Darren Aronofsky has abruptly dropped out of “The Wolverine,” which was supposed to start shooting in a few months, to spend more time with his family – yes, really, the original “diplomatic answer.”
Wasn’t Fox supposed to be getting LESS impossible to work with on genre projects?
This is pretty incredible: MGM is worried that the Red Dawn remake they’ve had sitting (completed!) on the shelf for 2 years will make China mad at them; so they’re going to digitally change ALL the bad guys’ “stuff” and just call them North Koreans. Really. They DO realize that Chinese and Korean people are a COMPLETELY different ethnicity, right?
Short version: It was a BLAST! Long version, after the jump…
BEST PART:
Finally meeting my editor Susan Arendt, the Loading Ready Run crew, Shamus and all the other Escapist peeps in person, plus doing the movie-night panel that went KICKASS.
WORST PART:
Ah, cons – where $5 for a slice of pizza somehow sounds briefly reasonable…
3DS:
For the first half-second of picking it up, my heart-sank: “Oh no… the 3D doesn’t work.” But once your eyes find “dead center” magic-eye style a half-second later… damn, that’s a nifty effect – it really does look like the screen is a “portal” reaching much deeper into the background than possible in your hand, which is freaky as hell at first – and I’ll bet it’ll be even more impressive when not under harsh convention lightning (i.e. when the screen is the brightest thing in your field of vision.) I’m still not 100% sure if the effect has a practical application outside of looking cool, and I can see myself switching the 3D off for longer sessions, but it works and even absent 3D the graphics/controls are – as expected – terrific.
“FIREFALL”
Hadn’t been following development on this, but evidently an online/co-op 3rd-person shooter that looks like “Gears of War” with a stylized, cartoon/comic inspired design aesthetic. They were putting on quite a show.
“MORTAL KOMBAT” REBOOT:
It’s “Mortal Kombat 2” gone 2.5D in High-Definition and with tag-team play… and there isn’t a DAMN THING wrong with that! They had it set up in oldschool arcade-style cabinets complete with “fighter stick” controls; played a match against a friendly stranger and suddenly it was the tolerable part of the 90s again – sooo satisfying to hear “Finish Him!” again. This thing will be HUGE.
(UPDATED TO FIX FACTUAL ERROR.) Please consider making a donation to the charity or relief-organization of your choice to aid in the ongoing tragedy in Japan.
As if anyone needed ANOTHER reason to get behind the Detroit Robocop Statue project, here’s another: Right-Wing douchebag Warner Todd Huston; one of Andrew Breitbart’s professional trolls, is against it.
Donations to detroitneedsrobocop can be made HERE. The statue itself has already been funded, but the group behind the movement has pledged to keep the campaign going until it’s original March 26th end date and expand their scope to include other Detroit-oriented charities.
(The big “How Did PAX East Go??” post will be coming tomorrow night, probably, when the con itself has wrapped up.)
Steve Head and John Black, a pair of very respected longtime Boston film journalists, run a weekly web show called “The Post-Movie Podcast.” This week, to help hash-out “Red Riding Hood” and “Battle: LA,” they asked me to sit in and lend a hand. Check it out HERE. This was recorded, literally, an hour before I headed further into town for the first day of PAX East.
http://cdn2.themis-media.com/media/global/movies/player/flowplayer.commercial-3.2.5.swf
UPDATED: Now with Intermission, because there’s a limit to what I can do here from a Blackberry.
Okay folks, things have been and will be “sparse-ish” in the daytime ’round here for the weekend, as I’ll be at PAX East for most of it. I’ll probably turn up at the con itself around 4pm or so tommorow (got some business first) and be around for most of the evening after that… Saturday and Sunday? We’ll see what happens, but I’m planning to be at as much as possible.
So… since I can’t really blog from the con; I’ve gone and done the unthinkable… and signed up for Twitter. Yes, I’ll be tweeting from PAX – follow me @the_moviebob. Let me know in the comments if that hyperlink works or not – Twitter’s urls are weird, and I don’t know if it “takes” like that. If it doesn’t, just look up “the_moviebob” on Twitter itself – the other ones just called “moviebob” AREN’T me.
The second trailer for “Cars 2″… looks like sub-Dreamworks pablum. As that also handily sums up the first one, I’m not sure why the fact that it’s so crummy-looking is being treated as a news-item everywhere else in the blogosphere…
Thing is, I kinda feel like there’s TWO angles at play here, but only one of them is “open” about itself. On the one hand, dedicated film-geek Pixar afficionados tend to dislike “Cars” because it’s such a step down from the rest of the lineup – that’s the “open” one.
On the other hand… “Cars” is ALSO the most “different” Pixar movie in terms of it’s vibe and frame of reference: The other movies are about monsters, action-figures, superheroes, lost-worlds, robots… stuff film-geeks (generally) love. “Cars,” on the other hand, is “about” rural small-town values, Middle-American normalcy and NASCAR culture; all things that “geek culture” to a large-degree actively abhors. Other Pixar movies drop references to Harryhausen and Kurosawa, “Cars” has Larry the Cable Guy as it’s co-lead. We (geeks) tend to see Pixar as an “US” outfit, but “Cars” is a “THEM” movie – and that kinda pisses us off, right?
Am I nuts, or is that just a teensy bit of the story here? Not so much, “this is why people think ‘Cars’ sucked – because it DOES suck – but maybe “this is why people CARE that “Cars” sucks.”
MOVIEBOB CENTRAL 