Posted on Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 by Peter Sciretta
Paramount Pictures has sent over high resolution versions of the two photos released last week for M Night Shyamalan‘s The Last Airbender. They have also been nice enough to send us the official release of the Dev Patel snow photo, which somehow leaked online last week.
Posted on Saturday, May 23rd, 2009 by Brendon Connelly
The first official images from M. Night Shyamalan‘s The Last Airbender appeared yesterday when US Today presented stills of Noah Ringer as Aang and Dev Patel as the ‘evil’ Zuko . I think that the first unofficial image of Zuko is much better however. I’ve presented a little of it above, with the whole thing lurking below the break.
I had the picture e-mailed to me overnight, without any explanation or fanfare. I’d reckon that it’s a screen capture from the teaser trailer. That teaser is due to unspool before Transformers 2 so the encode for online has doubtlessly already been done and I’d eat my shoe if that wasn’t the source of this image.
Posted on Thursday, May 21st, 2009 by Peter Sciretta
Paramount Pictures has released the first photos from M Night Shyamalan‘s The Last Airbender in Friday’s issue of USA Today. Above is the first photo of Aang (Noah Ringer), the “Last Airbender,” a 12-year-old regional karate star was who discovered in a Texas open casting call. After the jump we’ve also included a tv to film comparison of Dev Patel as Prince Zuko.
Posted on Thursday, February 26th, 2009 by Peter Sciretta
Slumdog Millionaire director Danny Boyle and star Dev Patel are in talks to appear on the real Who Wants to Be A Millionaire. This according to The Sun, if it happens, the two would play together on a celebrity edition where the winnings would be donated to an Indian children’s charity.
Wouldn’t it be great if Freida Pinto, who plays the romantic lead in the film, was available to be the “phone a friend” option? I have a feeling that the real life Pinto probably wouldn’t be of much help on a large money question (she wasn’t much of a help at that moment in the film), but it would be cool none the less. Wait a second, is Who Wants to Be a Millionaire even still on tv?
Posted on Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009 by Peter Sciretta
Vanity Fair hired Annie Leibovitz to photograph “10 partnerships that helped generate more than four dozen Oscar nominations this season.” If you’ve ever seen any of Leibovitz‘s photographs before (and you have, even if you don’t know it) than you know what to expect. She is somehow able to capture the life, natural realism and character of any of her subjects. And yes, the Christopher Nolan / Heath Ledger photo is a composite. Check out all the photos on VanityFair.com. Thanks to /Film reader Josh B for the tip.
Posted on Sunday, February 1st, 2009 by Peter Sciretta
M. Night Shyamalan is making some last minute casting changes on his live-action big screen adaptation of The Last Airbender, and the changes apparently have nothing to do with the intense criticism over the choice of hiring a mostly non-Asian cast (you didn’t expect him to right those wrong, did you?).
Slumdog Millionaire star Dev Patel will be replacing Jesse McCartney, who supposedly had schedule conflicts due to his music career. Night tells Variety that McCartney couldn’t make the martial arts boot camp that was set up for the cast of the film, and Patel was available to take his place.
Patel will play the Fire Nation’s evil prince Zuko. Exiled from the Fire Nation by his father, Zuko is sent to capture the Avatar in order to restore his honor and right to the throne. The film, which is the planned first in a trilogy, tells the story of Aang, the successor to a long line of Avatars who must put aside his irresponsible ways and stop the Fire Nation from enslaving the Water, Earth and Air nations. The Last Airbender is being targeted for a July 2nd 2010 release.
I can still remember the excitement in the TV industry when the Philbin-hosted American edition of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire debuted on ABC (i.e. way before they ran the show into the ground with a mind-numbing 4x-per-week airing schedule). Like many game shows, Millionaire was able to harvest some great drama out of a simple premise: A contestant answered questions of increasing difficulty with a chance at winning a million dollars if he got them all correct (while at any time still retaining the option to walk away with a sizable chunk of the money he’d already won). But unlike punishingly difficult quiz shows like Jeopardy or Twenty One, the questions usually didn’t center around obscure historical minutiae or nuclear physics; they were questions the viewers at home could answer too. As an audience, we were allowed to dream what we would do if we were sitting in that chair under those hot lights. We could imagine that, even with the limited knowledge and experience that we had, we always had the chance to strike gold. It’s no surprise, then, that Slumdog Millionaire is able use that game show to generate some engrossing drama of its own.
