Wait… Disney is doing a new “Winnie The Pooh?” In traditional hand-drawn 2D? As a proper follow-up to – and in the same style as – “Many Adventures?”

How am I only learning this NOW!? Um… I mean, that is to say… “Oh. Interesting. I have vauge memories of having enjoyed that, as a lad…”

That’s Peter Cullen returning as Eeyore, BTW, and Craig Ferguson as the new Owl. Tom Kenny (not heard) is the new Rabbit. Apparently, Disney is so confident in this they’re opening it against the 2nd part of “Deathly Hallows” this coming Summer.

EDIT: I am informed that that’s not Cullen as Eeyore, but rather Pixar animator/voice-actor Bud Luckey, a legendary figure to animation buffs for his 1970s “Sesame Street” shorts and the movie adaptation of Russell Hoban’s “The Mouse & His Child.”

“Entertainment Tonight” has your first look at Ryan Reynolds in motion as Hal Jordan.

We’ll all get a better look when a REAL trailer is almost-surely in front of “Harry Potter,” but I took some screencaps for a (somewhat) closer inspection:

(See the clip and more after the jump)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=RrBwKMxhtXQ

Pretty sure that’s Kilowog at 00:26. Awesome.

First thing a lot of people are noticing: Either “Entertainment Weekly” got a really bad shot of him for the infamously poorly recieved “cover debut,” or there’s been some significant redesign since then because the CGI-suit costume looks A LOT better than it did previously: You can distinctly see the black (darker green?) arms and legs seperate from the green upper-torso, closer to the source material and more “superhero”-looking, and the “energy vein” thing doesn’t seem to be constant.

Otherwise… look, trailers are trailers and trailers are usually misleading in one way or another, but with that in mind I’m not loving the “tone” here – they’re obviously going for “Iron Man” re: featherweight macho flippancy, but this character and “world” – what with the galaxy-spanning scope, space-opera backstory, etc – would seem to call for something more in the vein of “Avatar”… y’know, something conveying a “you will be amazed” sense of cosmic-AWE. The brief glimpses we see of space, Oa, etc. would seem to suggest that, so hopefully that’s closer to what we get.

Worth noting: This is actually supposed to come out a month AFTER “Thor,” which means that the two most “out-there” superhero movies in a long time will be out within weeks of eachother, with “Captain America” a month later. This means that, at a certain point in the summer of 2011, I will be able to walk into a movie theater and choose from any one of THREE superheroes I never, ever would’ve expected anyone to make a movie out of.

http://cdn2.themis-media.com/media/global/movies/player/flowplayer.commercial-3.2.5.swf
It’s about trains.

Intermission asks: “Where are all the toy/game/comic blockbusters for women?”

More estrogen for the next “Batman” movie, and you can (maybe) soon add another good actor to your list of arguments as to why I should be pretending the “Spider-Man” reboot is a good idea. Details after the jump…

First-up,: Actress, singer and living trope Zooey Deschanel is apparently playing Betty Brant (J. Jonah Jameson’s secretary, played by Elizabeth Banks in the previous 3) in “Spiderlight” –  at least so-sez not-terribly-reliable gossip site “Showbiz Spy.” Deschanel had the title role in director Marc Webb’s prior film, “500 Days of Summer.” File the casting under plausible but not terribly likely; but if any of this is true to fact that Betty Brant is A.) in the film at all and B.) has an important role with “big plans” is the real story. In the comics, Brant was the first (short-lived) love-interest for Peter Parker, so if this pans out maybe now we know who’s “Jacob” now that Mary-Jane is off the table. Also, her eventual boyfriend turned out to be Hobgoblin, which would be an elegant (if predictable) way for them to do the Green Goblin again without actually doing it again.

Analysis is… egh, why am I bothering at this point? Yes, she’s a good actress, yes it’d be good casting. Y’know who else was good casting? Uma Thurman as Poison Ivy… and then the movie came out. At this point, yeah, it’s clear that they’re assembling a cast of good actors for this thing – albeit in not terribly surprising/interesting ways (Sally Field as an advice-giving matriarch? Gee, that’s outside the box…) – but that really does very little to dispell how moronic the notion of the reboot is in the first place, how bad the “new” angle is (Spider-Man: The Degrassi Years) and how unlikely it is that a cheap quickie rights-holding production is ever going to be any good. Yes, it could work out. Yes, it’ll get a fair shake. Am I holding my breath? No. Sometimes you really can, in fact, see a disaster coming a mile away – I didn’t need to see or hear a single thing about “Transformers” other than the godawful mecha-designs and Michael Bay to be pretty damn sure that it was going to be just as bad as it turned out to be.

Meanwhile, back at Stately Wayne Manor…

Deadline sez that Christopher Nolan is casting TWO major female roles for “The Dark Rises” – one a love-interest, the other a nemesis. Whether or not they’re being “cute” and the roles are actually one and the same is left unsaid. Shockingly “the list” of candidates looks an awful lot like the “the list” of candidates for every other major female role in existance right now: Rachel Weisz, Naomi Watts, Blake Lively, Natalie Portman, Anne Hathaway and Keira Knightley.

So… female bad guy and a new romantic interest. Obviously, everyone’s first thought is “Catwoman” and… fine, whatever. It make sense, it’s kind of a “must do,” they’d all be varying degrees of hot in The Outfit and everyone but Lively is a good actress. If not.. who knows? Harley Quinn? Probably not. Poison Ivy? Maybe, but unlikely to be very interesting in Nolan’s fantasy-free Gotham. Entirely new character? Wouldn’t that be something…

There’s also the dark horse candidate: Talia al Ghul, daughter of Ras al Ghul – the Big Bad from “Batman Begins.” That’d be the one I’d most like to see, from a story perspective: TDK was great, but it’s also about as far into “regular crime drama guest-starring Batman” as I’d prefer to go for awhile, and I’d enthusiastically support the series veering back into Batman Vs. Quasi-Magical Ninjas territory. On the other hand, it’d be FASCINATING to see how the Nolan Bros. handle Catwoman, a character based 100% on sexuality – the subject that thus far gets the least attention in their ouvre (nevermind the fact that having a multitude of stronge female characters would be new territory for them in general – let’s face it, thus far The Nolanverse is a serious sausagefest.)

