Headline sort of sums it up: Former British PM Margaret Thatcher, ill for some time now, died today of an apparent stroke. She was most-recently the subject of the Meryl Streep Oscar-Aquisition Device “The Iron Lady,” my review of which appeared here and I’ll repost below the jump to mark the occasion.

As a student of history, I have my own general outlook on Thatcher’s legacy… but frankly the opinions that count for much more at the moment are those of the folks in the UK who lived either during her tenure or lived through the after-effects thereof. The moment belongs to them, and UK folks among my readership (or, y’know, anyone else really) are invited to weigh in in the comments – given the way most of my British/UK aquaintances tended to speak of her for the most part, I imagine the discussion will be spirited to say the least:

Relax, it’s good.

Intermission begins the first of a two-part Sam Raimi retrospective.

The buzz on the “Carrie” remake was that it’s not very good, which may or may not be responsible for it getting bounced to mid-Fall; but you can’t always trust those sorts of things. Anyway, now it’s got a full trailer which aims to help get everybody who never saw the original classic get on the same page with those who did by giving away the entire story in two minutes…


http://movies.yahoo.com/video/carrie-trailer-2-231012436.html?format=embed&player_autoplay=false

Well… it’s “Carrie” alright. Obviously can’t hope to touch the original DePalma film, one of the all-time great horror flicks, but it’ll be interesting to see the story (summary: abused/bullied teen has telekinesis, everybody pays) played out with characters who look more convincingly like high-schoolers.

Re-staging the car-flip as a slo-mo/bullet-time CGI gag is depressingly innevitable, though it should be fun to see whether they go even further on Carrie’s mother’s Christian zealotry (an edgy move for the late-70s) or dial it back for fear of pissing off Flyover audiences; and I wonder if there’ll be pressure to tone down the ambiguity of the original finale (yeah, it’s supposed to ALSO be Carrie flipping to the Dark Side… but most of her class more-or-less had it coming by that point) now that “misunderstood kid on a rampage” is more of a ‘thing’ in the popular-consciousness…

It probably says something about my own wasted youth that I can be watching a trailer in 2013 and my first thought is: “Wait, wasn’t this part of the premise for the shitty ‘Double Dragon’ movie?” (I checked, it was.)

Anyway, the premise behind “The Purge” is that at some point in the near future the United States has turned itself into a well-behaved utopia by instituting an annual one night “get out of jail free” event wherein all police and/or emergency services are suspended and everyone so-inclined gets a free pass to rob, murder, rape, destroy or whatever anyone and anything they want without fear of legal reprisal. In the film, a suburban family takes pity on a guy stuck outside during this year’s Purge, inviting the wrath of the Purge-participants who were hunting him.

Great pitch, to be certain – but to be honest I lost a lot of interest once the Slasher Movie crew turned up. The real horror (and real promise) of the setup should be the revelation of what absolute bastards the “nice normal people” of the world turn into when you take away the chance they’ll get punished; so having the heavies for this turn out to be a pack of Arkham Asylum goons who’d likely be out pulling versions of this shit in a world without a Purge feels a lot like chickening-out of something more subversive… though to be fair it’s extremely likely that the point of the “Strangers”-knockoff masks is so the film can pull “shocking” reveals (“OMG! It’s the mailman/grocery-clerk/barber!”) later.

Roger Ebert, who did more than almost anyone to turn Film Criticism into a viable medium/career-path unto itself, has died. Terrible news, especially considering how hard he’d continued working and innovating in spite of his long-running health issues – would you keep doing your day job if you were A.) already rich/famous and B.) no longer had the bottom of your face?

Ebert was the vanguard of new American film-critics who swept into the business alongside New Hollywood in the 70s, a guy who’d grown up a movie-obsessed youth and started out as a screenwriter for T&A maven Russ Meyer. He was said to have grown annoyed with the reductive simplicity of the Thumb-Up/Down gimmick from “Siskle & Ebert,” but that bit and he and Gene’s natural chemistry made them the first real Superstar Critics – more or less the reason that anyone in my profession has a career or public-profile outside of “guy assigning star-ratings in the local paper. It also cannot be overstated how important it was to the Online Critic community that Ebert was one of the first to take the medium and it’s early stars with any degree of seriousness – when Hollywood and the rest of the critical community was still looking down it’s nose at us, Roger Ebert was inviting the likes of Harry Knowles to guest on his show.

He is survived by his wife, Chaz, and multiple children and grandchildren. He is irreplacable, and will be sorely missed.

Thus far, the Gritty Reboots YouTube channel had seemed like a great concept in search of a target, but their “Calvin & Hobbes” is a total slam dunk: Feels very much like a plausible Nolanizing of the strip tonally, but also peppered with exactly the right amount of references for the fans (1:10 – perfect.)

Here’s the red-band trailer for Nicholas Winding Refn’s “Only God Forgives,” his follow-up to “Drive” once-again featuring Ryan Gosling, who is in turn once again playing up that almost surreal “macho” intensity that befits a guy who had to go through middle school with a last name that literally means “A Baby Goose.”

The Marvel Studios “Phase One DVD Set” that had been delayed is now finding it’s way to consumers, and pretty-much every news site is running some variation of reports on the Phase TWO preview materials that came packaged therein. HitFix, in particular, has some good scans up plus a vid (for now anyway) of the video-featurette portion. Take a look:

WARNING: At least one slice of concept-art may or may not show either a certain previously-established character fighting alongside The Guardians of The Galaxy OR one of the Guardians dropping in on someone else’s movie. Whichever it is, some might consider it a possible spoiler.

https://dailymotion.com/video/xyoruf

The video is heavy on “Iron Man 3,” which is to be expected, but for me the big “cool!” of this is that it offers the first non-bootleg look at the “test-footage” for Edgar Wright’s “Ant-Man” movie that ran at SDCC last year. I’ve only seen the footage once before at low-quality, so anyone who knows better feel free to correct me, but it looks like there’ve been some CGI improvements to the size-changing effects and the overall design of Ant-Man’s costume/helmet since the initial version. If so, that supports what many (myself included) have been saying all along: That cheapskate Marvel wouldn’t pay for finished-CG “test footage” if they weren’t planning to repurpose it as a post-credits tease in some near-future movie.

Also included (in the video and in the various image galleries are first-looks (primarily in the form of concept-art, but those proved pretty reliable in the past) at The Winter Soldier and Falcon from “Captain America 2.” and some BTS footage from “Thor: The Dark World.” Not loving that Falcon looks to have been outfitted with dull black duds a’la Hawkeye (c’mon Marvel, not only is that era done with – you stuck the fork in it) but he does have his wings, which is the important part. Winter Soldier has his robot-arm, but it also looks like they’ve given him a bottom-face mask to conceal his identity from mainstream audiences who don’t know who/what he is yet (I wonder how that reveal will “play” in the absence of 40+ years of buildup.)

Rounding things out are an expanded look at “Guardians of The Galaxy,” aka “Yeah, we’re really gonna do this;” confirming once more that Disney/Marvel really seriously is going to drop a talking, gun-toting Space Raccoon into their billion dollar Movie Universe just because they can.

It trips me out to consider that “This Is The End” is basically the Movie Celebrity version of “Kickassia” – a bunch of buddy-buddy comedy stars and whoever else they could land playing (versions of) themselves in a rude riff on End Times disaster movie that looks to find the sweet-spot between self-effacing and self-indulgent. The new red-band trailer is pretty extraordinary:

A virtual 90s’talgia non-entity “character” (and that’s being charitable) from one of the most overrated comics of all time is being dropped into the Marvel Universe. Believe it or not, this actually is kind of a big deal…