1. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn (Part One) (Summitt Entertainment, 4,061 Theaters, 117 Minutes, Rated PG): There will be millions of people in this world who will greet this film with cries of how are global nightmare is now at an end. No, the cry isn’t coming from Twilight fans, grateful that the next installment has finally arrived (although that’s only because its the next to the last installment, then there will be no more).

No, those cries will be coming from the Twilight haters, who have been waiting for the day that the franchise would slip out of national consciousness. There has seldom been a franchise that garnered this much teeth gnashing and vitrol as this one did.

I have to say that you can count me in this number. I have not read the books but I have watched enough of the films (they are in contant rotation on the Showtime networks) to know that the plot is weak, the acting bad, and the changes they meade to the accepted vampire and werewolf mythoses were achingly inane (sparkly vampires who can walk about in the daytime aren’t vampires).

But the plot point that is introduced in this segment where Jacob, who lost out on Bella to Edward, sorry Team Jacobites, finds himself irresistably drawn to Edward and Bella’s daughter. With the Penn State scandal still fresh in the air, that is creepy enough as it is. But what jacks up the creep factor even more is that this attraction starts when the spawn is still in Bella’s womb. I’m sure there are people who are calling for Joe Paterno and anybody even distantly related to Penn State to be thrown in jail who think that negative-May/December romance is so, well, romantic. And that’s just wrong.

2. Happy Feet Two (Warner Brothers,  3,606 Theaters, 100 Minutes, Rated PG): The first Happy Feet was a charming surprise, with a lot of heart that made up for the slightly heavy handed ecological message. I liked it a lot in that it was a kids movie that wasn’t afraid to have a bit of a dark side to it.

Part of the charm of the first movie is gone. Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman, whose best Elvis Presley/Marilyn Monroe impersonation since Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern Wild at Heart one, was a high point of the original, are missing from the credits in this one. Instead, we focus on a grown up Mumbles (Elijah Wood) who faces an opposite problem than his father has with him, his child with Gloria (voiced by P!nk, taking over for the late Brittany Murphy) who will not dance.

Regardless, if this film is a half as good as the original, it should be a great success.

Of the majors, Happy Feet Two has a shot not only at a Best Animated nomination, but, if it’s good, picking up a statue. Cars 2 was  a weaker than normal effort from Pixar, so the award is up for grabs. And the first Happy Feet waddled off with the award in 2007.

And there is no way The Twilight “Saga” pulls a Lord of the Rings and gets nominated on its final go round. So give it up, Twi-hards.

In the smaller releases, the biggest Oscar contender has to be The Descendants. It is written and directed by Academy favorite Alexander Payne (winner for his script for Sideways, for which he also got a directing nod, and was also nominated for writing Election) and stars someone the Academy loves, George Clooney. Bonus: points, it adapted from a novel about a man who reconnects with his estranged daughters after his wife suffers a horrible boating accident. It opened in Los Angeles and New York on Wednesday, and will be bumped up to 27 theaters nationwide today.

One of the reasons that Peter Jackson shot his epic Lord Of The Rings films in his home country of New Zealand was to highlight the country’s stunning natural beauty. And it was generally assumed that he would be following suit for his adaptation of The Hobbit as well.

However, Elijah Wood has let something slip in an interview with Vulture that would lead us to believe that perhaps Jackson and company will be traveling to England for at least a small bit of the production. When asked when he was scheduled to film his part for The Hobbit, Wood stated -

October. I’m going to the U.K. first to do some shooting, but then I’m going down in October for the New Zealand part.

Take a moment to parse that sentence. While it could be taken as work on two different projects, the word “part” is what links the two and indicate that both shoots are for the same project.

Could Wood have misspoken? Possibly, though I don’t see any project that Wood has on his schedule that would shoot in England.

The folks over at TheOneRing are theorizing that a UK shoot might be happening to accommodate cast member Sir Christopher Lee, who at age 89 may  just be getting too old to travel half way around the world to New England for filming. Lee himself expressed concerns over his health allowing him to participate in the films earlier this year. However, there is no time when Wood’s character of Frodo Baggins ever interacted with Lee’s evil wizard Saruman, so I doubt that may be the reason.

More likely is that actor Ian Holm, who played Bilbo Baggins in Lord Of The Rings, may also be too old to travel to New Zealand for filming and Wood will be shooting his scenes with him there. I am, of course, basing this on the assumption that Wood and Holm’s roles in the two Hobbit films will be serving as bookends for the main story. Admittedly that raises the question if Woods scenes are bookends with Holm, why would he need to travel to New Zealand if he was going to England to accommodate shooting with Holm?

I’m sure we’ll get an answer to this mystery sometime before the first installment of Jackson’s two-part Hobbit adaption hits theaters in December 2012.

Orlando Bloom has become the latest cast member from Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings to officially be confirmed as reprising their role in The Hobbit.

The news comes from the film’s official Facebook page, but you can read it below.

But really, is this news a surprise to anyone? We already knew that Hugo Weaving, Elijah Wood, Christopher Lee and Cate Blanchett are back to reprise their Rings characters despite them not actually appearing in J R R Tolkien’s original The Hobbit novel. Considering that the character’s father Thranduil does appear in the books, and will be played by Lee Pace, it does make sense that Legolas could at least pop up in a cameo. I suspect, though, that he will be playing a part in the material that Jackson has added into the story from the Lord Of The Rings appendices that chart out the other goings on in Middle Earth while Bilbo Baggins and the dwarves were journeying to the Lonely Mountain.

It appears that if you want the scoop on what’s going on with the production of Peter Jackson’s adaption of The Hobbit, you better be monitoring his Facebook page. In the last 24 hours the director has made two posts about the film – one discussing the writing process he uses for a film like this and a second one clarifying a bit of casting.

Let’s take the second, and shorter, of the two first. Last week, Jackson posted a ten minute video detailing the days leading up to the commencement of filming and the first few days of shooting. It turns out that there was some confusion as to who was reading he opening lines from J R R Tolkien’s original novel at the end of the piece. Jackson clears that up by saying -

One comment that came up from the recent video blog was the Bilbo voice at the end—many of you assumed it was Sir Ian Holm. Whilst Ian will be returning as the older Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit, that recording was actually Martin Freeman’s voice, taken from a script read through we recorded when the cast first arrived. I have to admit, I wasn’t sure who it was when I first heard it, either. Cheers, Peter J

And in the process he manages to confirm that Ian Holm will be back to reprise his role of the older Bilbo Baggins that he played in Lord Of The Rings. Presumably he’ll be appearing in scenes with Elijah Wood, who is returning to play Bilbo’s nephew Frodo. Speculation is that their scenes will be part of a framing device in which Bilbo tells Frodo of his adventures which make up the main part of the film.

Jackson’s longer post sees him discussing the stages a film’s script goes through before and during production. It’s an interesting read and we present to you in its entirety for those who aren’t on Facebook.

Just arrived at our four-day Easter break, which will be a nice time to recharge batteries and do a few script tweaks for future scenes.

We always find there are three distinct phases in the life of a film script. First, it exists before the film starts shooting. In this period, which can last from months to years, the script is a theoretical document—an imaginative version of the movie.

Then you start shooting and things come much more into focus—usually in a very positive way. We now have actors who bring their skill to the roles and suddenly we see the characters in a more vivid and tangible way. This is both fun and satisfying, and always inspires us to embark on constant script revisions to meet the renewed potential these characters now have. I feel that much of the best writing happens during this period, but it does make a very busy time—very, very busy! Sometimes we have gotten these revisions to the actors a little late. We constantly joke to Ian McKellen that tomorrow’s script pages will be slid under his door sometime the night before… and sometimes that has been true.

