. Perhaps the time is right.

We’ve known for some time now that Ridley Scott’s currently in production science-fiction film Prometheus, started off life as a prequel to his classic Alien before moving off in a different direction, although possibly still being set in the Alien franchise universe. It’s hard to say for certain, though, as Scott has been fairly cagey about spilling details on the new plot of the film and how it may relate to Alien.

Well, io9 has reported that they’ve solved that mystery and have posted the following synopsis they were forwarded by a tipster.

Earth. Year 2058.
Archaeological digs in Africa reveals alien artifacts that proves humans were genetically engineered by a advanced alien race (space
jockeys). These “Alien Gods” also terraformed Earth in order to make it habitable for their human creations. Amongst the finds are coordinates to the Alien Gods’ home-world. To Paradise. Months later the Weyland Corp launch the spaceship PROMETHEUS and his
crew, into deep space to make first contact. Thanks to faster than light travel a few years later the PROMETHEUS enters the Zeta Riticuli star system. Humans are greeted by their makers, then transported further into space to a scary yet fascinating world.
The Alien Gods are proud of their “children”, their first creation to reach such levels of intelligence.

As a reward they share bits of their astonishing bio-based technologies with the humans. But for one member of the Prometheus’ crew it’s not enough. In a treacherous act he steals the “bio-source code” to Terraforming, a technology at the origin of all Gods’ powers, that could make humans equal to their creators. The Alien Gods may be scientists but are also ruthless conquerors,
destroyers of worlds who will not accept humans as equals. They unleash on the escaping human crew their favorite bio-weapon, a
creature used to “clean up” worlds before colonization. But something goes wrong in the process and humans manage to turn the bio-weapon against their makers. Giving birth to a smarter, nastier, bigger breed of gut eating creatures. Creatures that will be the demise of Paradise. What’s left of the Prometheus crew manages to escape the doomed alien planet.

On their trail a survivor Alien God on a familiar ship with an ultimate mission.

Bring the wrath of the Gods to Earth.

Well, that definitely sounds like an interesting story and anyone with just a passing familiarity with the Alien franchise can easily guess where how this would fit into the grand scheme of things.

Of course the question remains as to whether this is legit or not. We’ll see as we get closer to film’s June 8, 2012 release.

We haven’t heard much on Warner Brothers’ adaptation of Glen David Gold’s 2001 historical thriller Carter Beats The Devil since the studio optioned the book in March 2010. But now it seems as if there is some movement on the project inside the studio.

According to the LA Times, a script has been turned in to studio brass and now they’re beginning to look for interested actors and directors for the project. And at the the top of their wish list for stars is Johnny Depp.

Now granted, Depp is at the top of many projects’ wish lists, and not all of them appropriate for the actor. But having read the book several years back, I think that this one might be a good fit for him.

Gold’s book fictionalizes the life story of the real-life magician Charles Carter, whom no less than Harry Houdini gave the nickname “Carter The Great.” After he performs for President Harding, even bringing him up on to the stage to assist with a trick for the show’s finale. But when the President is found dead in his hotel room hours later, Carter comes under the scrutiny of a US Secret Service Agent. As the investigation unfolds, we are treated to flashbacks to Carter’s life, with him encountering historical personages from a pre-film career Marx Brothers to Houdini to BMW founder Max Friz to Philo Farnsworth, the inventor of television.

The book had been optioned a couple of times previously, once by Tom Cruise who was eying it as a starring vehicle.

Screenwriter Diablo Cody is looking to add a new job description to her resume – director. The writer will be taking on her first directorial duties with Lamb Of God, a screenplay she has also written.

Deadline describes the script as a comedy that “follows a young conservative religious woman who loses her faith after a plane crash. She decides to go to Vegas and live the life of a sinner, and somehow finds her faith along the way.”

Mandate Pictures, who produced Cody’s breakthrough film Juno, will be performing similar duties here.

Since winning the Best Screenplay Academy Award for Juno, Cody has kept herself busy. Her horror film Jennifer’s Body was already in production at the time of her Oscar win. Juno‘s director Jason Reitman is just finishing up work on the pair’s second collaboration Young Adult, about a ghost writer of a popular series of girls young adult novels who returns to her home town to steal her high school sweetheart away from his wife. (I have to say that I’ve tried reading this script several times but just found the lead characters pretty much across the board unlikeable.) Cody also was hired to adapt the popular tween novel series Sweet Valley High for the big screen, but that was almost two years ago and we’ve heard nothing on it since so that project might very well be dead.

Superheroes are taking a beating this summer, and not just at the hands of their arch nemesis’s. In terms of tickets sales, Thor, X-Men: First Class and Green Lantern have all not quite measured up to the bar set by the likes of the Iron Man, Batman and Spider-Man films. But the one that has proved to be the greatest and perhaps most unexpected disappointment at the box office has been Warner Brothers’ Green Lantern, starring Ryan Reynolds. In the ten days of its release it has barely cleared $120.5 million domestically and internationally as of June 27 (as per Box Office Mojo), not a good number when compared to its estimated production budget of $200 million.

FilmBuffOnline publisher Rich Drees and comic book film editor William Gatevackes got into a discussion as to what went wrong with the film. The conversation started with Gatevackes admitting that he had gone back to the theater to see the film for a second time.

Rich Drees – What brought you back for a second viewing?

William Gatevackes – My wife. She hadn’t seen it. I wanted to get her opinion on it. She liked it a bit better that I did, but admitted it could have been better.

RD – So did you see it in 2D or 3D? I saw it in 2D and was glad I did. The opening scene where the alien astronauts accidentally free Parallax was so dark and murky I’m afraid it would have looked terrible in 3D.

WG – I saw it in 2D as well. The shame of it is that the scene was pretty much designed for 3D. Filmmakers just haven’t got it that keeping scenes dark for CGI purposes and shooting scenes in 3D don’t go together.

RD – Well, Michael Bay has been making a big push to get Transformers: Dark Of The Moon shown properly in 3D, but that’s another topic. Putting aside the 3D, it seems that a lot of the reviews have bagged on the film for the amount of CGI used, but isn’t that the point of CG? To show things you couldn’t do any other way? And for the scope of a Green Lantern story, you are really going to need CG.

WG – For me, if anything there was too LITTLE CGI. The green light constructs were born for CGI. They don’t need that fine of definition, which CGI lacks, so they would look awesome in computer generated art. They should have included more. And when it comes to aliens in the Green Lantern mythos, it wouldn’t be cost-effective to create make-up effects for an alien that is only onscreen for ten minutes. Just the amount of time it would take wouldn’t make it worthwhile.

RD – So would say that the scope of the story was a problem? That it was just too big a story?

WG – My main problem, storywise, was with the lack of definition on several plot points. I would have liked the relationships between the characters developed more, especially between Hector Hammond and the other characters.

RD – I agree with you there. The film could have used about ten more minutes or so of character work. Also, I think I would have started the story on Earth and then gone to the scene where Parallax was freed. I think the way it is structured now it is too much of an infodump on non-comic fans. It’s a big, sprawling story and I think it needed to start small to allow the audience to connect.

WG – Another bad thing about the infodump at the beginning is the fact that much of the info is repeated later on in the movie. One of the best ways to lose an audience is to show them something after you told them something. And they have a perfect way to introduce that info – a new person from a new race joining the Corps. Hal could have been the audience’s representative, we would learn as he did.

RD – But at least all that info is out of the way if Warners definitely goes ahead with a sequel.

WG – Yeah, but in a way that killed the film critically and via word of mouth, which puts any sequel in jeopardy.

RD – Well, Warners is still considering it. If they do move forward, what advice would you give them?

WG – Wow. Where do I start? Show, don’t tell. Create an emotional bond between your characters and your audience. Hammond was a good villain, but would he have been better if we saw a reason why he’d give up on the human race? Why did Hal become a test pilot after watching his father die in an accident as a test pilot? That was something that would have strengthened the character. That’s the thing they need to fix for the sequel.

RD – Part of me wants them to pull back and do an Earth-bound story, but that would mean possibly ignoring the cliffhanger involving Sinestro.

WG – One of the things that bothered me about the comic was that most of the stories took place on Earth. That’s like being a beat cop who only patrols the street he lives on. If his beat is the Milky Way, logic dictated that most of his time should be spent off-planet. But that could be addressed in a number of ways. However, I still want to know why Sinestro put on the ring in the first place.

RD – I thought they covered that a bit when he argued with the Guardians for the need to forge a yellow ring? Still, I would have liked to see more of his “fall from grace” as it were.

WG – The argument was that they need to fight to fear with fear (which I didn’t think would work – Parallax “ate” fear to make himself stronger). Parallax ended up being cooked in the sun, so there was no need for Sinestro to put on the ring. Who was he going to fight with it?

RD – Good question. I’ll grant that it did seem like a fan service moment. Surprising, as there wasn’t too much of what I would call fan service in the film. I’m thinking of the scene in the early draft of the screenplay that had the ring bypass Clark Kent and Guy Gardner when Abin Sur sent it out to find a replacement.

WG – Yeah, and I was waiting for that too! But think of it, if Parallax was attacking an Earth that Superman was on, he’d be the one to take care of it. No cameos either, but that kind of made sense. John Broome and Gil Kane, the creators of this version of the character, are dead. Geoff Johns would be self-serving.

