Summer is coming, so it’s almost the prime season to revisit Jaws. Steven Spielberg‘s 1975 film was the first modern summer blockbuster, and effectively signaled the decline of the New Hollywood movement and the beginning of the studio era we know now.
Regardless of the effect Jaws had on the Hollywood business landscape, it stands as one hell of a film. The characters are sharply drawn, the performances are entertaining and don’t merely wade in the dramatic shallows, and the filmmaking craft of Spielberg and his crew is top-notch.
You’ll get to see just how good that craft was when Jamie Benning releases his online doc Inside Jaws: A Filmumentary. Benning has already chronicled the making of the original Star Wars trilogy as well as Raiders of the Lost Ark, and he’s proven to be a master at collating footage, interviews, photos and other disparate elements that help paint a total picture of the making of these films. If Inside Jaws is even vaguely as thorough as Benning’s other films, it’ll be a keeper.
See a trailer for the doc below, and read info about Jaws getting a new, slightly more restrictive rating in the UK. Read More »
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I have no faith that this movie will actually get made, but this is an interesting story regardless. Even as Sony continues to try to adapt the relatively movie-friendly Uncharted game series, the company is trying again with something much more ambitious: an adaptation of the 2005 fantasy adventure game Shadow of the Colossus. Now attached to direct is Josh Trank, whose first feature was the early 2012 release Chronicle.
The game is often at the center of the debate over whether video games can be art (I fell into that conversation back in 2005, when I reviewed the game for G4) but for good reason. The game features a young male protagonist who is told that his dead love can be revived if only he kills a collection of giant beasts that reside across the countryside. He does so without question, and the player is left to eventually wonder if the kid is being played. Visually austere yet stunning, the game was a critical hit and has endured as one of the masterpieces of the PlayStation2 generation.
But will it make a good movie? Read More »
Briefly: We don’t have a lot of info on this one yet, but DreamWorks is ready to compete with Universal’s mega-earning Fast and Furious franchise. The studio is moving forward with an adaptation of the EA game series Need For Speed, and has Scott Waugh in talks to direct. Waugh’s most recent work on screens was the Navy SEAL movie Act of Valor. The interesting thing here is that Waugh has also been reported as set to direct another racing movie called High Speed. That was going to be through his own production company, with a story about “the best high-speed police pursuit drivers in the country, assembled as a unit to stop and elusive, high-end underground racing circuit hellbent on running deadly point-to-point races through major American Cities.”
So has Dreamworks bought into that film and combined it with the studio’s own effort to make a Need for Speed movie? A valid question, given the potential similarity between the properties, but Variety says Waugh will work with the script by George Gatins that DreamWorks bought a month ago. The screenwriter’s brother John Gatins (Real Steel and Flight screenwriter) will produce.
Waugh and his Act of Valor co-director Mike McCoy are also set to make Unknown Soldier (formerly Black Sands), starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Recently, thanks to the ongoing and increasingly controversial case around the shooting of Trayvon Martin, Fox changed the title of Neighborhood Watch to The Watch. Now we’ve got a new trailer for the film under the new name. This footage is culled in part from the red-band trailer that announced the title change, but it does show a glimpse of the invading aliens that we didn’t see in that last collection of footage.
Check out the footage featuring Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, Richard Ayoade, and Jonah Hill, presented thanks to Vaughn’s invasion of Conan, below. Read More »
It’s fun to watch how the drive to promote big-ticket films has led to new initiatives in putting movie content online, even well in advance of a film’s opening. Fox’s efforts for Prometheus are at the front of the pack this year, but there are other good things going on. Trailers often aren’t enough any longer; now we see annotated trailers, or director commentaries layered onto the footage.
Universal has done a pretty good job with this annotated, ‘interactive’ trailer for Snow White and the Huntsman, as it takes the most recent theatrical trailer and layers in discussion topics, photo galleries, and other video clips. Check it out below. Read More »
Frank Miller, Klaus Janson and Lynn Varley helped change the comic book landscape when the first issue of their four-issue Batman reinvention The Dark Knight Returns was released in 1986. Those four issues have influenced film and television as well as comics; Christopher Nolan’s three Batman films are shaped to a great degree by the grim, violent vision of Batman put forth by Miller & Co.
The Dark Knight Returns has never been directly adapted to film or television, however, until now. Warner Bros. animation label DC Comics Premiere Movies is creating a two-part adaptation of the four-issue series. The good part is: Peter Weller (RoboCop) has been hired to voice Bruce Wayne and Batman. Read More »
The beauty of animation is that is a medium where anything can happen. Anything, that is, so long as all the creative and business impulses that make a project happen align in the proper way. Sadly, that translates to “anything can happen, but it often doesn’t.”
Take Redux Riding Hood, a short produced by Disney’s television division in 1997. Steve Moore was offered the chance to create an animated short with no limitations, and he went nuts with it. The film turned out well, and scored an Oscar nomination, but then Disney put it on the shelf in 1998, and it has remained there ever since. Now the film is online, and it is very much worth a look.
Moore used a script by Dan O’Shannon (Modern Family) that told how the wolf from Little Red Riding Hood spent years plagued by self-doubt after he failed to eat Red. The resulting short is truly bizarre: a little bit Disney, a little bit Terry Gilliam, and a little sci-fi. (A time machine is involved) If you think there’s a bit of Seinfeld spirit, that’s because Michael Richards voices the wolf; other characters are voiced by Mia Farrow, June Foray, and Adam West, with Garrison Keillor narrating. Oh, and the woodsman hero who saves the girl, the one who seems like a cross between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Fabio? Well, he’s actually voiced by Fabio. Finally, for those who’ve seen and loved TimeCrimes, this will have a great extra level of appeal.
Check out Redux Riding Hood below. Read More »
For a decade, Disney has been preparing a new live-action Snow White film, and in the couple years it has taken the shape of The Order of the Seven, previously Snow and the Seven, a film that would re-cast the Seven Dwarfs as a band of international warriors (the better to court non-US box office) protecting Saoirse Ronan. The Snow White character was to be re-imagined as “a young woman in 19th century Hong Kong who escapes her wicked stepmother and takes refuge with seven men belonging to an ancient order dedicated to fighting demons and dragons.”
Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby were hired to rework the script very recently, and commercial helmer Michael Gracey was set to make his directorial debut with the movie. (Scott Elder and Josh Harmon originally wrote, and Michael Arndt rewrote last year, with Francis Lawrence previously attached to direct.) But now it is off. Read More »
