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Grand Designs: The Iron Man edition

Risky rumours, true lies

Reporting the latest news about upcoming movies can be a risky business: Plots, titles and cast lists seem to change almost at random even when the film is apparently in the can.

The thinking man's (or woman's) Sci-Fi blog i09 has rounded up some of the wilder reports that have been bandied about the Internet in recent years and displayed them here for your amusement.

As well as some Star Wars and Star Trek gems, there's this revelation that, once heard, is impossible to forget:

In the new Doctor Who series, the Daleks will have legs, to help them get around better. The legs may look like R2D2s, or they may be nice "Hobbit-like tootsies."

Daleks on little Hobbit feet. You can just see it, can't you?

When You Are Ready To Have A Serious Conversation About Green Lantern, You Have My E-Mail Address

When you've finished reading my fanboy speculation about a forthcoming Green Lantern movie, read this hilariously note-perfect parody of fanboy speculation about a forthcoming Green Lantern movie:

"In particular, I am baffled by your insistence that being "more powerful" makes Kyle a better Lantern. Are superheroes always superior when they're invincible? If Superman was better when he was able to move entire solar systems, why, then, was John Byrne enlisted to reinvent him as a more vulnerable character who can get injured by his foes and even killed? Because to hear you tell it, Douglas, Superman was "ruined" by the '80s revamp, long before the ridiculous electrical version"

The full article is over at The Onion, and should elicit a chuckle of recognition from any reader who's spent a little too much time in Forbidden Planet.

Star Trek? Star Wars? Batman?

Picture the kind of person who spends too much time on the internet and chances are he (it's probably a he) is wearing a Star Trek T-shirt. He's the kind of person, indeed, who might be interested in the new loving re-creation of the original Star Trek series coming soon as a feature film from Paramount starring British actor Simon Pegg as Scotty. In a recent interview though Pegg paid tribute to the team behind Star Trek: Phase II, an entire series of pitch-perfect “original series” episodes that never were, often made using revered Trek writers such as D.C. Fontana, and in some cases members of the original crew (with various complex time-travel shenanigans concocted to explain their aged appearance). Watch To Serve Them All My Days here to see what I mean. Chances are the chap in the T-shirt already has.

The world of Fan Films isn't all CGI and replica costumes though. Sometimes it's cardboard boxes and KFC bucket helmets. As part of the fan response to Michel Gondry's madcap video shop comedy Be Kind, Rewind there has been a rash of “sweded” trailers for popular movies aping the ramshackle attempts to recreate video blockbusters of Be Kind, Rewind's protagonists. The Star Wars trailer here couldn't contrast more with the first video. If the first offering was sci-fi's answer to the Sealed Knot Society, the makers of A Cardboard Hope are closer in spirit to a scuffle in a pub car park.

The absolute master of the fan film though is Sandy Collora. His painstakingly accurate low-budget superhero movies are the stuff of legend. Batman: Dead End is probably his masterpiece, pitting the Caped Crusader against some distinctly unearthly foes that movie fans will find surprisingly familiar. If you can't wait for 2008's hottest blockbusters to be released, take a look online, where teams of devoted fans are busy creating the next best thing.

(from The Times' Webwatcher column)

Blogging This Side of the Truth

This Side of the Truth is the latest project from tireless comic Ricky Gervais. WIth an all-star cast involving (so far) Jennifer Garner, Christopher Guest, Rob Lowe and Jeffrey Tambor it's a comedy about a parallel world where lying is unheard of. As Variety has it:

The comedy takes place in a world where everybody tells the truth. Gervais plays a storyteller whose job is to ramble on about the 1300s. Faced with losing his job because his terrain is a boring period in history once he gets beyond the Black Death, he invents lying as a way to save himself. Lowe will play his arch nemesis.

Keep up to date with future developments on this frankly peculiar sounding movie by checking in on Ricky's  blog - or of course subscribing to the Blockbuster Buzz RSS feed.

Doomsday: First (and only?) review

I've been telling you for weeks now how immensely silly and entertaining I thought Neil Marshall's new movie Doomsday was going to be.

Somehow though, the exclusive first review of this Blockbuster Buzz favourite has gone to Movie Moron.

And they don't even seem to like it much:

The director has an obvious fondness for the horror genre, and he shows here that he is a more than capable director with some very neat visual flourishes, the only trouble being that when all the clever nods to genre staples are over, there’s nothing left but poorly delivered lines and the kind of performances you’d expect from a Uwe Boll film.

Uwe Boll? That's harsh.

Click through for the full review, which contains at least one good-sized spoiler.

Dark Knight: To the Dentmobile!

The Dentmobile is not, as you might have imagined, the dilapidated jalopy that transports impecunious journalists to movie screenings. It's part of the imaginary campaign to make Harvey Dent District Attorney of Gotham City which is currently forming the main thrust of Warners' marketing build towards the release of the next Batman movie Dark Knight. 

If you log in to Harvey's 'campaign site' you can submit video messages of support for the clean-cut young litigator who will eventually be transformed into Batman villain Two-face.

Aaron Eckhart, who plays Dent in the film, has said that he played all his scenes in Dark Knight twice - once as calm, rational Harvey Dent and once as the manic inner personality that manifests itself after the courtroom acid attack that 'kills' Harvey and gives birth to Two-face.

It's an interesting approach and one which the few commentators who have seen the footage describe as powerfully unsettling to watch. Add in the mixed emotions most viewers will feel at seeing Heath Ledger's Joker on screen and you have the makings of one of the strangest, most memorable, comic book adaptations ever.

What If: Tim Burton had directed 'Superman Returns'?

Part of the long, tortuous history of the reborn Superman franchise was a brief period in the late 90s when both celebrity comics nerd Nic Cage and Batman director Tim Burton were attached to the project.

Now, nearly a decade later, Burton's concept art for the movie has surfaced on the Web. It's a 'darker' more edgy Superman, as one might expect from Burton. Braniac in particular has something of the Nightmare Before Christmas about him and there are distinct references to the apocalyptic Kingdom Come comics series.

Go to Bam! Kapow! to see the whole gallery.

Who do you trust?

As part of the marketing hullaballoo for their Invasion of the Body Snatchers style 'Who do you trust?' comics series, Marvel have dropped this piece of viral video silliness onto the Internet in the hope that impressionable bloggers will post it and drum up some interest for them.

They must think I'm such a fool. After the near-interminable Civil War series I'm not going to get sucked into another one of those things. Not even if it has a Blair Witch flavoured video to lure me in. Anyway, here it is...

The Friday time-waster

I got my name in lights with notcelebrity.co.uk

Your name in lights is one of those things that serves no purpose, and is destined to be emailed across the globe this lunchtime. It may be the closest any of us get to having our names up there on the cinema marquee, so enjoy it now before everyone gets tired of it!

Something wonderful: Time Travel emporium

Not quite a blockbuster movie story, but if you're interested in superheroes, pirates, evil robots or (especially) time travel you'll love this article from the hipster's sci fi blog of choice, io9, about a new store in Los Angeles that caters to the small but lucrative Terminator/Bill & Ted/HG Wells demographic.

Watchmen: The Black Freighter sets sail

The Dark Knight has its anime-style companion Gotham Knight, and now Watchmen gets an animated satellite in the form of a Black Freighter anime, narrated by 300 star Gerard Butler, that's set to appear on the DVD (or Blu-Ray) release.

Take a look at the full story over at Empire Online. I don't know....this movie isn't out for another year and I already want to buy the DVD.

Semi-Pro: The Times Review

Kevin Maher reviews Will Ferrell's latest comedy over on the main Times Online site and gives it 3 stars.

The great thing about Will Ferrell is he knows we liked Anchorman and so he keeps making it. Semi Pro has the same nostalgic setting, the same lovably pompous hero with no self-awareness, and the same cavalcade of slapstick chuckles.

In Kevin's words: Moon is such a huge character, and so monumentally played by Ferrell, that he transforms the film into a haphazard series of Moon-centred vignettes loosely hung around the sports-movie format. Witness his breezy entrance into a grim Michigan nightclub, sliding into the DJ booth, slapping his single down on the turntable and announcing, without irony, to the expectant crowd, “You're a sexy town, Flint!” Or his full-body tantrum at a boardroom meeting where he takes zany Jerry Lewis physicality to its limits. There's even an ingenious Russian roulette sequence that's deftly played for laughs at an after-hours poker game.

You've sold it to me!
 

Doomsday: Flatpack Apocalypse

We all accept that Doomsday looks like a Frankenstein's monster of other movies stitched together, but we don't go to the cinema to learn stuff. We go to the cinema to see stuff blow up. And eat popcorn.

Besides, there's a whole generation of moviegoers alive today who weren't even born when Mad Max II came out. That's why Doomsday looks like being one of the action movie treats of 2008. If you still need convincing, Cinema Blend has a huge gallery of stills to tempt you (look at this one if you're not sure why I keep talking about Mad Max) and the official Doomsday site has a new shooting game that requires you to download an annoying plug in that your IT Department probably won't let you have, and doesn't work on Intel Macs anyway.

Don't get me wrong, I am totally stoked about this movie.

Danger Room: How to stop a 500 foot monster

As much as I enjoyed Cloverfield, I couldn't help thinking that the final solution to the Clovis problem looked a little bit like overkill and that the stick of bombs from the B-2 Spirit should have done the trick, even if the tanks had struck out.

That was before I read this superb post on the always diverting Danger Room weapons tech blog.The writer, David Hambling, makes some assumptions about the kind of extraterrestrial/subaquatic menace likely to terrorise New York (it's always New York) and comes to the conclusion that the correct solution is one the movie makers don't seem to have tried yet.

I suspect that the best bet would be a weapon capable of producing a large explosion inside the beast – a bunker-busting bomb like the BLU-122 used in the Divine Thunderbolt test or the even bigger Massive Ordnance Penetrator, which is still in the pipeline. This has the added advantage that it keep collateral damage in the neighborhood to a minimum as most of the destruction should be internal. Whether they could hit a moving target is, however, another matter.

In the same vein this, from Crunkfish is pretty droll too. I don't think it's a real NSA leak though.

Awesomely sweet visualisation of Box Office receipts

This very very pretty infographic from The New York Times shows total US ticket sales by date, with significant movies flagged up by little bullet points.

The elegant search engine lets you identify the release date of any movie you care to name, although be warned: because it displays cumulative box office the graph can occasionally be rather deceptive, with Adam Sandler's Big Daddy, for example, showing as a bigger peak than The Phantom Menace.

10 wonderful sci-fi films you'll never see

Everybody likes a good list. This, from Pointless Waste of Time, is a great list. A rundown of some of the great sci-fi films that were never made. It starts with for me the most tempting one, a 'good' Alien 3. You may disagree with some of the author's opinions. You may even take exception to some of the rather forthright language, but it's a great list. And everybody likes a good list.

Indiana Jones Lego game online

If you're the kind of employee who likes to waste their time with silly Flash games when you should be working, you might care for this diverting piece of marketing piffle from those generous people at Lego. It's an advert for the spiffy new range of Lego sets due for release this Summer to tie in with Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

It's momentously silly, but it's free. What are you going to do instead while you're waiting for the movie to come out? Work?

The Top 22 special effects movies: Star Wars not quite as unrealistic as you think

Over at i09 this morning there's a diverting rundown of 22 popular movies ordered by the amount of special effects shots used. They note that both Peter Jackson's recent King Kong remake and the comically brilliant disaster epic Independence Day both improve (if that's the word) on the most effect-heavy installment in the Star Wars series - Revenge of the Sith.

More surprising to me was the comparatively poor showing for one of my own guilty pleasures, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, which I would have imagined to have been all FX.

If you're in the mood for reading something longer and more involved about the current state of the art in CGI Timothy Sexton over at Associated Content takes a long look at modern effects technology and argues, very persuasively, that the reason that most modern CGI shots are hard to watch is that they are just too easy to create.

Hellboy II: More details emerge

Superhero Hype has a great rundown of the new characters to expect in Hellboy II: The Golden Army. Chief among them is Johann Kraus, an ectoplasmic being who isn't particularly eye-catching in the original Dark Horse comic -  resembling as he does a somewhat malnourished member of The Residents. The movie's designers, though, have given him a magnificently retro steampunk diving suit that makes the heart ache all the more for the missed opportunities of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

There's also an interview with director Guillermo del Toro and a few behind-the scenes photos for Hellboy fans who really can't wait until July

Movie Monsters: Size matters

The fine people over at hip sci-fi blog io9 are as aware as any Internet professional that people like to read Top 10 Lists online. So they're running the best one ever: The Top 9 movie monsters, arranged in order of height. Clovis, the Cloverfield beastie, only makes it to mid-table and there's no mention of Buzzy, our fire-breathing cyborg dinosaur mascot, but it's still a very fine list indeed.

Nolan's heartfelt tribute to Heath Ledger

Newsweek this morning carries an article by Dark Knight director Chris Nolan. It's a heartfelt tribute to Heath Ledger, full of small, telling details about the star's dedication, talent, and innate human decency. It's going to be hard to root for the chap in the cape knowing that The Joker was such a nice guy

Michael Moran

Michel Gondry gives JJ Abrams a run for his money

Michel Gondry, hyper-surrealist pop video auteur turned offbeat movie director, has created the strangest, most unpredictable and downright Swedish viral publicity campaign you're ever likely to see for Be Kind, Rewind. Hip sci-fi blog i09 has the clip, but is no closer to successfully explaining it than we are.

Michael Moran

Star Trek: What is that NCC1701 site all about?

It wouldn’t be a JJ Abrams production without some sort of web-savvy viral weirdness. In the case of Star Trek it’s NCC 1701, which nerds will instantly recognise as the registration of the original starship Enterprise and über-nerds will instantly recognise as the numberplate of George Takei’s limo when he plays Hiro’s dad in Heroes. Just connecting to the NCC1701 site isn’t too rewarding an experience though, it just offers some flickering static until you enter these codes which we found on the blog of ace movie nerd Gelu.

If you like welding, you 'll love the secret images that are revealed.

Michael Moran

Trailers from Hell

Trailers are so much better than films. They’re shorter for one thing, so you can watch more of them in one go, and they have all the best bits of the film in. They’re the fun-sized Mars bars of the movie world. You can always find new trailers on the Apple site, on Yahoo, or (as you’ll soon discover) here. Revel, though, in the forgotten gems collected at Trailers from Hell.

Michael Moran