Tuesday, July 10, 2012
MADAGASGAR
In this, almost weekly, series. I publish a selection with movie posters of just released or just announced movies. Today a selection of movie posters for all three Madagascar movies, with the most posters for the first movie, but in my opinion, better posters for the last two movies. Decide for yourself...
Madagascar (2005): At New York's Central Park Zoo, a lion, a zebra, a giraffe, and a hippo are best friends and stars of the show. But when one of the animals goes missing from their cage, the other three break free to look for him, only to find themselves reunited ... on a ship en route to Africa. When their vessel is hijacked, however, the friends, who have all been raised in captivity, learn first-hand what life can be like in the wild.Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (2008): The sequel to 2005's "Madagascar", in which New York Zoo animals, Alex the Lion, Marty the Zebra, Melman the Giraffe and Gloria the Hippo, still stranded on Madagascar, start to leave the island. All of a sudden, they land in the wilderness of Africa, where Alex meets the rest of his family, but has trouble communicating with them after spending so much time at the Central Park Zoo.Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted (2012): Alex, Marty, Gloria and Melman are still trying to get back to the Big Apple and their beloved Central Park zoo, but first they need to find the penguins. When they travel to Monte Carlo, they attract the attention of Animal Control after gate crashing a party and are joined by the penguins, King Julian and Co., and the monkeys. How do a lion, zebra, hippo, giraffe, four penguins, two monkeys, three lemurs travel through Europe without attracting attention and get back to New York? They join a traveling circus. Their attempts to get back to New York are consistently hampered by the Captain of Animal Control who wants to make Alex part of her collection. Once they make it back to New York Marty, Alex, Gloria and Melman realize that they want to be part of the traveling circus.
Saturday, July 7, 2012
MOVIE NEWS AFTER DARK 36
What is Movie News After Dark? After inadvertantly taking the night off last night due to a surprise viewing of the extended cut of Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (all 4 hours and 10 minutes, baby), it’s a nightly movie news and notes column and is just here to send you off to your weekend with a few fun reads. That’s exactly how many we’ve got tonight. A few.
We begin the evening with a shot of a bald, robotically enhanced Matt Damon in a new shot from Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium. For a movie being made with such a low profile, that sure is a big image. A Chem-rail gun (I don’t know what that is, but it sounds fun) and some exoskeletal goodness. Plus, Damon is looking quite militant. Here’s hoping we get more of this one at Comic-Con next week.
1. The Interrogation of John – Amongst my favorite web projects is Matt Hermann’s Original Movie Ideas, a series of ideas that attempt to create a long-form synopsis for a completely new idea. It’s a tall task, and Hermann’s effort should be applauded. His latest is about a hotshot FBI agent and a suspected terrorist who claims to be Jesus. That’s definitely something. Here’s the poster he’s created:
2. What is IMAX? – The Substream delivers a fairly deft explanation of exactly why IMAX is such an impressive format and why Christopher Nolan shooting over 100-minutes of The Dark Knight Rises in the super-sized format is so significant.
3. The strange marketing of The Amazing Spider-Man – Movieline explores everything odd about Sony’s partnership campaigns, including that one where Spidey finds the organic Twizzler shooters.
4. The Imposter and a Sense of Balance – Every person I know who’s seen Bart Layton’s The Imposter has said that it’s excellent. Over-the-moon good. Best of the year material if such a thing is possible with half a year to go. Tom Roston’s essay about it at the NY Times only reinforces what I’m hearing.
5. The Amazing Spider-Man fan poster – Because it’s Spider-Man week and I really dig the work of designer Dave Williams, I’m going to show off his latest creation. This does not excuse the fact that he sold them out before I could get one. It does not excuse it, Dave!
6. Was the untold story cut from The Amazing Spider-Man? – In one of his best articles in a long time, Devin Faraci at Badass Digest digs deep to explore the entire subplot that may have been cut out of Mark Webb’s Spider-Man flick, revealing a nerdy director’s cut that will probably never ever happen.
7. In Defense of the Horror Remake – Horror advocacy council chairman Scott Weinberg takes to Movies.com to defend the notion of horror remakes. Because like comic books, those stories are ripe for the rebuild. And hell, he’s got a point. Are there worse things out there than a kid seeing Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead and being inspired to explore the original? That’s actually a really great, heart-warming, brain-eating notion.
8. 85 Documentaries About Movies Currently on Netflix Instant – Two things. One, the folks at Refocused Media have way too much time on their hands. Two, this is an amazing list of films that could easily substitute for several semesters of film studies courses. Now, which of our writers can we get to watch all of these For Science…
9. Theater employee spoils Prometheus for political reasons – What a dick.
10. There Will Be a Ranch – AV Club continues its excellent series Pop Pilgrims with an exploration of McGuire Ranch in Marfa, Texas, where Paul Thomas Anderson shot almost all of There Will Be Blood. This series, like the movies and locations it explores, is drinking the milkshake of pop reporters everywhere.
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Posted: 06 Jul 2012 07:00 PM PDT
After the success of Twilight and The Hunger Games, film executives all over Hollywood are presumably falling all over themselves trying to find the next series of young adult novels that could become a film series cash cow. Smart money has to be on the upcoming adaptations of Cassandra Clare’s ‘Mortal Instruments’ series of books, the first of which is called ‘City of Bones.’ They’ve got everything a young adult series needs: a protagonist with a vague destiny, supernatural shenanigans, monsters to be killed, a love triangle involving a bad boy and a nice guy; everything.
