I’m embarrassed to admit that I still haven’t seen the Academy Award-winning documentary The Cove despite all the huge acclaim and buzz (I hope to finally see it later this week). Louie Psihoyos‘ film follows a group of activists, led by renown dolphin trainer Ric O’Barry, who use state-of-the-art equipment to infiltrate a cove near Taijii, Japan “to expose both a shocking instance of animal abuse and a serious threat to human health.”
Apparently during the film, the crew get the idea to have a friend at ILM to build them spy cameras to capture the act of the crime. But it is during that segment where we get a small cameo from another big screen villain: Prince Vigo the Carpathian from Ghostbusters 2. You can see the screencapture from The Cove, along with a full photo of the Vigo the Carpathian painting after the jump. It haunts my dreams!
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I always find Infographics to be fun, which probably explains why we feature them a lot on /Film. OnlineMBA has created an Infographic which focuses on the Film Industry by the numbers, showing that even in a recession, Hollywood remains strong in the world of entertainment. Check out the full infographic, after the jump.
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As many of you already know, James Earl Jones is the voice of Darth Vader in the Star Wars films, but he was not the actor in the suit during filming. A couple weeks ago a video circulated the web, showing actor David Prowse’s original performance (sans Jones voice replacement). We have had it on the list of videos to be featured in VOTD (Video of the Day) but have been unable to fit it in until now. So if you haven’t yet seen this footage, in the behind the scenes doc or the youtube clip that made the rounds two weeks back, check it out now, after the jump.
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Physorg has an interesting article about how Hollywood movies follow a mathematical formula that “lets them match the effects of their shots to the attention spans of their audiences.”
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I always love learning which actors were offered and turned down roles in films. Did you know that Sean Connery was originally offered the role of Morpheus in The Matrix? He supposedly turned down the role saying he couldn’t understand the script.
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I hope you had a chance to read the Vanity Fair profile on John Hughes that we featured on the site yesterday. If you put it off, browsed by it, and just didn’t find the time — here is your second chance. I’ve been wondering since reading the piece, just how many screenplays Hughes completed in the period of time since he disappeared from Hollywood, and if we’d ever get a chance to see those stories published, or maybe even, produced into feature films.
One of the comments on the article was from a person claiming to be filmmaker Alan Metter, the director of Girls Just Want to Have Fun, Back to School and Police Academy: Mission to Moscow. Metter’s comment was a story about the biggest mistake of his life — a Hughes screenplay he had been offered to direct, which he turned down in selfishness, and was ultimately never made.
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The new trailer for Toy Story 3 hit the web yesterday. If you haven’t watched it yet, watch it now here! As you probably know, I’m an obsessive Pixar fanatic and love finding all of the little easter eggs that the animators/designers hide in the films. In the past we’ve taken a look at the easter eggs in Pete Docter’s Up, Andrew Stanton’s WALL-E and Brad Bird’s Ratatouille. So I thought we’d take a look at the new trailer and see what easter eggs we could find (with the help of director Lee Unkrich’s tweets).
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Okay, first of all, let me warn you: If you haven’t yet seen Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air:
1. Why haven’t you? It’s in theaters everywhere… go now!
2. You might not want to read the following story as it contains some spoilers for the film. (the headline is not a spoiler, trust me)
While George Clooney’s character Ryan Bingham is not dying of terminal cancer in the actual theatrical cut of the film, might one have been written and even filmed? After the jump we get to the bottom of the mystery. Is it true? Was it written? Was it filmed? We talked to Jason Reitman to get the answers.
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Posted on Thursday, December 24th, 2009 by David Chen
Rebecca Keegan’s book, The Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameron, was recently released to coincide with the release of James Cameron’s Avatar (you can read all of our Avatar coverage, including news/reviews/interviews by clicking here). Here at /Film, I’ve be relaying some of the most interesting sections of the book - stories from the fascinating career of James Cameron, with words from the man himself - culminating in a /Filmcast interview that I’ll do with Keegan next week. I’d highly suggest you pick up the book yourself, as it’s certainly a worthy read for any film fan.
Up next: Whatever happened to James Cameron’s version of Spider-Man? Hit the break for a brief excerpt from Keegan’s book explaining the aborted endeavor. Note that the details of this entire process have already been well-documented, but Cameron’s quotes and reactions are new.
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When the Kick-Ass ‘making of’ book hits shelves next February, well ahead of the film’s April release, it may be impossible to resist it’s spoilery goodness. According to Mark Millar, Kick-Ass: Creating the Comic, Making the Movie is “incredibly informal” and “actually really frank”, which will make a refreshing change from the truckloads of rather insipid tie-in books I’ve thumbed through for two minutes while having a coffee in Borders - each of them seemingly designed to numb me into considering their subject movie utterly lacking in any kind of controversy or even life and therefore ’safe’ to go see.
Just some examples of the juicy stuff contained within this Kick-Ass tome: concept art for both the comic and the movie, interviews with the talent, candid e-mail exchanges between Millar and director Matthew Vaughn, and some little bits and pieces about versions of the story that we’ll never get to see. For example, Nicolas Cage may have ended up playing Big Daddy but when he signed on, the filmmakers had already talked to both Mark Wahlberg and Daniel Craig about the role; and while Dave Lizewski may well have ended up the key character, initially, Millar was planning to tell the story from the point of view of Hit Girl and Big Daddy.
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