Blockbuster Buzz - Times Online - WBLG

Films you'll never see: RoboGeisha

I offer this movie trailer for your delectation not because you might want to see the movie, but because it is hands down the strangest assemblage of scenes you're likely to see all day

It's a little extreme for some working environments, without being post-watershed rude. Watch with caution though, and look out for the fried prawn.

Public Enemies: Exclusive featurette

A more than averagely interesting look at the production design behind the Jonny Depp / Christian Bale 'charisma-off' showing some of the original locations and newsreels which helped create that authentic look:

Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs - The Buzz review

I don’t expect that many Buzz regulars will have Ice Age 3 on their ‘must see’ list. Some of you, however, will be responsible parents, uncles or aunts and hoping for something, anything to do in an air-conditioned environment that will keep your younger relatives out of the fierce British sun.

 The third Ice Age movie, with the promise of endless vistas of computer-rendered glacier, might seem to be just the ticket.

Well, it very nearly is. There’s actually very little of the promised snow and ice, as most of the action takes place in a subterranean ‘Lost World’ that is home to a somewhat anachronistic population of dinosaurs in a way that will infuriate those of you with a background in paleontology

For inoffensive laughs, though, it’s pretty reliable. There are none of those clunky pop-cult references that filmmakers sometimes feel obliged to shoehorn into kiddie-flicks and the one gay joke is sufficiently throwaway that you won’t lose valuable Blackberry time on the way home explaining it to a puzzled 6-year-old.

The star of the show is Simon Pegg, as new character Buck. He’s a rodent Captain Ahab duelling interminably with a great white T-Rex in the surprisingly large microclimate beneath the ice. All of the favourites from the original movies are there too, with enhanced CGI and 3D technology conspiring to make the cinema feel at times like some strange extraterrestrial zoo.

The level of perceived threat is judged about right in the action scenes too: I can recall a few similar movies I’ve seen recently (Bolt comes immediately to mind) that reduced a number of smaller audience members to tears. Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs is bland enough to keep the little ones happy all the way through without being so dull as to leave chaperones in danger of falling asleep.

On the scale of CGI kids movies, with Hoodwinked at the bottom of the graph and The Incredibles breaking through the top of the chart, Ice Age 3 is a solid 5 or 6.

It won’t be the most exciting movie you see this summer, but it’s a pretty agreeable way to spend an hour and a half. And at least you’ll be in the cool of the cinema for a while.

Flopbusters: 10 Blockbusters that defied the critics

Den Of Geek is running a rather pleasing list of movies that, despite savage reviews, made substantial reciepts at the box office.

Transformers 2, which you may recall I thought was noisy and silly but essentially good fun, shows up around half-way down the list. It's a roll-call of sequels and adaptations of hit book, game and TV properties that were so hotly anticipated by fans that the critics were just ignored.

It's a fun read. Why not take a look?

Public Enemies: The Buzz Review

I blame myself. I think I expected too much: Pumped up by the comic book delirium of The Dark Knight and mindful of Johnny Depp’s undeniable charisma I had convinced myself that Public Enemies, the period gangster flick that pairs Depp with Christian Bale would be a great movie. It isn’t. It’s just a very good movie.

EE Smith's classic Lensman series headed for the big screen

Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d write: The movie adaptation of EE Doc Smith’s classic Lensman series is moving ahead,

I can’t be objective about this one: As a teenager I was addicted to Smith’s technologically dated, but narratively gripping space opera cycle.

It tells the tale of two great civilisations, The Arisians and the Eddorians. Impossibly ancient races, they fight at arms length by manipulating lesser beings. Like, for example,  humanity.

Our view of the battle is through the eyes of various members of the Kinnison dynasty, most notably space cop Kimball Kinnison, the Grey Lensman. The lens is a quasi-sentient doohickey analogous to (and a great influence upon) the ring of the Green Lantern comics. It confers telepathy and a few other handy powers on the wearer and Kinnison uses these powers to fight his way up through the hierarchy of the Boskonian pirates, puppets of the evil Eddorians.