We have lost one of the most important movie producers of all time.

To film geeks of my generation, Dino’s name was basically an opening-credits signal that you were about to see something unique, strange, not necessarily “good” but hard to forget: Danger: Diabolik!, Barbarella, Mandingo, Death Wish, King Kong/King Kong Lives!, Orca, Flash Gordon, Conan the Barbarian, Dead Zone, Dune, Cat’s Eye, Manhunter, Army of Darkness… his career from the late-60s to the early-2000s speaks for itself; but he’d lived a lifetime before that.

He was a true independent – at once a profit-minded businessman and a bizzarely-visionary risk-taker with a love for garrish, overblown spectacle; an Italian renegade with the energy and style of a Golden Age Hollywood mogul. Along with his more infamous features, he also produced “art-films,” war movies, historical epics and romances. He put big budgets and studio support behind a diverse selection of filmmakers from Ingmar Bergman to Frederico Fellini to Sam Raimi to John Milius to David Lynch. He backed John Wayne’s last film, and produced the Wachowski Brother’s first screenplay (AND their debut feature.) He brought us “Nights of Cabiria,” “La Strada” and “Transformers: The Movie.”

If pressed, I don’t think anyone could name a modern equivalent to him in the current film world – that volatile mix of ruthless mogul businessman and art-lover of “questionable” artistic taste isn’t much seen these days. In his ever-expanding producer role, Guillermo del Toro MAYBE comes close in terms of vision… but in terms of actual triumph it’s likely we’ll never see another like him.

De Laurentiis was 91, and lived a life the way one ought to be lived: Fully. He is survived by a small army of children and grandchildren, including Hollywood producer Raefella and Food Network personality Giada.

Had an absolute BALL of a “bad movie night” with friends a few hours ago, watching the 1983 Lou Ferrigno version of “Hercules.” Exactly why this film, which was regarded as a fairly-notorious “what the hell happened here!?” trainwreck in at the time, hasn’t become an ironic cult-classic like “Troll 2” I don’t know, but it ought to be. Check it out:

Yes, that is a Rainbow Flaming Sword the bad guy is using at 1:14.

The trailer doesn’t even do justice to how GONZO this thing is, a bizzare hybrid of “classic” Italian swords & sandals muscleman epic juiced-up with some weak “Chariots of The Gods” scifi reimagining to justify the awkward inclusion of “Star Wars”-style space scenes and giant robots. A lot of the visual logic appears cribbed from Kirby/Ditko-style Marvel Comics renderings of the esoteric, i.e. every “magical” place appears as a floating chunk of expressionist art hovering somewhere in an unidentified starfield – regardless of where it’s “supposed” to be.

It’s also garaunteed to drive anyone with even a cursory familiarity with classical Greek Mythology into a psychotic episode. Just as a sample: Hercules’ chief enemy is King Minos (!), who rules the futuristic city of Atlantis (!!) and commands robot monsters built by his minion Daedalus (!!!) – appearing as a beautiful female space-being in “Barbarella”-style costuming (!!!!) Oh, and you get an endless prologue in which the Universe is formed from the exploding fragments of Pandora’s Jar.

For whatever reason, you can actually see this on Netflix Instant – I very much reccomend that you do, preferably with as many unsuspecting fellow viewers onhand as possible.

Below, Jon Stewart responds to “liberal” critics of The Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear; specifically Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and Bill Maher:

Stewart is scheduled to be a guest on Maddow’s show this Thursday, which should be incredibly interesting: Will it be a tense-but-genial thing like when he’s on O’Reilly, or a collapse-of-the-other-guy’s-credibility like Jim Kramer or “Crossfire?”

And here we are. The innaugural episode is about “Halo.”

http://cdn2.themis-media.com/media/global/movies/player/flowplayer.commercial-3.2.5.swf

Big news, everybody!

I’ve got a BRAND NEW video series making it’s debut at The Escapist tomorrow: “The Big Picture.”

I’m pretty excited about it. This is be a show with an entirely different style and vibe than “Game OverThinker” or “Escape to The Movies” – there’s no “set” subject other than no-punches-pulled commentary on the broad nerd-ephemera, so various installments will delve into everything from video games to comics to politics to pop-culture to whatever else strikes my fancy. If pressed, I’d describe the approach as Walter Winchell meets Randal Graves.

The debut episode should be up tomorrow (11/09) around Noon ET. I’ll put up a link as soon as I can (aka once it exists) but check out The Escapist tomorrow and it should be there. I hope you like it.

Part of what will sooner-than-deservedly be seen as former President George W. Bush’s “quirk” was that his backstory seemed to fit so neatly into a classical template: The late-blooming WASP blueblood screw-up who rose high and fell hard trying to live up to the dynastic standard.

All the pieces were there: Cold, distant relationship with patriarch, prologned adolescence, supplementing of religious-devotion for alcoholism, mangetic-pull toward daddy figures… and now, thanks to his book and pending interview with Matt Lauer, we have the final one: Traumatic experiences with seemingly-derranged mother that he doesn’t seem to realize were borderline-abusive.

Seriously… that’s the sort of thing you see in the “origin story” flashback in a slasher movie. Ick.