Hotel Transylvania features the voice of Adam Sandler as Dracula, which isn’t exactly the most attractive casting idea for the classic monster. But the film is directed by Genndy Tartakovsky (Dexter’s Laboratory, Samurai Jack, Star Wars: Clone Wars) and that is very attractive — Tartakovsky has demonstrated more than once that he has the ability to mix effective characterization with cute and weird visuals.
In fact, the cute and weird visuals are very much on display in this Russian teaser trailer for the film. I love a couple of the quick looks we get at some of the denizens of the film’s strange world. The fact that Sandler (who may turn out to be a great voice actor for Dracula) is dubbed over by a Russian voice actor doesn’t hurt at this juncture. Read More »
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Posted on Tuesday, March 13th, 2012 by Angie Han
Two small-screen animation heavyweights will be making their first forays into feature filmmaking this year, though the projects couldn’t sound more different. This summer will see the premiere of Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane‘s rather insane-sounding R-rated comedy Ted, while Genndy Tartovsky (Samurai Jack) will follow this fall with the more family-friendly animation Hotel Transylvania. After the jump, check out a new poster from the former and new images from the latter.
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Posted on Tuesday, March 6th, 2012 by Angie Han
Proving that just because you can doesn’t mean you should, the new green-band trailer for That’s My Boy drops much of the cursing, nudity, and bodily fluids that comprised last week’s red-band trailer, and is, frankly, all the better for it. The jokes are still pretty hit or miss, but the fact that it has jokes at all — rather than just a lengthy string of “fucks” — makes this cut a vast improvement over the last one.
Adam Sandler stars as Donny, the ne’er-do-well father of Todd (Andy Samberg). When Donny realizes he’s deeply in debt, he reunites with his son, now a successful hedge-fund manager, and butts heads with his future daughter-in-law (Leighton Meester). Watch the trailer after the jump.
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Here are new images for a couple of upcoming CG animated features. One is Sony’s Hotel Transylvania, featuring the efforts of Dracula (Adam Sandler) to celebrate the birthday of his daughter Mavis (Selena Gomez), which end up being complicated by the attentions of a regular ol’ human (Andy Samberg). The movie is directed by Genndy Tartakovsky (The Powerpuff Girls, Samurai Jack, Star Wars: Clone Wars) which for me at least, represents the primary appeal of the project.
There’s also The Croods from Dreamworks Animation, featuring the voices of Nicolas Cage, Ryan Reynolds, Emma Stone, Catherine Keener, Clark Duke, and Cloris Leachman in a story about a prehistoric family of early humans.
New looks at both films showed up this week. That’s Mavis from Hotel Transylvania, above, and we’ve got a big image for The Croods below. Read More »
Posted on Thursday, March 1st, 2012 by Angie Han
The first red-band trailer has dropped for Adam Sandler and Andy Samberg‘s That’s My Boy, formerly titled I Hate You Dad. Sandler plays an aging party boy and horrible father who falls into deep debt. He decides to move in with his more tightly wound son (Samberg), who’s on the verge of getting married, to a character played by Leighton Meester.
The script comes from Happy Endings creator David Caspe, with a rewrite by Ken Marino and David Wain, which is promising; the fact that it was directed by Mr. Popper’s Penguins writers Sean Anders and John Morris and produced by Sandler’s Happy Madison is somewhat less so. Watch the (NSFW) video after the jump.
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Posted on Monday, February 27th, 2012 by Angie Han
As the race for the year’s most coveted trophies came to a close with this weekend’s Oscars ceremony, another much less prestigious awards competition was just getting started. Nominations have been announced for the 32nd Razzie Awards, handed out to the “worst achievements in film” each year.
Leading the 2012 list is Adam Sandler, whose involvement in Jack and Jill, Bucky Larson, and Just Go With It earned him a record-breaking eleven Razzie nominations. That’s more than twice as many as the previous record holder, Norbit star Eddie Murphy, received in 2007. Other standouts include Nicolas Cage, Ken Jeong, Sarah Palin, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part I, and The Hangover Part II. Read the full list of nominees after the jump.
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A couple years ago Universal made a deal with Hasbro that put a whole bunch of board game films into development at the studio. The one result so far is Battleship, opening later this year, and in fact Universal has steadily shed most of the other projects: Ouija, Clue, Monopoly and now Candyland have all been cut loose to find new homes. The version of Candyland that was in development was the brainchild of writers Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger, who likened their approach to The Lord of the Rings with candy.
That incarnation of Candyland is apparently dead, and a new one, Candy Land, has stuck to Happy Madison and Columbia Pictures. Adam Sandler is now attached to star with Kevin Lima (Enchanted) directing and Sandler in talks to co-write with Robert Smigel. This collection of talent sounds like, if nothing else, one that will deliver a much more obvious film based on the sweet game. Read More »
This one’s too good to hide after the break, so let’s begin this roundup of sequel news with a killer quote from Nicolas Cage. The actor often seems to go off the deep end with respect to movie roles, and one of his crazier ones in recent memory is the Neil LaBute remake of The Wicker Man. There’s no way to sum up the madness of the film; if you haven’t seen it, get that sucker now.
During a recent web chat with Empire, Cage was asked about revisiting old characters, and he said
I would like to hook up with one of the great Japanese filmmakers, like the master that made ‘Ringu,’ and I would like to take ‘The Wicker Man’ to Japan, except this time he’s a ghost.
Hideo Nakata is the director of whom he speaks, and it took me a couple extra seconds to call his name to memory as my mind was busy exploding. Was Cage serious? Hard to tell of late, given the other films he’s been doing. But I would watch that Ringu Man movie, whatever it turned out to be, without thinking twice.
After the break lurks a variety of news about an incredibly disparate collection of films: the theoretical follow-up to Before Sunset; Grown Ups 2; a possible R.I.P.D. sequel, and Riddick. Read More »