Two of the main roles for the ‘City of Bones’ adaptation (just called The Mortal Instruments) have been filled for a while. Director Harald Zwart (The Karate Kid) has cast Mirror Mirror star Lily Collins as the protagonist, Clary Fray, a girl who finds that she has ties to a race of mystical demon hunters called Shadowhunters, and Jamie Campbell Bower as Jace Wayland, the troubled and mysterious Shadowhunter who Clary develops a crush on. And now things seem to finally be picking up on the casting front, because Variety has a report that Zwart has started the process of filling the film’s villain roles.
Kevin Durand and Robert Maillet have been cast as the characters of Emil Pangborn and Samuel Blackwell, two of the henchmen of the story’s Voldemort-like main villain, Valentine. Durand is a handsome but evil looking fellow who’s been around for awhile, recently playing roles in Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood and that robot boxing movie Real Steel. Maillet is a gigantic former professional wrestler who has, in recent years, transitioned into the acting world with roles in films like 300 and Sherlock Holmes.
Truthfully, the casting of the bad guy’s goons isn’t really big news on its own, but this is the first bit of casting that’s been done on The Mortal Instruments in a while, and one can imagine that it’s indicative of the fact that things are starting to move forward on this potentially huge project. Plenty of big roles still need to be filled, including Clary’s mother and the man who serves as her father figure, Luke, her best friend Simon, and Jace’s foster family, the Lightwoods (all of whom are Shadowhunters). Probably we can anticipate plenty more casting news coming out of this camp in the very near future, and the actors chosen are sure to fuel impassioned debate amongst this series’ many fans. Might as well start sharpening your knives now.
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Posted: 06 Jul 2012 06:00 PM PDT
“Does anyone have any questions about Flipper?” Front and center, Mondo chief Justin Ishmael isn’t fooling anyone. Next to him is Elijah Wood, the star of the 1996 Alan Shapiro-directed Paul Hogan vehicle Flipper. But we know this can’t be Flipper. Not for the highly anticipated tenth Mondo Mystery Movie, a series that has spanned across shows in Austin and Los Angeles, each better than the last and each packaged with an amazing work of art that attendees have the exclusive opportunity to purchase. Even though Justin and Elijah insist that we’re all about to watchFlipper, this crowd of true believers — a crowd that, when asked who was in attendance for the last Mystery Movie, saw about 80% of hands raised — was having absolutely none of it. “So you guys are just going to shit on this event?” said Ishmael in a faux tiff. “Okay then, lets roll the movie.”
And so began our screening of Flipper.
Thirteen minutes and one painful on-screen conversation about Spaghetti-O’s later, the movie stopped and another movie began, the real draw. It was still a film starring Elijah Wood, but this one had no dolphins. It also, much to my own dismay, was not all thirteen episodes of Wilfredseason one. We were created by the bulging gaze of Andy Serkis and the story of Smeagol, the backstory of how he came to madness over “The Precious.”
And so began our screening of the extended cut of Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.
250 minutes later (yes, that’s 4 hours and 10 minutes), there was not a dry eye in the house. Not here, not for the denizens of Nerd Mecca at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin. These are the kind who sit at their desks refreshing Mondo’s Twitter page every five minutes, wage war against ticket sales system algorithms and stand in line for upwards of 12-13 hours just to see a movie they’ve probably seen a number of times. And while doing all of that, they have no idea what the movie is. In here exists a level of fandom that most people would see as insanity. Others question whether or not such behavior is proper or “normal.” Are these adults malfunctioning? Is this the worst case scenario of Internet-era fandom? What’s the big deal about Mondo, anyway? Jump on the Google, the arguments are spread far and wide across the blogosphere.
In here, at 11:37pm on a Thursday night, under neath the rapidly cooling Texas skies, no one cares. They are just enjoying the reward they’ve earned with their enthusiasm for moving pictures and their patronage to one of the art world’s rapidly ascending poster factories. Each of them is enjoying the vast splendor of Middle Earth seen through the lens of Peter Jackson. An accomplishment of scale and fantasy and computer generated effects that remain unrivaled almost a decade later. Some may be seeing Gollum on screen and think, “I can’t believe these are 10-year old effects.” All are riveted, all are emotionally invested. This is where the understanding of what Mondo has built can be seen so clearly. It’s not for everyone, but it’s everything to some.
The screening concluded and the house lights revealed those weary, soggy eyes — seriously, the “You bow to no one” moment between Aragorn and the Hobbits gets me every time — all quickly focused on the task at hand: time to get the poster. Ever since Mondo got Tyler Stout to deliver a poster for Akira, there’s always been something extra special about their Mystery Movie goods. And for Mystery Movie X, that little something extra was ever-present in the Aaron Horkey designed Return of the King print. They wanted to do something special, Ishmael explained before the screening, to give back to those who’d made Mondo and its Mystery series such a wild success. A companion piece tohis Jurassic Park design, Horkey brought his colorful, intensely detailed touch to the world of Middle Earth:
All of the sudden that $80 (or more for the variant) spent prior to the screening didn’t sound so bad. The next morning, these limited edition (only 260) prints were selling for upwards of $675 dollars on eBay. But it’s a small fraction of those who bought it who will now flip it online. Those poster hunters are the scourge of what Mondo does, but they don’t come close to representing a majority of those in attendance. Everyone else — yours truly included — is picking out wall space.
Mondo, the boutique art arm of the Alamo Drafthouse empire, has announced that they will continue on with a series of Lord of the Rings posters throughout the year, covering all the films with a number of great artists — this includes, as we can only assume at this point, The Hobbit, which is due out this winter. For those who collect this kind of art and have allegiance to Gondor, this is very exciting news.
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