For months now, both Peter and I have been raving about Morgan Spurlock‘s latest documentary Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope. And for good reason. The director of Super Size Me teamed up with producers Joss Whedon, Stan Lee, Harry Knowles and Thomas Tull to create a film that does just about the perfect job of showing why fans like us enjoy going to San Diego Comic-Con every single year. The bulk of the story follows seven different people going to Comic-Con for their own, very different, reasons (cosplay, toys, comics, art, love, etc.) which is then intercut with interviews from other directors, actors, fans and geek-gods, together covering almost every single base of why the mecca of pop culture is such a magical place.
Obviously, with a film like this, there’s a lot to talk about and Spurlock obliged. He gave us a generous 30 minutes of his time to discuss the ins and outs of Comic-Con Episode IV A Fan’s Hope, which is in select theaters now and on VOD and iTunes everywhere, and much more.
After the jump, watch part one of the three part interview where we discuss the genesis of the project, media perception of Comic-Con, subjects who ended up on the cutting room floor, the crazy logistics of shooting at the convention and much more. Read More »
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Note: This review was first published on September 11th 2011, and the film was screened during the Toronto International Film Festival. Spurlock’s film is now available on demand, so we’re republishing the review. I’ve since seen the movie a second time and gladly recommend it to any pop culture geek I know.
When I first heard that Morgan Spurlock would be directing a documentary about San Diego Comic-Con International, I was worried that it would be a puff piece — a glorified direct to video infomercial. The fact that Spurlock chose to premiere the movie at the Toronto International Film Festival instead of in San Diego speaks towards its merits as a real film and not a Simpsons 20th Anniversary Special: In 3-D! On Ice! prime-time tv special.
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One of summer’s biggest wildcards is the 3D, hyper-stylized, historical action-horror film Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Based on a novel of the same name by Seth Grahame-Smith (who also wrote the screenplay) the film is directed by Timur Bekmambetov and tells the fictional story, infused with a lot of non-fiction, of how Abraham Lincoln decicated his life to killing vampires after losing a family member. It’s a biopic of our 16th President, played by Benjamin Walker, just with vampires everywhere.
If you saw our WonderCon video blog you heard about the footage that was shown but, before that happened, I got about two minutes with both the director and screenwriter to talk about the film. For Bekmambetov, I talked about how this film was different visually from his others. With Grahame-Smith, I asked what Timur brought to the project that he couldn’t imagine when writing it as well as the public’s reaction to the latest trailer for Dark Shadows, a film he wrote for Tim Burton, who also produced Vampire Hunter. Read my mini-interviews after the jump. Read More »
The following interview wasn’t supposed to happen. It wasn’t scheduled or expected, but when a 20th Century Fox employee says you can have five minutes with Damon Lindelof but its gotta be now, you run across half of WonderCon to make it happen. So run I did and it was worth it.
Lindelof is one of the screenwriters and architects of Prometheus, easily one of the most anticipated films of 2012. Directed by Ridley Scott and starring Noomi Rapace, Charlize Theron, Michael Fassbender, Idris Elba and others, the 3D sci-fi epic tells the story of a group of people who travel to another world hoping to find friendly beings. And fail. Spawned out of, and inflused with, the DNA of the Alien series, Prometheus has been shrouded in secrecy since day one, much like the show that put Lindelof on the map, Lost.
In my interview, we talked a little about that secrecy, some of the viral things happening around the movie including the TED Talk, a possible Lost concert, if Star Trek 2 will have a presence at San Diego Comic-Con and, once and for all, I got to the bottom of the issue if this really is an Alien movie or not. That last part is a lie. Watch the video below. Read More »
Director Marc Webb was one of the many filmmakers talking to the press at WonderCon in Anaheim this weekend where he showed up an impressive Amazing Spider-Man sizzle reel previously only seen by select audiences. And though the film, which stars Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone, isn’t out until July 3, our friends at CinemaBlend got Webb to confirm, in a very vague way, that this film sets up future installments. You can not only read his exact quote, but watch and listen to it after the jump. Read More »
Despite the relatively tepid financial and critical reception TRON: Legacy got in 2010, everyone who would potentially be involved in a sequel still believes it will happen. Tron himself, Bruce Boxleitner, keeps giving potential start dates, Legacy director Joseph Kosinski has talked about the plot and the screenwriters of that film, Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, handed the writing reigns for a third movie to Dave DiGilio.
At WonderCon, Kitsis and Horowitz – who were on hand to promote the show that took then away from Tron, Once Upon A Time, confirmed they’d read DiGilio’s first draft and couldn’t help be do a little teasing. Read more after the jump. Read More »
Rian Johnson‘s never done this before. This, meaning, promote a movie he really can’t talk about with a huge, huge studio backing it. The movie in question is Looper and, from the looks of it, Johnson has finally stepped into the big leagues after two fantastic smaller films. Looper, which will be released September 28, stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a present day assassin for the mob of the future. Time travel is real and the mob uses it to send people back in time to be murdered. It’s called being a looper and the perks are fantastic…until the person sent back to kill is the 30-year-older version of yourself played by Bruce Willis.
Johnson seems to have really outdone himself with Looper, crafting a whole new world of time-travel, action sci-fi. In our exclusive one-on-one interview, the writer/director (and frequent /Filmcast guest) talked about how he researched this concept, the contributions (or unfortunately lack there of) of Primer director Shane Caruth, when and where the film might premiere and even one question that prompted the usually candid director to ask me to turn the camera off. Check out the video below. Read More »
I’ll be completely up front with you — I really have had no interest in the movie Battleship since it was announced. Even the recent action-packed Michael Bay-lite trailers didn’t win me over. I just didn’t see the point of making a big screen adaptation of the Battleship board game. And I also didn’t understand why an adaptation of that board game would involve an alien attack. It just didn’t make sense to me. Despite loving director Peter Berg‘s previous films and recently discovering the awesomeness of Friday Night Lights (the tv series), I just didn’t care.
When Peter Berg stepped onto the WonderCon stage in Anaheim, you could tell he was on a mission. Why a movie based on a board game? Why aliens? Berg made his pitch and somehow was able to change my mind — I now am excited to see this film.
Peter Berg never wanted to make a movie based on a board game. He wanted to make a naval movie but Hollywood wouldn’t let him.
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