Entertainment Tonight visited the New Mexico set of the Hughes Brothers‘ The Book of Eli and released one of those annoying video packages of a “reporter” roaming the set, making lame jokes, and not really learning anything about the actual movie itself. Regardless, it might still be worth watching. The sequence they are filming is the movie’s climactic western-style shoot-out between Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman. In a rare moment where the ET editor let some actual information slip though, Mila Kunis explains that the film is set in the future after the sun has exploded, leaving earth to rot. Unfortunately, the editor cuts away before Kunis explained how the nearest gigantic star exploded but didn’t destroy our planet.
Described as a post-apocalyptic western,, the film tells the story of a lone man (Washington) who fights his way across America in order to protect a sacred book that holds the secrets to saving humankind. Gary Oldman, Mila Kunis, Ray Stevenson and Jennifer Beals co-star.Watch the Entertainment Tonight footage after the jump. Read More »
Two entirely different starlet/zombie updates in one for you.
Firstly, Variety are reporting that Emma Stone is in her final negotiations to appear alongside Woody Harrelson in Ruben Fleischer’s Zombieland. Stone is the B&W one in the image above, in case you didn’t know. Stone’s first film was Superbad, and since then she’s gone on to be one of the best things in both The House Bunny and The Rocker. Indeed, the moments in The House Bunny that featured just Stone and Anna Faris were incredibly well played, no matter how lacklustre the script, and it would have been my hunch, as director, to just get those two riffing off of one another as much as possible.
Aint It Cool have a report from a would-be flesh-eating extra in Zombieland, which quotes director Fleischer on some interesting details of the particular brand of zombie we can expect to see:
“Our Zombies are ferocious, infected people that move erratically. They are diseased, as opposed to undead. These are not the lumbering walking dead of Romero’s zombie movies, but instead the super jacked up 28 Days Later / Dawn of the Dead (2004) zombies. They are scary and gnarly and gross.
Even Bruce Wayne is beginning to think Max Payne will be a sizable hit and worth seeing. A new theatrical trailer for Fox’s video game adaptation contains even more shots of the hypnotic angels-of-death that continue to puzzle the games’ followers. We learn herein that the winged beings are referred to as “valkyries,” and reward people who “die in violence.” Clarification, meh. Backed by the vocals of Marilyn Manson (our second reference today, k), the new trailer better emphasizes a brooding, escalatory tone that plays the right notes of fanboy nihilism. Also present are the high-charged visuals that wowed our staff at Comic Con. For a PG-13 video game gun-porn flick with many doubters, my latest impression? For what it is, Max Payne clicked.
Current comparisons online to the R-rated, totally cheeseball Hitman are predictable and warranted, but the confidence expressed in the press by Mark Wahlberg and John Moore—once attached to X3—doesn’t seem like a contractual shill-routine to me. This trailer’s vague mix of occult imagery and organized crime recalls past genre fare like The Crow and middling efforts like End of Days, and Constantine, but there’s also the sense that TDK’s rating boundary-pushing was a real inspiration. And, c’mon, Mila Kunis firing a machine gun is equal doses ridiculous and hormone-tickling. I hereby move my chips over from Punisher: War Zone to Max Payne; admittedly, this is not a major gamble, but Payne does feature Ludacris in a fedora. Hope I’m right.
Max Payne opens on October 17th.
Discuss: Will Max Payne be a hit? What’s your impression of the final theatrical trailer? Is it cool or stupid or both? Are the valkyries symbolic or real?
Posted on Wednesday, August 20th, 2008 by Peter Sciretta
Ben Affleck and Clifton Collins Jr (Traffic, Capote) have been cast in Mike Judge’s next live action feature film Extract. Jason Bateman, Mila Kunis and Kristen Wiig have already boarded the project, which has been described as “what it’s like to be the boss when everything seems to be shifting around you.” Bateman stars as a flower extract factory owner who is suffering a bout of bad luck. Everything is going wrong at work and his wife is having an affair with a gigolo.
And no, Affleck is not playing the gigolo. Collins plays a factory worker who loses a body part in a freak accident, and is now looking fo a financial settlement. Affleck will be playing an ambulance-chasing lawyer, who one must assume will be helping Collins’ character with the lawsuit. The project is scheduled to begin production on Monday in Los Angeles.
You probably know Mike Judge as the creator of Beavis and Butthead, King of The Hill and the popular cult work comedy Office Space. Fox basically buried Judges’ second feature film Idiocracy, which now appears to be getting a cult following on DVD/tv.
I think a lot of people love Judge’s work because he creates comedy that is very relatable, but in a second person sense. Everyone has encountered a Beavis. Everyone knows a family like the Hill family. And everyone has a job, and most people have worked in an office at one point in their life. I think Idiocracy might have been too “cartoonish” for some, even though the concepts at the core of the film speaks a lot about the current direction of humanity. But I have to wonder how many people will relate to a factory owner?
Posted on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 by Mel Valentin
Possibly the unfunniest comedy ever made, Forgetting Sarah Marshall is…. Wait, let’s back up. That’s completely backward. Written by actor Jason Segal (Knocked UpUndeclared, Freaks and Geeks), Forgetting Sarah Marshall is the kind of romantic comedy straight men can get behind and not just because Segel unveils his manliness more times than you can count (actually four full-on frontal nudity shots, but who’s keeping count?). Forgetting Sarah Marshall belongs to the sub-genre of romantic comedies that turn on losing then finding love with the “right” person (as opposed to the “right-now” person). It also fits into what one critic or reviewer has called, semi-pretentiously, the “cinema of discomfort” (actually, it was this critic who said that), comedies that center on putting characters in socially awkward situation after socially awkward situation (e.g., Meet the Fockers, Meet the Parents).
Judging by the teaser image above, I can’t blame you for mistaking it for The Smurfs Movie, but it’s really the final poster for the Judd Apatow-produced rom-com Forgetting Sarah Marshall. The poster tags the movie as “The Ultimate Romantic Disaster Movie” and the design has a lite, slacker-esque feel that is somehow appealing to both sexes. Star Jason Segel, playing a dude who goes to Hawaii to drown his breakup sorrows only to encounter his TV star ex, gets the man-child misery just right.
The full poster is after the jump, and we’ve also attached the recently released teaser-poster that promotes the domain/tonal change of the film’s official site, ILoveSarahMarshall.com, to IHateSarahMarshall.com. I’m still not convinced this flick will be on par with Superbad or Knocked Up, but hey, it beats Fool’s Gold.
Discuss: How aware are you of April’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and does anyone have an ex who later became famous?
Possibly the unfunniest comedy ever made, Forgetting Sarah Marshall is…. Wait, let’s back up. That’s completely backward. Written by actor Jason Segal (Knocked Up Undeclared, Freaks and Geeks), Forgetting Sarah Marshall is the kind of romantic comedy straight men can get behind and not just because Segel unveils his manliness more times than you can count (actually four full-on frontal nudity shots, but who’s keeping count?). Forgetting Sarah Marshall belongs to the sub-genre of romantic comedies that turn on losing then finding love with the “right” person (as opposed to the “right-now” person). It also fits into what one critic or reviewer has called, semi-pretentiously, the “cinema of discomfort” (actually, it was this critic who said that), comedies that center on putting characters in socially awkward situation after socially awkward situation (e.g., Meet the Fockers, Meet the Parents).
