Tag: Cinema

Let the devil wear black, for I’ll have a suit of sables.

In the trailer bin, the full-length preview for Tropic Thunder, with Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Steve Coogan, Nick Nolte, and, uh, Robert Downey Jr. in blackface. (Downey’s got a pretty high degree of difficulty here to not crash and burn, obviously, but my guess is he’ll probably be less off-putting than Fred Armisen’s cringeworthy Obama.) And, while it’s probably straight-to-video, I like the admittedly gimmicky premise: the trailer for Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Undead, i.e. Hamlet with vampires.

The Talented Mr. Minghella.

“He was a really beautiful man, a lot of fun to be with. He was a storyteller in a classic British David Lean tradition.” Anthony Minghella, 1954-2008. I can’t say I was a huge fan of his work, although I’ll stand by the first half of The Talented Mr. Ripley. Still, he aimed high, and had a keen eye for the haunting shot. Condolences to his friends and family.

Failing my Clinton Rorschach Test.

“I looked at the Rorschach blot. I tried to pretend it looked like a spreading tree, shadows pooled beneath it, but it didn’t. It looked more like a dead cat I once found, the fat, glistening grubs writhing blindly, squirming over each other, frantically tunneling away from the light. But even that is avoiding the real horror. The horror is this: In the end, it is simply a picture of empty meaningless blackness. We are alone. There is nothing else.” Ok, I’m not that ’round the bend. But I have to admit, when I saw this picture of Sen. Clinton on Drudge today, this immediately came to mind:




Oddly enough, the same exact thing happened a few weeks ago when this oft-used pic instantly reminded me of this.




Or is it just me?

As a disclaimer, unlike Republicans and denizens of Halloweenland — I’ll stand by that one — I’m not comparing Sen. Clinton to Linda Blair’s secret admirer or a psychotic, snazzily-dressed mass-murderer here. In fact, I think Drudge’s tendency to post unflattering pics of Hillary and Chelsea Clinton is often cruel, juvenile, and bordering on sexist (if not plunging right past that border.) So, this is not meant as a comment on Clinton per se, only on the implicit associations made by my impressionable fanboy subconscious, which would seem to trump slightly the findings of my Implicit Association Test. (And, in my defense, at least I wasn’t so irredeemably geeky as to come up with Tasha Yar.)

Banner Bulks. | Harry Splits.

Hulk smash? Or does Hulk whine for two hours about his condition like last time? The rather underwhelming teaser for Louis Leterrier’s The Incredible Hulk is now online. (I had hopes for Norton, but it looks like, if anyone saves this film from summer mediocrity, it’ll be Tim Roth.) Meanwhile, Harry’s seventh year at Hogwarts, Deathly Hallows, has been split into two films, both directed by Order‘s David Yates and coming out in 2010 and 2011 respectively. If it’s at all like the book, I guess there was just too much camping in the English countryside to fit in one film.

E, Racer head-to-head.

I missed these the other day, but via Bitten Tongue, two new international trailers for the Wachowskis’ Speed Racer are now online. You might want to stay away if you have any propensity for epileptic seizures. Also out today, the final trailer for Pixar’s WALL-E: Lonely boy-robot meets egg-shaped girl-robot, gets lost amid the stars. Pretty standard, really. Update: The full domestic trailer for Speed Racer is up, now with 95% more Susan Sarandon. (And, I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it before, but Matthew Fox as Racer-X is a stroke of genius.)

Shadows over Gotham.

“In a political context this would politely be called an ‘unintended consequence.’ (Gotham as Baghdad, anyone?) Mr. Nolan doesn’t deny the overtones. ‘As we looked through the comics, there was this fascinating idea that Batman’s presence in Gotham actually attracts criminals to Gotham, attracts lunacy,’ he said. ‘When you’re dealing with questionable notions like people taking the law into their own hands, you have to really ask, where does that lead? That’s what makes the character so dark, because he expresses a vengeful desire.‘” The NYT checks in with Chris Nolan on The Dark Knight.

Rewriting the Legend.

As y’all might remember, I quite liked I am Legend last year, despite the fact that it pretty much falls apart in the last half-hour or so. (It still made #18 on the 2007 list.) Well, fwiw, the original ending to the film is now online, and it’s definitely more Matheson-esque (and sidesteps the goofy New England Utopia at the end, although I guess it is still implied.) Worth a look, if you saw I am Legend in the theater.

This aggression will not stand, Stark.

Robert Downey, Jr. suits up to face Obadiah Stane (a.k.a. the Bald Lebowski) in a spiffy all-new trailer for Jon Favreau’s Iron Man. As with the two previous teasers, this looks surprisingly enjoyable, and may hopefully end up being Marvel’s best product since Spiderman 2 and X2.