The worst case of this came during The Fellowship of the Ring, when we revised Boromir’s long speech about Mordor at the last minute and only got it to Sean Bean on the day it was being shot. Sean handled it very cleverly—if you look at the movie, you’ll see he occasionally has his head bowed, as if dealing with the emotional weight of the horrors of Mordor. In actual fact, the new script page had been taped to his knee! By the time we were done with several takes and a few different camera angles, Sean had the speech down pat, and it was mainly those takes that were used in the final cut.

The final writing phase comes in post-production, when you edit the movie. No matter what you were imagining when you wrote the script, and what you imagined during the shoot, nothing now matters beyond the actual cut film. We often find that script work continues during post, including writing and shooting new scenes, reorganising the order of scenes, or recording additional dialogue to slip into shots. We do all of these things, and the writing only stops when the film is finally finished.

Many thanks for all the comments about the first posts. A few common questions have come up and I’ll answer some of those over the break. Now to get back to the script for those Rivendell scenes we have coming up…

Cheers,

Peter J

Late last week, it was rumored, then quickly confirmed that Elijah Wood was returning to Middle Earth for Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit, even though the action of that story takes place decades before Wood’s Lord Of The Rings character Frodo Baggins is born. At the time we, and several others, speculated that perhaps Jackson is going to use a framing device in which an older Bilbo Baggins, the hero of The Hobbit, relates his adventures to his nephew Frodo. But that’s all it is, speculation.

It seems that Wood has a bit more of an idea as to what he’ll be doing, but not much. As he told IGN -

We thought we were finished and the character doesn’t even exist in The Hobbit, so it was not even a pipe dream to imagine the possibility would be there for me to reprise the role of Frodo. But they’ve come up with something that I think is kind of interesting and I think very fitting that doesn’t necessarily infringe upon the integrity of the original novel. It’s great. I’m really excited. I think [the roll will] be relatively minimal. That’s my impression. I actually haven’t read anything yet. I haven’t read a script. I have almost as much information as you guys have!

I would say, judging by what Woods says and doesn’t say, that we are pretty much on safe ground with the narrative framework guess in regards to his appearance in the film. The idea of Bilbo reading the story to Frodo certainly keeps the integrity of the book, especially when you consider author J R R Tolkien’s conceit that both The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings were written by Bilbo and then Frodo as part of a history of Middle Earth known as The Red Book of Westmarch. Can we read his “I have almost as much information as you guys have!” as an admission that yes, the online press have it right? I think so.

On Thursday, word started to spread that Elijah Wood was possibly going to be in Peter Jackson’s two-part The Hobbit even though his Lord Of The Rings character of Frodo Baggins hadn’t even been born at the time of the action of The Hobbit.

Yesterday, Wood’s representatives confirmed that he is indeed going to be part of The Hobbit in a statement that also mentioned other projects that the actor has upcoming -

Wood is confirmed to star in Peter Jackson’s “THE HOBBIT” to be shot in New Zealand. In addition, he has signed on to play “Ben Gunn” in Stewart Harcourt’s adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s TREASURE ISLAND along side Eddie Izzard. The 2 part/ 4 hour miniseries will be airing on SKY TV in the UK. Alan Moloney is producing with Steve Barron directing.

Wood will next be seen this summer in FX’s new series “Wilfred”, as well as lending his voice to Warner Bros. “Happy Feet 2” set for release November 18th as well as Disney XD’s “Tron: Uprising” (2012), In addition, he is starring in the Sundance short “Fight for your Right Revisited” directed by Adam Yauch and starring John C. Reilly and Seth Rogen.

Wood is repped by Nicole David at WME and Joanne Colonna at Brillstein Partners.

Of course, this still doesn’t explains exactly how his character will appear in the film. The logical choice seems to be as part of a framing device with his character’s uncle Bilbo, the hero of The Hobbit who will be played by Martin Freeman, telling Wood’s character Frodo of his adventures that make up the bulk of the film.

Via Deadline.