1. Transformers: Dark Of The Moon (Paramount, 4,011 Theaters, 157 Minutes, Rated PG-13): The first film was, for me, a pleasant surprise. I didn’t go in expecting much, and was solidly entertained. The second film, well, sucked. Too strong a word? You should have seen the ones I decided not to use.

So this one has two easy goals to reach: be better that the last film (since it had a script before it started filming, it’s already pretty much guaranteed to have that one in the bag) and be as good as the first one.

Since most of the franchise’s cast is back with one notable exception (tsk, tsk, tsk, Megan. Calling your director Adolf Hitler while forgetting your producer directed Schindler’s List? Yeah, that’s just asking to get fired.) and the new cast members run the gamut from a Victoria’s Secret model to Dr. McDreamy, from Oscar Winners and nominees (Frances McDormand & John Malkovich) to the two actors with the best small parts from Knocked Up (Ken Jeong & Alan Tudyk), it should be decent. Although there is a Bill O’Reilly cameo, so it’s guaranteed not to be great.

About 15 minutes into Jonah Hex, I started thinking about Josh Brolin’s teeth. I was thinking–were they accurate? There had to be dental hygiene back in the old west–tooth powders and whatnot, but Jonah’s mouth is constantly scarred open. Even if Hex was a regular brusher, he’d have to be open to all kinds of bacterial. His teeth shouldn’t look as good as they did in the film.

The fact I was think of this instead of being enraptured in the scene that was going on up on the screen illustrates an interesting dichotomy about the film. It is amazingly short, yet almost completely boring. And the reason why it is so boring, strangely enough, is because it’s so short.

There is a good film in the material provided, but the film needed to be developed far more, especially when it came to the characters. But this was a make it cheap, get out fast and take as much money as you can kind of thing. And a look at the weekend’s grosses shows there will probably not be a lot of money to get.

Hex is seeking revenge against Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich) for slaughtering his family, but except for one brief exception we get to see no interaction between the Hex clan. Turnbull slaughters Hex’s family because Hex was responsible for the death of his son, yet we don’t see any interaction between father and son or the events that led to the son’s death. Hex has a relationship with the hooker Lilah (Megan Fox), but we never see how that pairing developed or what the two see in each other.

The addition of the “talking to the dead” superpowers to Hex isn’t as odious as I feared, outside of the fact they are another way to speed up the film. Why have Hex act as a bounty hunter and track down Turnbull from town to town when he can just touch a dead guy and have him tell Hex the information he needs. But the powers are used to good effect and create one of the best scenes in the film, one between Hex and Turnbull’s son Jeb (played in an excellent cameo by an uncredited Jeffrey Dean Morgan, the “Dean” of DC Comics adaptations after this film, The Losers, and Watchmen.). There is more emotional depth and character development in their short scene than there was in the whole movie. It was almost painful to watch because you can see  how good the film could have been.

And yes, the acting is not all that good. Malkovich pretty much sleep walks through the role and Fox shows the depth of a Barbie doll in her performance. And actors such as Michael Shannon, Aidan Quinn and Wes Bentley are wasted (which brings up an interesting future rule of thumb: if you see Bentley in any comic book adaptation, stay far away. His track record between this and Ghost Rider isn’t all that good). But we really don’t care because we really are not attached to the characters.

Which really dooms the film. It seems that it wants to be an over-the-top, don’t-think-that -much-about-it summer blockbuster but its whole plot revolves around betrayal and loss–two things that work better with subtlety and thought put into it. Jonah Hex might not be the worst film I’ve seen, but it is by far the most disappointing.

You know how every now and then you read about a prestigious actor taking a role in a movie you would think a bit beneath their prestige? This is one of those stories.

Two-time Academy Award nominee John Malkovich and three-time Academy Award nominee and one-time Oscar winner Frances McDormand have been hired to appear in Michael Bay’s giant robots fighting and exploding sequel Transformers 3. According to Deadline, Malkovich will be playing franchise star Shia LaBeouf’s character’s first boss while McDormand will be playing the National Intelligence Director.

So is Bay aiming for a higher caliber film, with quality actors and a quality script? This is a Transformers film, so I’m not holding my breath. Hopefully, Malkovich and McDormand have something worthwhile to spend their paychecks on.

After weeks of rumored contentious back and forth over the direction of the franchise, Sony Pictures and Marvel Studios have released a statement saying that the Spider-Man franchise is set to be revamped–without Sam Raimi at the helm. The release of the film has been further pushed back to 2012 to accommodate the new director, the new script and new cast.

This is the press release, as it appeared on Deadline-Hollywood:

Culver City, CA (January 11, 2010) — Peter Parker is going back to high school when the next Spider-Man hits theaters in the summer of 2012. Columbia Pictures and Marvel Studios announced today they are moving forward with a film based on a script by James Vanderbilt that focuses on a teenager grappling with both contemporary human problems and amazing super-human crises.

The new chapter in the Spider-Man franchise produced by Columbia, Marvel Studios and Avi Arad and Laura Ziskin, will have a new cast and filmmaking team. Spider-Man 4 was to have been released in 2011, but had not yet gone into production.

“A decade ago we set out on this journey with Sam Raimi and Tobey Maguire and together we made three Spider-Man films that set a new bar for the genre. When we began, no one ever imagined that we would make history at the box-office and now we havea rare opportunity to make history once again with this franchise. Peter Parker as an ordinary young adult grappling with extraordinary powers has always been the foundation that has made this character so timeless and compelling for generations of fans. We’re very excited about the creative possibilities that come from returning to Peter’s roots and we look forward to working once again with Marvel Studios, Avi Arad and Laura Ziskin on this new beginning,” said Amy Pascal, co-chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment.

“Working on the Spider-Man movies was the experience of a lifetime for me. While we were looking forward to doing a fourth one together, the studio and Marvel have a unique opportunity to take the franchise in a new direction, and I know they will do a terrific job,” said Sam Raimi.

“We have had a once-in-a-lifetime collaboration and friendship with Sam and Tobey and they have given us their best for the better part of the last decade.This is a bittersweet moment for us because while it is hard to imagine Spider-Man in anyone else’s hands, I know that this was a day that was inevitable,” said Matt Tolmach, president of Columbia Pictures, who has served as the studio’s chief production executive since the beginning of the franchise. “Now everything begins anew, and that’s got us all tremendously excited about what comes next. Under the continuing supervision of Avi and Laura, we have a clear vision for the future of Spider-Man and can’t wait to share this exciting new direction with audiences in 2012.”

“Spider-Man will always be an important franchise for Sony Pictures and a fresh start like this is a responsibility that we all take very seriously,” said Michael Lynton, Chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures. “We have always believed that story comes first and story guides the direction of these films and as we move onto the next chapter, we will stay true to that principle and will do so with the highest respect for the source material and the fans and moviegoers who deserve nothing but the best when it comes to bringing these stories and characters to life on the big screen.”

The studio will have more news about Spider-Man in 2012 in the coming weeks as it prepares for production of the film.

Rebooting a superhero franchise from square one is a long standing practice in the realm of comic books and is quickly becoming a habit for the cinematic superheroes as well. The Hulk and Punisher franchises were revamped after disappointing film debuts, and there are revamps planned for the Daredevil and Fantastic Four franchises as well. But their are certain qualities that makes the Spider-Man reboot a problematic one.

First off, the franchises mentioned above were either critical or commercial failures (and in some occasions, both). Spider-Man 3 received the worse reviews of the trilogy, but still broke many box office records. The franchise under Raimi seemed to have a license to print money and there was really no indication that it was going to change.

Second, while The Incredible Hulk and Punisher: War Zone were closer thematically to the comic books that inspired them, they weren’t viewed as being all that successful financially. The former, when you include worldwide grosses, made its money back and then some–and even out grossed the Ang Lee-helmed original.  But some people thought it was a failure because of its lower than expected domestic grosses. There is no excuses to be made for Punisher: War Zone. It only made a third of its production budget back and only one fifth of what the first Punisher film made. So there is no guarantee that the revamped Spider-Man film will continue the previous films success or even “make history once again” as the press release hopes.

Since the reboot wasn’t necessitated by bad reviews or poor box office, many are pointing to the rumored combative relationship between Sam Raimi and the films producers, most notably Avi Arad. It began during the filming of Spider-Man 3when Arad pushed for the inclusion of Venom as a villain in the film. Raimi admitted as much when speaking at the San Diego Comic Con the year before the film’s release:

“Avi Arad, who’s really got his pulse on all the Marvel fans better than any head of the corporation has ever understood those people that are interested in the corporation’s product – he really knows what those kids want – he said, ‘You’ve had two Spider-Man pictures. This third one – there’s so many kids, so many fans of Spider-Man want to see Venom. Even if you didn’t grow up with him, they want to see him. You’ve got the Sandman, that’s one of your favorite villains. Why don’t you bring Venom in also and make those kids, the fans of Venom, happy?’ So I thought that’s what we should do.”

A similar thing was rumored to be happening this time around. as we reported here. Raimi has shown a favoritism for the classic Spidey villains, and wanted to use The Vulture as the bad guy in the film, played by John Malkovich as the actor admitted recently on an Italian talk show.  The studios were pushing for a more recent Spidey villainess, the Black Cat. Actress such as Rachel McAdams and Anne Hathaway were rumored to be considered for the role. There was problems in constructing a script that would combine both characters in a way that would satisfy both parties.

