Oh yeah, hey – this went up yesterday afternoon:

UPDATE: The studio has been hitting peopel with cease and desist letters regarding the photos, so they’re down for now.

Yup. Consider me onboard, Michael Bay.

As I said re: the earlier image of the maquettes, I’m not “in love” with the jacked-up-badass Turtles as a concept, but this is the best version I can think of FOR said concept. Leonardo looks especially great (love the homemade Japanese fencing-armor look) but then he was always my favorite. The “tech-gear clotheshorse” look for Donny looks a lot less extreme than reported, though we can’t really see his shell:

But Shredder, on the other hand? Holy shit. Shredder looks fantastic! Not nuts about the overly-busy faceplate (nothing is known about where this Shredder comes from, other than that he’ll start out as an American businessman named “Eric Sachs” played by William Fichtner instead of Japanese “Oroku Saki,” possibly to avoid Chinese movie distribution skittishness over Asian villains in otherwise western-dominant movies) but everything else looks fantastic. In many ways it’s an extreme realization of Eastman & Laird’s original “human cheese-grater” concept for the armor – even his cape is made of knives, for fuck’s sake!

This is could, of course, all change when we get our first look at how the mocap CGI and voicework used to bring these guys to life works out, which will supposedly be during a teaser set to debut during The Super Bowl.

Via ComicBookMovie.com, these are apparently Michael Bay and Johnathan Liebesman’s new “TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES;” looking about like you’d expect (i.e. like the originals but on HGH) with Raphael displayed most prominently. Don’t immediately hate, but will need some time to process:

By all accounts Terry Gilliam’s “ZERO THEOREM” is polarizing as hell, which is of course unsurprising. Pitched as the internet-age successor to his masterwork “BRAZIL,” the story finds Christophe Waltz as a dystopian data-entry drone who goes batty(er) when he’s assigned to crack a mathematical paradox whereby 0 must equal “100%” – presumably proving that nothing matters:

If Bryan Singer were an X-Man, his codename would be “DIAL-BACK” – born with the amazing power to lower expectations at superhuman levels.

EMPIRE has been doing a goofy day-long promo where they’re revealing 25 “character reveal” covers for “X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST” once an hour. They look… universally terrible, thus far (we’re up to 14 as of this writing); save for the obvious caveats of Jennifer Lawrence hitting my fairly specific fetish for women in bodypaint looking like they’d rather be anywhere else and also who isn’t happy to see Patrick Stewart?

Thus far, the only “important” reveal has been QUICKSILVER, looking (to your right) like either the mascot for a line of off-brand Sega controllers from a mid-90s GamePro ad or the leader of the Burger King Kids Club.

Quicksilver, of course, is mainly important as a curiosity item since he’s the first instance of a Marvel character being in both the “official” Cinematic Universe (“AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON” next year) and in another film played by two different actors in two different contexts: In this version, he’ll keep his comics’ backstory as the son of Magneto, while the version who turns up in Avengerswill presumably have either a different or unspoken parentage (prevailing fan theory is that he and sister Scarlet Witch will be refitted as the children of Thomas Kretschman’s Baron Von Strucker.)

Originally, Quicksilver’s role was said to be minor – possibly only one or two scenes (that may be par for the course – despite appearing in the first trailer, Anna Paquin’s Rogue has since been cut entirely by the removal of a single scene) – but gossip swirls that his screentime has been beefed up to try and make the character’s role in “AVENGERS: AOU” problematic for Marvel Studios. And yes, by all accounts the relationship between Disney and Fox really is that childish.

From Bryan Singer’s personal Twitter account, which just promised to join the cast in tweeting all 25 Empire Magazine covers promoting the film:

First up, here’s a look at the #Sentinel Mark I, circa 1973. #XMen #Empire25 @EmpireMagazine pic.twitter.com/gNcwwc68FX
— Bryan Singer (@BryanSinger) January 27, 2014

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This is, apparently, The Sentinels as they’ll appear in the 1973-set portions of the film – which is good to know since, if you go by the film’s marketing thus far, you might’ve assumed the film was comprised entirely of slow dissolves between closeups of returning familiar actors, Z-list Mutant barrel-scrapings nobody asked for (“OMG! Blink and Warpath in the SAME MOVIE!!??”) and unsettling reminders that Singer can’t really direct action or scale to save his life.

“X-MEN: DOFP” will be out in the U.S. on May 14th. For those of you playing along at home, this will be the sixth of seven movies centered on a subset of the Marvel Universe comprising almost (probably more-than, really) 700 characters that short-shrifts basically everybody to focus on Hugh Jackman With Muttonchops.

I needed this.

You, not so good.

Better? “RETURN TO NUKEM HIGH.”

Since I don’t get to go to Sundance ::grumble:: this is a slow news week here. So have you seen what The Game OverThinker has been up to lately? Well, it’s about Nintendo… and it ain’t happy times.

http://blip.tv/play/AYOakTMC.html?p=1http://a.blip.tv/api.swf#AYOakTMC

I understand the nostalgia that some filmmakers have for being able to turn things like “what does so-and-so look like?” into the equivalent of a plot-twist… but I really don’t know why anyone bothers today except in cases where a character’s appearance actually IS meant to be a surprise. There are too many moving parts to big movies now, and trying to keep something like what your main character(s) look like secret isn’t practically feesible: It’s going to get “revealed” by merchandising materials or production art or a thousand other things, and suddenly you lose control of your all-important “first-impression” moment and instead people’s first exposure is a potentially subpar version.

Case in point: According to a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fansite, the thing at the right is a children’s Halloween costume-kit for Michaelangelo in the new Michael Bay-produced TMNT movie… and if so, it now gets to be the way we’ll be introduced to Bay’s (and director Johnathan Liebesman’s) version of the heroes:

First reaction: Not loving the basic idea of the head – too human, too much from the school of “people can’t relate without a humanoid face to focus on” creature-design – but a plastic Halloween mask is no way to judge that. The rest of the suits (the fansite claims to have pics for the other three), apparently, are a stretch-fabric onesie with a “stuffable shell” that functions as an attached backpack – making these the most utilitarian-useful Halloween costumes ever (“Just put the candy in my shell!”)

Otherwise? It’s instantly recognizable as “Mikey” orange mask and all but with extra accountremants (workout shorts, a sweater worn as a belt, sunglasses, tattoos, surfer/skater neck jewelry) that reflect his familair personality. I don’t hate this at all. I’m fond of the “identical but for colors/weapons” look from the comics etc for how it ties in with the Japanese/American fusion aspect of the characters, but as an alternate take this makes sense. And the DIY-grubbiness of it fits – I like the implication that these guys have “scavenged” their own personal looks.

The look also lines up to-the-letter with a written description of toys from awhile back, which also matched up with most of what I’d been hearing about the production post-“Alien” script: That the aim for the look was to keep the masks, weapons and standard looks but further differentiate them by body-type (Mike being smaller than the others, Raphael being a “tank,” etc) and clothing/gear choices. This Mikey looks exactly as described, so I imagine subsequent pics will confirm the others: Leonardo wearing Japanese/samurai-style fencing gaurds to some extent, Donatello wearing/carrying lots of tech and gadgets, Raphael in Muy-Thai style cloth/rope padding, etc.