Rendezvous With Rama Short Film
The Pitch: Last week it was revealed that David Fincher won’t be directing a big screen adaptation of Rendezvous With Rama after all. We used an image for our blog about the news which we just assumed was included in one of the many editions of the book. Apparently not. Longtime /Film reader Aaron Ross e-mailed to inform us that the image is actually from his short film. Ross directed and animated the short in 2001 while attending Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. We get a lot of VOTD submissions from film school students. As you would expect, most of them are [...]

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Have you sen David Fincher’s latest? No, not Benjamin Button… I’m talking about the Nike commercial he directed. “Fate” tells the life-long journey of pro football players LaDainian Tomlinson and Troy Polamalu as their destinies collide in an NFL football game.
Based on a concept by Wieden & Kennedy, the portland-based advertising agency behind some of Nike’s best campaigns (including Bo Knows, Spike Lee’s Mars Blackmon Air Jordan ads, Charles Barkley’s I Am Not a Role Model ad), the Bruce CVampbell Old [...]

David Fincher has been trying to get Rendezvous With Rama off the ground for some time now. Arthur C. Clarke’s 1972 novel is set in the 22nd century, a group of human explorers, who intercept a thirty-mile-long cylindrical alien starship that passes through Earth’s solar system, and attempt to unlock its mysteries. Last we heard the Zodiac director was still waiting on a script, with preliminary plans to shoot the film using performance-capture. Our friends at First Showing got a chance to speak with Fincher over the weekend, and the director confirmed that the project will probably never happen.
“It looks like it’s not going to happen. There’s no script and [...]

Paramount has released the second movie trailer for David Fincher’s The Curious Case on Benjamin Button is now online. I was bit disappointed after seeing 20 minutes of selected scenes from the film at Telluride, but I can’t help getting excited again after seeing this latest television spot.
Watch the trailer in High Definition on Apple.com.
The official plot synopsis: “I was born under unusual circumstances.” And so begins “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” adapted from the 1920s story by F. Scott Fitzgerald about a man who is born in his eighties and ages backwards: a man, like any of us, who is unable to stop time. We follow [...]

Tom Cruise will produce and possibly star in an adaptation of Douglas Preston’s non-fiction bestseller, The Monster of Florence, for his studio United Artists. When Preston relocated his family to Italy in 2000, he soon became aware of a nearby murder committed years ago by the region’s serial killer, the Monster of Florence. Intrigued, he teamed up with a local obsessive investigative journalist to track him down. This culminated in the duo falling under the suspicion of authorities, with the journalist ultimately being thrown behind bars and pegged for a short time as the “Monster.”
You may recall seeing these highly engrossing events reported on Dateline NBC. Clearly, there are parallels [...]

Heavy Metal publisher Kevin Eastman says that Zack Snyder, Guillermo del Toro and Gore Verbinski have expressed interest in joining executive producer David Fincher to direct segments of the upcoming Heavy Metal animated film. The feature is scheduled to include eight or nine segments, and is being envisioned as an adult-themed R-rated film. Animator Tim Miller and Eastman himself are also expected to direct segments. The original 1981 film was also an anthology of sci-fi and fantasy stories adapted from the Heavy Metal magazine. The magazine and the film are known for their overuse of bloody violence, nudity and sexuality.
source: rgbfilter.com

Last week, I screened 20 minutes of clips of scenes from David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. In our first impression article, I expressed my concern and disappointment over the footage shown, partly because I felt some of the short scenes dragged. Note: I haven’t seen the entire film - I want to be clear on this…, I only screened 20 minutes of selected scenes. It was good but not great. I wasn’t alone, FirstShowing and Jeff Wells also posted articles about the disappointing buzz the footage received at the festival.
In my blog posting, I told you about the rumors of Paramount’s vicious fight with Fincher behind the [...]

Last night the Telluride Film Festival held a tribute for director David Fincher. After an introduction by festival sponsor documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, and a package of clips spanning Fincher’s career from Music videos, commercials, to Se7en, The Game, Fight Club, Panic Room and Zodiac, Variety’s Todd McCarthy took the stage to do a 1:1 interview with the director. Here are some highlights from that conversation:
Fincher admitted that much of his early years discovering cinema consisted of Thrillers and scary movies. His favorites included Jaws, I Saw What You Did, and Rear Window.
When asked why he creates a lot of films under morbid ideas, Fincher said that he makes whatever [...]

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I just got out of the David Fincher tribute (which I will write about at length later) but for now I want to share my first impressions on the 20 minutes of footage from Fincher’s new film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which was screened at the event. First off, I want to say that I’m a die hard Fincher fan. I’ve loved everyone of his film, with the slight exception of Panic Room, which I still enjoyed. Fight Club is [...]

A new television spot for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button aired during the Olympics on Sunday night. A crappy version has shown up online and is embedded below.

I’m excited to see this movie, but I’ve been hearing all sorts of troubling things coming out of the post production of the project. Most movie journalists are afraid to report on what is going on behid the scenes, because it’s very gossipy. You’ll see little slips like, Anne Thompson writes “The early word on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: again, David Fincher has handed in a movie to Paramount that is quite long. That hurt his last pic for [...]

“Feed me, feed me comics,” booms Hollywood. According to TheGoon.com, /Film fave, David Fincher, has optioned movie rights for The Goon with plans to adapt the Dark Horse comic book into a CG animated film from Blur Studio. If this news sounds familiar, back in March it was announced that Fincher would team with Blur to produce and co-direct a new animated Heavy Metal anthology flick.
Created by Eric Powell in 1999, The Goon, “tells the adventures of a muscle-bound brawler who claims to be the primary enforcer for a feared mobster. The Goon and his sidekick Franky often get tied up in other machinations, often in relation to the evil [...]

The American teaser trailer for David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button has finally shown up online on Trailer Addict. The trailer received huge buzz when it premiered attached to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull last month. Check it out, after the jump.

Update: We’ve embedded the International version of the movie trailer in this posting.

Want to see the movie trailer for David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button? I’ve heard it’s playing in front of most prints of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. And word has it that the trailer won’t show up online in official form until the end of next week. International trailer below:

So if you haven’t seen Indiana Jones 4, you might now have a reason. From what I understand the majority of the trailer has no dialogue and is almost completely cut to music (I’m being told that it uses “Aquarium” section of [...]

Director David Fincher (Se7en, Zodiac) is set to co-direct, oversee and produce an animated feature film based on Heavy Metal Magazine, the adult fantasy and sci-fi publication founded in the ’70s that’s still in print today. The R-rated flick will consist of eight or nine individual animated tales, each to be helmed by a different director, so expect some rather far-out names added to the project shortly.
At this time, Fincher, Kevin Eastman, who co-created Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and now owns and runs Heavy Metal (hmm, didn’t know that), and Tim Miller, whose California-based Blur Studio (Transformers: The Game, NFL graphics on Fox) will handle the animation, will each produce [...]

Update: Neil Gaiman said on his personal blog yesterday that he is still co-writing the Black Hole script with Roger Avary. Seems rather stoked on Fincher’s involvement as well. Thanks to /Film reader ‘Nancy.’
“David Fincher tackling STDs, not like herpes, worse,” is the imagined, beaded brow pitch to the studio. It worked. The director of the Oscar-shunned modern masterpiece Zodiac, as well as Fight Club, is attached to direct a film based on the comics-turned-acclaimed graphic novel, Black Hole, by Charles Burns. Brad Pitt’s Plan B is producing the project, but like DiCaprio’s Akira, no official word if Pitt is involved to star. Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman were [...]