RD – I think that the only bit of fan service was Carol’s callsign of “Sapphire,” a nod to the character becoming the villain Star Sapphire later in the comics. Getting back to the script problems, I was surprised that we didn’t see Hal’s family again after that one scene.

WG – They served their purpose. They told the audience that Hal was trying too hard to be his dad (and set up the Hot Wheels track for use as a construct). After that, they weren’t needed. However, that bit of info would have been better if they had a longer scene with Hal and his dad that showed us that.

RD – But I think that showing the family in the third act would have given Hal a greater personal stake in his final conflict with Parallax. Besides, I think it’s bad scripting to introduce something like his family in the first act and not have them be part of a payoff in the third.

WG – Definitely. On a quasi-related minor note, that shot of the school bus full of kids at the climax in the line of Parallax’s attack is a sign of an ugly trend in films like this. Maybe this is just my being a parent talking but it seems whenever they want to sell the villain as a threat, they put kids in the line of fire. It’s cheap, manipulative and bad story telling.

RD – I’ll agree, but that can be traced back to Superman saving the bus load of kids on the Golden Gate Bridge in Superman: The Movie. (Side note – DC Entertainment’s Geoff Johns, who oversaw this film started off as a personal assistant to Superman: The Movie’s director Richard Donner.)

WG – But it’s been done more often in more blatant ways. There was no need for the bus to be there other than to put the kids in peril. Because, unlike Superman, Green Lantern wasn’t able to save everybody.

RD – I actually thought that how they showed Parallax “eat fear”/kill his victims was a bit on the strong side for a PG rated movie.

WG – That’s more on the MPAA than anyone else. You know how arbitrary they can be. Maybe they thought that because most of the victims were aliens it wouldn’t be that bad.

RD – Are you saying that the ratings board is racist towards non-human intelligence life forms?

WG – Hah! Yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying. Now a question for you – Do you think the filmmakers went into this trying to make a great film or just not to screw things up?

RD – I don’t think anyone spending close to $200 million on a movie starts out with any other intention than to make a great movie. However, I think that in everybody’s mind was the specter of the Catwoman movie and more recently the fan reaction to the briefly mooted Green Lantern film that would have starred Jack Black and have been written y Robert Smiegel. Combine that with the studio’s need to launch a franchise to replace the Harry Potter income streams and it very quickly can become a case of “Don’t screw this up.”

But I’m wondering two things – 1) Did they pick too ambitious a hero to start a DC Comics film franchise with and 2) Are they trying to follow the Marvel Studio model too closely and will that prove a detriment? OK, that was three things.

WG – Don’t forget that Jonah Hex, a film with studio involvement that ruined it, was even fresher. This goes to answer #2, since the heavy hand of the studio changing the film to what they think audiences wasn’t didn’t work, following Marvel’s lead was a smart way to go. And answering #1, I belive that Green Lantern was an ideal choice to make a movie – if they made it correctly. A big part of the concept that was missing was the awe and grandeur aspect. This might be where following Marvel’s lead was bad. Marvel’s films lend themselves to be more grounded. DC’s comics are more about being mythic and bigger than life in nature. When you lead character is so blasé about meeting different alien races and travelling to alien planets, it ruins the awe aspect.

RD – true, there was no real feeling of awe. Hal seemed pretty nonchalant with the whole going to a different planet thing. But I was thinking of Marvel’s Kevin Feige and his philosophy of only asking the audience to accept one fantastic concept per film, i.e., a man can build a flying suit of armor. As much as I like the character of Green Lantern and its mythos, I’m wondering if perhaps they should have started with someone not quite so complicated, perhaps the Flash or Green Arrow, both of whom are currently being developed for their own films.

WG – Well, if not being complicated was the idea, Thor would not have been made. Asgardian gods, frost giants, evil half-brothers, hammers that control the weather is not all the much less complicated than space cops, evil forces, corrupted humans and wish granting rings. So I don’t think that Green Lantern being too complicated played a role.

RD – But with Thor, audiences had three movies to acclimate themselves to Marvel’s cinematic world. Green Lantern is a bit of a plunge into the deep end.

WG – Not really. Outside of SHIELD, there was nothing to really set up anything in Thor. It’s a big leap to go from altered humans and technological geniuses to a thunder god. Thor was different enough from what came before that it was still a struggle to overcome.

RD – Well, I think we’ll have to agree to disagree on this point.

WG – Yes, you ignorant slut.

RD – Hah! So any final thoughts?

WG – I know that I probably came out sounding like I absolutely HATED Green Lantern. I thought there was a lot of good there too. But the film should have been a slam dunk. And it wasn’t because of some bad choices. That’s frustrating.

RD – Well, all I’m hoping is that if Warners goes ahead with a sequel (and since I have trouble seeing them hit $150 million, let alone $200 million I doubt that they eventually will), I hope that they concentrate more on the story and remember the human element in the grand scheme of things.