Deadline-Hollywood reports that Raimi felt he could not possibly meet the constraints of the film reaching its new release date and stepped down from the directors chair. Instead of replacing him and continuing with the franchise’s continuity, the powers that be decided to reboot the franchise with a teenage Peter Parker donning the webs once again.

In my opinion, this takes a “can’t miss” franchise and quite possibly fatally derails it. The studios seemed to underestimate Raimi’s skill as a director. He was able to fill the story with great emotional depth all the while filming the action with his unique visual style. The studio concerns about he choosing old-school Spidey villains as the film’s antagonist need not look towards the last film. Sandman, a villain that predated the Green Goblin in the comics and arrived only one issue after Doctor Octopus, was much more well defined than Venom and came off much better. I’m sure a lot of this was Raimi’s doing.

And Raimi was building an epic story with the franchise. The characters were growing from film to film, which was part of the reason why the franchise was so successful. Now, instead of looking forward to what might happen to the characters we came to know over the last eight years, we have to start over from scratch. Essentially, instead of giving us a known commodity , it has to resell the property to us all over again.

And, quite frankly, any director short of Steven Spielberg or James Cameron as a replacement would be a disappointment at this stage. Raimi is one of those rarities in the modern film director–an artist with a distinctive visual style and a respect for the craft of filmmaking. Replacing him at the helm with a McG or Brett Ratner would be a disaster of epic proportions.

My greatest fear about all this change is that Sony believes that the fans of the first three movies will naturally follow along onto the reboot, and that they really don’t have to dedicate all that much effort to making the new batch of films good. That would not only be damaging to the franchise , but also to the fate of comic book movies in general.

Megan Fox really doesn’t need to work on her “geek” cred. Just her being one of the most attractive up-and-coming young starlets in Hollywood would be enough to warm the cockles of most genre fan’s hearts.

But her starring in the two Transformers movies pretty much enshrines her in the hall of fame of many Comic-Con goers. And her starring as a demonically possessed cheerleader in Diablo Cody’s next film, Jennifer’s Body guarantees her plaque will get a primo location in that hallowed hall.

But recent news out of Hollywood could give some the idea that Megan Fox is one of us. Could she be a comic book geek too? Signs point to yes.

The Hollywood Reporter tells us that Fox has signed on to not one, but two upcoming comic book adaptations.

First is the upcoming Jonah Hex. I’ll let THR describer her role:

…Fox will play Leila, a gun-wielding beauty and love interest of Hex (Brolin), a scarred bounty hunter tracking a voodoo practitioner (Malkovich) who wants to raise an army of undead to liberate the South.

I don’t know about you, but that plot description alone makes me want to see that movie. The fact that the cast consists of Josh Brolin, John Malkovich and Megan Fox makes me want to see the film NOW!

The other comic book film Fox has sign on for is the lead in the film adaptation of Aspen Comics flagship title, Fathom. Created by the late Michael Turner in 1998, the comic deals with a woman named Aspen Matthews whose ordinary, everyday life is changed forever when she finds out she is a member of an underwater race with the power to control water.

As you can see to the right, Fox bears an uncanny resemblance to the character.

According to THR, Fox will also be taking a role in the developing and shaping the property because, get this, she was a fan of the series since its 1998 debut. See, she is one of us (or at least she was).

Jonah Hex is set to hit theaters August of next year, while Fathom is still in the development stage.

John Malkovich will be strapping on some six-shooters to take on Josh Brolin in Warner Brothers upcoming adaptation of the DC Comics anti-hero Jonah Hex.

Brolin is set to play the roving, Old West gunslinger Jonah Hex. Variety describes Malkovich’s role thusly- “Malkovich will play Turnbull, a wealthy Southern plantation owner whose son is killed by Union soldiers during the Civil War. He blames Hex, a former confederate soldier-turned-hardened bounty hunter and gunslinger.”

Jonah Hex is a Civil War veteran who fought on the side of the Confederacy. Moving westward, Hex soon became one of the most notorious guns-for-hire in the lawless territories.

The movie is set to begin production in April.

It’s nice to see that comics outside of the usual superhero genre are making it to the big screen. Sure, there have been others non-spandex and superpowers books that have reached the big screen- Men In Black, A History Of Violence, American Splendor, Ghost World, Road To Perdition. While I think that the comics medium has made great strides in getting the public to realize that there is an incredible diversity of genres covered in comic books, I still think there are some negative connotations of the medium out there that could stand to be eradicated.

Jimmy Hayward (Horton Hears a Who) is directing the script by Crank scribes Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor.