The new “Amazing Spider-Man” trailer, which is supposed to be in front of most “Avengers” prints, is now online; confirming that The Lizard (the CGI on the whole still looks shockingly bad) will be wearing his labcoat for at least a little while and that the standup-comedy Spidey and missing-parents stuff aren’t looking any better with more polish, and that omniously-stupid “do you know what you really are?” business crops up again:

http://latinoreview.springboardplatform.com/mediaplayer/springboard/video/ltrv001/955/485569/

For all the “Avengers vs. Batman” talk that will surely dominate the summer movie coverage, this honestly strikes me as the genre movie that could be negatively impacted the most by “Avengers” sucking all the air out of the room: Nolan’s Batman is very much it’s own thing, but ASM looks to be playing the same game as “Avengers” (scifi-heavy superheroics in New York) but not nearly as well.

Who’s the guy asking Connors if he said anything about The Parkers at one point? Has the trailer revealed it’s previously-unannounced Norman Osborn?

UPDATE: Devin Faraci claims to have some inside sources on the project, and says that they’ve confirmed what the trailers (this one moreso than the others) have hinted at about the reboot making a major, fundamental change to Spider-Man’s origin. If true, it’s sort-of a spoiler (though the trailers are pretty-much saying it right out at this point) so read it only if you wish to HERE.

I have a slightly askew relationship with the “organized atheism” movement, not so much ideologically but tactically – I think some facets of the movement can be a little petty and mean-spirited sometimes (re: the “you know it’s a myth” billboards that amount to a neener-neener against various faiths during their holidays); and I’m unable to subscribe to the tenet that “All religions are bad.” Sorry, I can’t go there – they’re all a little silly, conceptually, sure… but not only are most self-identified persons of faith either decent or at least harmless; the vast majority of the world’s hundreds of thousands of organized-religions are fairly benign.

That having been said, I’m fairly comfortable in my infrequent calculation that while not ALL religions are bad… between three and four of them (the religions) ARE bad – or, at the very least are a net-negative influence on the modern world as a whole to a degree that is not offset by whatever good is done by individual adherents. And this kind of shit is WHY…

That’s Pastor Sean Harris, rather explicitly suggesting that parents should – upon witnessing their children behaving in homosexual and/or gender-non-normative ways – essentially beat the behavior out of them. Charming.

He has, of course, offered a toothless apology on his blog.

There are two kinds of people in the world: Thinkers and Believers. This fellow, and the cheering/clapping ignoramouses hanging on his every word, are Believers; and that designation has NOTHING to do with their being religious and EVERYTHING to do with the words coming out of his mouth.

Oh, and have you heard? Activision has hired right-wing folk hero Col. Oliver North – convicted (later overturned on appeal) in the Iran-Contra Affair – to do commercials shilling next “Call of Duty” video-game.

Yeah, things are goin’ swell…

Universal has inked a major production deal with Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, the writers of the “Transformers” movies and the “Star Trek” reboot, that will include among other things a remake of “Van Helsing” with Tom Cruise tapped to star. Yes, really – a do-over of a failed decade-old Hugh Jackman vehicle starring Tom Cruise. I don’t even know where to start a joke about that…

K&O have had a good year as deals go – despite “Cowboys & Aliens” tanking, they’ve already lined up this new set of projects plus an agreement to take over the writing duties on Sony’s pre-planned “Amazing Spider-Man” sequel (the gossip is that Sony is VERY unhappy with how “ASM” has turned out, and are effectively looking to reboot the reboot in terms of a new creative team if the film does well enough to get a sequel.)

Is “Halo 4” releasing on Election Day fishy?

I know, I know… commercialism, first-world opulence, more-plastic-for-the-landfill, etc… but I just LOVE this commercial Target has been running for “Avengers” merch:

What I like about this is that it really does nail – intentionally or not – exactly why the project works so well: The beats and energy of the kids “playing Avengers” is nearly indistinguishable from the actual Avengers in movie, which understands (especially in regards to it’s best-ever version of The Hulk) like almost no other superhero movie before it that the foundational versions of these characters tended to act like the energetic children their stories were aimed at (seriously, pretty-much every “WTF?” thing about weird old comics is answerable with “because that’s what a seven year-old would think/do.”)

Hey look, here’s that final “Dark Knight Rises” trailer that’s supposed to be stuck in front of “The Avengers” prints. Good news: Bane’s voice doesn’t suck now. Bad news: Batman’s still does.

Yup. That’s that movie alright. And a decidedly solid trailer to boot – definitely leaning hard on the “this is serious drama” button.

Are we finally going to see (competent) hand-to-hand fight scenes in a Nolan Batman movie? …probably not, but the trailer is kinda hinting at it at least. I DO really like that so much of this seems to take place in the daytime, it’s a nice switch – although… huh. Y’know, if the big setpiece action scene of this is also a big goodies vs. baddies brawl in the middle of New York  Gotham… that would really kind of suck for Nolan and company.

I won’t be running a full review of “The Avengers” until this Friday’s “Escape to The Movies,” but the review embargo seems to have dropped (it’s already opened for half the planet) so I’m happy to drop a few thoughts on the matter (after the jump) and offer that the already-posted full reviews from Drew McWeeney, Devin Faraci and (he’s back!) Neill Cumpston pretty-much sync up with my own. (note: some reviews and this post after the jump contain ellusions to events in the movie a MINOR spoiler of something that doesn’t seem to have ever been meant as a secret, i.e. the name of the alien bad guys, but if you insist on waiting until literally the first minute of the movie to hear it you’ve been warned.)

Short version: I don’t know that it’s the best movie about superheroes ever made, as “Spider-Man 2” “Dark Knight” and the ’78 “Superman” loom pretty large in that regard. But “The Avengers” it’s easily the best “Comic-Book Superhero Movie” ever made in terms of bringing the genre itself to the screen – undilluted, uncompromised and, finally, unashamed of itself.

Some other observations:

• This is The Marvel Universe, it’s world(s), it’s characters and it’s rules translated into a live-action feature film as faithfully as possible; and by that virtue fairly or not it will immediately become the superhero movie by which all others will be judged and, in the immediate, probably found wanting. The subsequent Marvel movies are going to have to work a lot harder than they had been before (excluding “Captain America”) to measure up to this, and I’d imagine that it will cause a lot hand-wringing for the producers of the too-far-along-to-rework “Man of Steel” and “Amazing Spider-Man;” and while the Nolan Batman movies are so much their own seperate thing form the rest of the genre (at this point it feels like even having the main character still BE Batman is a begrudging courtesy on the filmmaker’s part) for a comparison it’s hard to imagine “Dark Knight Rises” NOT being regarded as the runner-up in the innevitable punditry matchups.
• Worries about Iron Man dominating the movie? Shelve them. There’s a lot of Tony Stark in the movie (he is, after all, “the funny one” and good for exposition) but in terms of the action beats and screentime Iron Man is more of a combination comic-relief/deus-ex-machina figure: He’s there to deliver a quick-fix and land a punchline for the most part; with Thor as the serious one who keeps things on track, Hulk as the wildcard and Cap as the overall MVP.
• It’s kind of genius that Samuel L. Jackson’s role as Nick Fury mainly utilizes his gift for solemn, forboding delivery and straight-faced just-the-facts-isms, as opposed to the “angry, ever-shouting black police captain” cliche it could’ve easily been.
• If there’s one innevitable “down-side” to just how good “Avengers” is, it’s that it can easily be seen as the ultimate vindication of a “The Fanboys Were Right” outlook on such things – pretty much every risky/offbeat thing that makes the film work as well as it does, from the inter-film continuity to the source-faithful aesthetics to the hiring of Joss Whedon amounts to what comic fans have been clamoring for for decades. It’s going to be very hard for any adaptation of a “geek” property to jettison an awkward genre/continuity relic or rework a costume/design-element without getting a tidal-wave of “It worked fine for The Avengers!!!” in retort. In other words, we’ve probably heard the death-knell of “Nolanizing” genre-properties – for good or for ill.
• Mark Ruffalo is the best Bruce Banner since Bill Bixby, and this Hulk is the best Hulk period. I like the Edward Norton one and I still think Ang Lee’s oddball interpretation is criminally underrated; but this is the first time anyone has really pulled-off the idea that while being Bruce Banner is scary and sad… being The Hulk looks like fun. I do not envy the parents of small children the night after they see this movie.
• Jeremy Renner is VERY good as Hawkeye, but I still say they should’ve given him something more interesting to wear. He looks underdressed whenever he’s with the other Avengers, and frankly even his ridiculous “classic” purple gear is no sillier than some of the “why would he even HAVE THAT!?” trick-arrows he busts out. (Warner Bros. is either going to very happy or very sad about their in-production “Green Arrow” show after seeing this.)
• Chris Evans was very, very good as a more deeply-characterized version of Golden Age Captain America; but he’s phenomenal as a literal live-action translation of Silver Age “man out of time” Captain America. His one-line off-the-cuff appraisal of Thor and Loki is a perfect piece of writing from a character standpoint (though I think some folks will misinterpret it.)
• Speaking of perfect writing, the long-in-coming payoff to the lingering question of Bruce Banner’s “secret” to keeping The Hulk in check is one of the best pieces of Banner dialogue ever uttered in any version of The Hulk in any medium ever.
• I know Marvel is back and forth about what to do with The Hulk after this (is that TV show still happening?) but someone needs to sign Ruffalo for at least more in-universe cameos yesterday. The instant chemistry and snappy rapport he has with Robert Downey Jr. as Stark is the best surprise of the whole production.
• One of the great benefits to bringing the “rules” of comic book storytelling into the movies is that, as it turns out, the “shortcuts” carry over, too: The film’s brisk pace is aided by an almost gleeful pulling of the “A Wizard Did It” trigger; with what might otherwise have required tedious exposition often being handled in short conversations that boil down to: “Wait, plot-hole?” “Oh, handwave/phlebetonium/magic/cosmic, of course.”
• Loki is a great choice for an innaugural bad guy, especially because he’s still essentially the same “type” of bad guy from “Thor” – angry, crafty and more invested in manipulation and game-playing than big-scale supervillainy. This is necessary, since everybody knows that in superhero team-ups the good guys MUST be made to fight eachother in as many combinations as possible before they all fight the bad guys – otherwise how would we find out “who would win?”
• It is soooooooooooooo fucking refreshing to see a superhero movie where the characters joke around and the movie is allowed to be funny without it feeling like self-parody (the Schumacher Batmans) or obnoxious (what we’ve seen of the new Spidey’s cringeworthy comedy-routine.) For me, the first two Raimi “Spider-Man” movies were the gold-standard for “takes itself seriously but knows when to go for the laugh” superhero narrative, but this overall surpasses them in that department.
• One thing that DOESN’T happen that I was kind-of hoping MIGHT happen: Captain America being able to lift Mjolnir. Probably for the best – might’ve taken a bit too long to explain to people who skipped “Thor” why that’s a big deal, and as it is Cap already gets like four or five “Yeah, I’m the guy” moments.
• More than one person at Warner Bros. is taking a second look at the Joss Whedon “Wonder Woman” script they passed on a few years back right now.
• It’ll be really interesting to find out, when the dust settles, just what DID happen in the conception of the alien army that shows up for the big finale. In the film they’re called Chitauri (the “Ultimate” name for The Skrulls) but they don’t have Chitauri/Skrull shape-shifter powers and they don’t look like either creature or any other recognizable Marvel alien. Supposedly the shape-shifting was part of the leaked script that was around awhile back, and the Skrulls rumors were “fact” for awhile, so it almost feels like they went into shooting intending for these to be Skrulls  and then had to switch it around later on when the legal quagmire surrounding those characters proved untenable. Either way, all the “what are they?” silence has led a lot of people to assume their identity is some kid of important secret, when in reality we learn their names offhand within the first minutes of the film.
• This is probably the closest to recognizably human (as opposed to unbelievably-sexy-alien-unfamiliar-with-emotion) a performance as has ever been coaxed from Scarlett Johanssen. That’s not to say she’s ever been “bad” (far from it) but she finally appears to be from this plane of existance.
• “Iron Man 2” is probably still the least of the Marvel movies, but the payoffs in this film to some of the smaller character beats and worldbuilding it got into are good enough to make that film a whole “star” better.
• Traditional Marvel mid-credits surprise? Yup, and it provides the most definitive answer possible to “how the HELL do they plan to top THAT?”

It’s crummy.

Intermission: Not as crummy.

Incredible.

Deadline reports that megaproducer Joel Silver is out at Warners – he no longer has a production deal with the studio vis-a-vi his Silver Pictures and Dark Castle labels. This may not “read” as much if you don’t follow “the industry,” but on the inside rest assured this is major, epic, end-of-an-era, Fall Of A Titan stuff. Most modern-day producers are lucky to last more than a year in one deal; Silver had been at Warner Bros. since the early 1980s and was seen as “old school” even then: a hard-living, harder-partying, opulence-favoring eccentric infamous for harraunging his employees and his employers into risky gambles with big payoffs – so goes the legend, he gave The Wachowskis, then virtual-nobodies with one movie under their belt, damn near carte-blanche to make “The Matrix” based on little more than the (then) brothers introducing him to Anime and a promise that they could deliver that style in live-action.

If you came up watching action movies in the mid-80s/early-90s, Silver was responsible for a HUGE amount of what you likely absorbed: He backed the original runs of the “Lethal Weapon,” “Die Hard” and “Predator” series, plus one-off hits like “Commando,” “Demolition Man” and “The Last Boy Scout.”

Not everything he touched was gold, though, and his willingness to role the dice on oddball projects like “Hudson Hawk” and “Speed Racer” along with a legendary bluster made him plenty of detractors. Over the last decade he’d made most of his money in the realm of low-budget horror via the Dark Castle imprint, though he still found room to throw his clout behind hard-sells like “Kiss-Kiss Bang-Bang” and “Splice.” He also spent a decade trying to get a live-action “Wonder Woman” off the ground, only to lose the rights when Warners decided to take the various DC franchises back from individual producers a few years ago.

All told, Warners has probably been trying to find a way out of the partnership ever since “Speed Racer” bombed; but this is still pretty big stuff. Whatever he does next (another studio? independent production?) will be a major story whenever it breaks.

Via The AVClub
The big topic at CinemaCon – the combination Movie Theater trade-show / tech-demo / footag-showcase – this year was the debut of the 48fps digital projector technology for “The Hobbit.” Second biggest? Apparently theater chain owners are having a serious discussion about whether they should allow people to text during movies to increase ticket sales.

The obvious answer for any respectable person is NO; but that we’ve come to the point where this is even a serious question is telling about just how much closer we inch toward Idiocracy every day.

The population has become so obscenely bloated – in multiple senses of the term – that the stupid, ignorant and inconsiderate now have so much power as a “market demographic” that lowering the standards to entice them back into various establishments is seen as a necessary business decision.

I will GLADLY pay a higher ticket price to attend a theater that forcibly removes talkers, phone-users and other wastes of tissue from the building; and I know I’m not alone. If Michael Bay’s America wants to text during the movie, let them do it at home – and if the ticket prices have to rise and the Theatrical Experience has to become the province of elite cinephiles and hardcore film-geeks who don’t mind paying extra for the privilige… so be it. I’ve had enough.