WG – Ditto!

Michael Bay has screwed up again. For the longest time, the rule of thumb for any summer blockbuster trilogy has been that the first film should be pretty good, the second film even better and then the third film be a massive disappointment. Leave it to Bay to get it all wrong and make the second installment of his Transformers trilogy the massive disappointment and the third film the one that improves on the series’ initial offering.

Of course, saying that Transformers: Dark Of The Moon is the best of Bay’s three films based on a toy line about an alien race of robots engaged in a civil war and who can disguise themselves as Earth vehicles does sound like I am damning it with faint praise. And I probably am, but it still remains a fairly solid summer popcorn flick. And I say this as someone who never really held all that much interest in the Transformers franchise through all its incarnations as toys, comic books and cartoons. Sure, there are some lapses in logic and some plot holes, but nothing so big as to swing a wrecking ball up against one’s suspension of disbelief.

It has been a few years since the heroic Autobots have finally defeated their enemies the Decepticons in the centuries-long civil war that brought them to Earth, they have allied themselves with the United States’ military to help keep humanity from destroying itself. On one such mission to the damaged nuclear reactor at Chernobyl, they discover a part of a spacecraft that had been piloted by their former leader Sentinel Prime. Confronting the US military, it is revealed that the entire Apollo lunar program was a smokescreen to investigate a mysterious alien spaceship whose crashlanding on the Moon was detected by NASA in 1962.

Meanwhile, Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBouef), the Autobots first ally when they arrived on Earth, has been shut out of the military operations that the Autobots go on and is having a hard time finding a job like every other college graduate. Eventually landing a position in the mail room of a company, Sam is confronted by a co-worker and a conspiracy theory fanatic who recognizes Sam from news reports of his adventures with the Autobots and tries to warn him about the mysterious deaths of several scientists. Sam brushes it off until the co-worker is murdered and the office is attacked by a Decepticon. Still being rebuffed by the military, Sam starts his own investigation with the help of former government agent Seymour Simmons (John Turturro) and quickly discovers that there are still Decepticons hiding on Earth and that they have a plan involving retrieving some advanced technology still aboard the crashed ship on the moon. After much running about, things culminate in battle between the Autobots and the Decepticons through the streets, buildings and skies of Chicago with the fate of the world, as always, hanging in balance.

Much like this is the best film in a series that hasn’t been all that great, Ehren Kruger’s script is possibly the best thing I’ve seen from the writer. But then again, when you have films like Reindeer Games, the American remake of The Ring, The Skeleton Key, The Brothers Grimm and the last Transformers movie on your resume, you have nowhere to go but up. Kruger does a nice job weaving some real world history into the story and these plot points stand out as some of the more inventive moments in the script. True to form for a Transformers movie though, the robots have more interesting motives and characterizations than the humans. The comic relief moments aren’t as awful as in the past and thankfully the two odious and racist comic-relief Autobot characters from the last film are nowhere to be seen this time around.

Perhaps in an attempt to curry favor with the top brass at Paramount, the studio behind the Transformers films, Kruger works in three references to the studio’s crown jewel franchise Star Trek, including lifting a plot moment from last year’s relaunch of the series. Ironically, the Star Trek reboot was written by Roberto Orel and Alex Kurtzman, who had worked on the first two Transformers installments but declined to participate on this outing out of a fear of “getting stale.”

Shooting the film in 3D seems to have had a positive effect on Bay. Typically, Bay moves his camera swiftly around the action to a point that can leave one reaching for some motion-sickness pills even during a simple conversation between two characters. Coupled with Bay’s quick style of editing, the end result can often be action sequences that are nothing more than a confusing jumble of images. However, due to the demands of how one’s brain seems to process 3D imagery, Bay has been forced to slow down his moving camera and lengthen the time between edits resulting in scenes that are much more visually coherent and comprehensible.

And while Bay seems to have upped his game for the film’s added visual dimension, much of the acting remains as flat as ever. For most of the film, LaBeouf plays Sam at one constant level of anger which makes it hard to want to root for him. The only thing that distinguishes Huntington-Whitley’s girlfriend character from the departed Megan Fox’s similar role is a British accent. As this is Huntington-Whitley’s first acting job it is hard to determine if her flat performance is the result of an underwritten role or a lack of experience.

But at the end of the day, or in the case the film’s two-hour and 37 minute run time, Transformers: Dark Of The Moon provides plenty of bang for your buck, even with an inflated ticket price for 3D. The film’s third act siege of Chicago is filled with some exciting sequences that make one forget the in adequacies of the previous hour and a half. It certainly isn’t going to rewrite the rules of the summer blockbuster, but it never had that intention to begin with. And there’s nothing wrong with that.