With no computers, some slightly outmoded astronomy and a very 1940s approach to sexual politics the books must be read with a careful awareness of period but Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski has brought the hugely ambitious saga up to date in a finished screenplay that’s now doing the rounds. Director Ron Howard is reportedly expressing an interest.

Here’s Straczynski  giving a flavour of the thing from the Babylon 5 podcast.

"You've got these two fleets battling it out, you've seen it a hundred times before. But now, within that massive fleet battle you have two ships locked on with gravity (lances?) firing at each other, they're linked together like scorpions in a bottle tied with a string, by the gravity beams. Inside that, you have the crew of one ship in EVA suits with armor coming out to try and board the other ship. They send their people out to stop them, so we have hand-to-hand combat.” In Smith’s books warriors use very vicious weapons called “space-axes” in hand to hand combat. Imagine armored attackers flinging themselves into cold of space ready to rip each other to shreds"

The title, and a few key concepts, were used in a 1984 animated feature from Japan, but the huge scope of the novels has defied any serious attempt at a cinema treatment until now.

Even if the project doesn’t get derailed along the way, we are probably two or even three years away from seeing Kinnison and his Lensman allies (who look respectively like a crocodile, a multi-limbed oil drum and a peculiar multi-dimensional something that no-one can describe) on the big screen.

2010 and 2011 already have some pretty exciting movie properties to offer, but a successful Lensman adaptation, some 60 years after the books were first published, would be the most thrilling thing of all.

(via CinemaBlend)

Christian Bale to kill Batman AND Terminator?

Most Batman fans would probably tell you that Christian Bale is the best on-screen Batman we’ve ever had. Followers of the Terminator series may not quite be unanimous as to whether Bale is the perfect John Connor but there’s still a groundswell of opinion that he pulled off the role of the emotionally cauterised robot-killer pretty well too.

Now, though, the British-born actor is talking about walking away from both of the multi-million dollar franchises.

VIDEO: Guillermo del Toro talks 'Hobbit' schedule

The Hellboy director tells of a year-long shoot yielding a two-part movie epic.There's also the powerful implication that if anyone should direct Monsters Inc. 2, it should be Guillermo. And boy, does he like New Zealand!?

Will Avatar be the biggest movie ever?

I think we all now accept that James Cameron's sci-fi epic Avatar will dominate the box office over Christmas. Due for release on December 18, it's already recieving excited notices from lucky journalists and bloggers who were invited to a 24-minute footage screening earlier this week.

As a mysterious character known only as 'The Insider' puts it on Coming Soon:

"It's the third scene where my heart begins to pound like crazy. Jake and Norm will inhabit their Avatar for the first time. They enter some sort of capsule and - flash – their mind enters the blue creatures, now lying on hospital tables. And not before long Avatar Jake wakes up. And it took my breath away. I thought--just like you guys--that I've seen it all with Gollum, or The Hulk, but Cameron has done it again. These creatures seem so real, that within minutes you forget you're watching an enormous and very blue CGI character. Even the eyes are totally convincing. The characters have real personalities and a soul"

Cameron's last movie, Titanic, was the smash hit of 1997 and since then he has confined himself to documentaries about exporing the ocean depths and developing new 3D filming techniques.

Avatar is sure to thrill sci-fi fanatics, many of whom already revere Cameron for his two massively influential Terminator movies and the action-packed Alien sequel.  Titanic was stylistically something of a departure for Cameron, but won him a colossal new audience who will almost certainly be tempted to give Avatar a look.

With its current release date so late in the year, there just won't be time for Avatar to reach its full potential audience before 2009 is over but it stands a fair chance of being the first, and quite possibly biggest hit of 2010. Beyond that, who knows? As long as there are enough 3D-capable cinemas for people to see the film in its full glory Avatar might just break Titanic's $600,000,00 US box office record

(pic from Latino Review)

The Last Airbender: Teaser trailer

M.Night Shyamalan takes a holiday from the world of world of implausible twist endings ( we hope)for this impressive-looking martial arts fantasy: