Odds & Ends
Monday, June 30, 2008
Quantum of Solace Trailer
Here's the new trailer for Quantum of Solace (aka the Bond movie with the title that makes everyone snicker but which has actually kind of grown on me). High definition version, which as always is worth it if you can, here. I've said way to much about Bond over the years for it to be worth any detailed comment, but it is kind of cool. I love that finally we have some linkage between the films, in a way we haven't had since the sixties. This looks like it could be the Bond revenge story that should have, but didn't, follow the best Bond movie of all, On Her Majesties Secret Service. You also have to love that Bourne-ish shot following the motorcycle jump. Also - the first review I've seen anywhere of Baz Luhrmann's Australia, is here, from some random mallgoer in America. As such, the word "review" is used loosely but it's interesting to see such an early word on a film about which I am now increasingly curious - no matter who the source. Tha trailer for that one is here. Labels: australia, bond, rumours, trailers Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 30.6.08 - 0 comments  
Saturday, June 07, 2008
Because We All Remember How the Last Movie I Posted the Trailer For Turned Out
Baz Luhrmann's Australia hadn't really been on my radar, despite its profile. I think it was partly the stink of self-indulgence that hung over the project, as well as my increasing reservations about Lurhmann's style. I enjoyed Strictly Ballroom without loving it, and Romeo + Juliet really impressed me, but by the time of Moulin Rouge I thought Luhrmann's self-conscious technique had become a liability. However, the appearance of the first trailer on the internet has put this right at the top of my list. Luhrmann - as best as we can tell - appears to have limited his stylised approach to the framing story and gone for a more old-school epic style of shooting for the rest of the film. I realise a trailer can make anything look good, but damn: this movie looks absolutely gorgeous. We never really have had a really good Australian western, despite a few attempts and the fact that the genre is so suited to being trasnposed here (it isn't cool to say this, but Man From Snowy River probably got closest). Luhrmann just might have cracked it. For the full, high-def experience (very much the preferred option) click here, but if you can't do that, a YouTube version is below. Labels: australia, commentary, luhrmann, trailers Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 7.6.08 - 3 comments
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
The Other Jones
Because obviously I'm now officially part of the hype machine, here is the new trailer for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. {placeholder text - if you can see this, ignore it!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!! !!!!!! !!!!!!!! !!!!!!! !!!!!!!! !!!!!!! !!!! !!!! !!!!!! !!!!!! !!!!!! !!!!!! !!!!!! !!!!!!! I'm psyched, even if the trailer looks disturbingly CGI-ish. Updated: ... and here's the almost identical third trailer. Labels: indiana jones, spielberg, trailers Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 7.5.08 - 0 comments
Iron Man 2: Early Review
I saw Iron Man the other day. I enjoyed it, but don't have enough to say about it to warrant a full review. Suffice to say it reminded me a lot of the first Spider-man film; well-written, with good characters and performances and a healthy sense of conviction in the exercise by all involved, but at the same time lacking the really big show-stopping scenes that would have made it more memorable (the climax is really just two guys in metal suits punching each other.) It made me think of these comments by Paul Rameker in an article I've linked to before, over at David Bordwell's page:
I would second all that and also add that these days, the sequel will get more money spent on it than the original; this and the more straightforward stories allowed once the "origin" story is out of the way means the second film in a series can usually be more action-focused. (Yes, this is a good thing.) The old idea that sequels gradually fade away in terms of quality should be considered completely dead, at least as far as first sequels go; third films in series remain much dodgier propositions. Another example: the Bourne series, which - whatever you think of it's hyperkinetic style - really only emerged as the default reference points for action filmmaking when the sequels appeared. Thus I'm excited about Iron Man 2 (Iron Men?), assuming the first film does well enough to warrant a sequel, and that they can keep Robert Downey Jr interested and out of jail. I fully expect to better than Iron Man, just as I'm looking forward to The Dark Knight (despite not being amongst those who consider Batman Begins a gold standard for comic book blockbusters) and Quantum of Solace (which is very much a first sequel in the reborn Bond series that began with Casino Royale). Speaking of which, here's the new trailer for The Dark Knight, featuring lots of the late Heath Ledger. His performance looks incredible, and surely show-offy enough to get a posthumous supporting actor Oscar. Labels: batman, bordwell, commentary, sequels, snobbery, superheroes, trailers Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 7.5.08 - 2 comments
Friday, March 14, 2008
Round-Up of the Frivolous Things
The site has had, until yesterday, another quiet few weeks, what with one thing another. Whenever I go through one of these periods where I don't have time to get something substantial up (or where, as was the was the case over the last week or so, I'm labouring over something that starts as a short post and ends as a great big one) the temptation is always to keep the page ticking over by posting the various silly things and rumours on this page. But then I get self-conscious about how lightweight some of this stuff is. After I've just published a "proper" article or post, though, I've got no such qualms. So on the coat-tails of my piece on Film Theory, it's time to catch up on the frivolous stuff from the internet. Bees! Bees! Millions of Bees! This one came from Jaime J. Weinman's Something Old, Nothing New, where Weinman was taking about Irwin Allen's The Swarm. A very dumb clip, but it gets me every time: as a commenter over at Weinman's blog put it, the way the guys says "Millions of bees!" makes it sound like he's selling them, not getting killed by them. Bosko Says What? Everyone loves it when a cartoon character swears. Via Cartoon Brew. Clampett Update There's been some good stuff on the internet about Bob Clampett over the last few eeeks: this post by Kristin Thompson looks at some freeze frames from his work and Michael Barrier talks about the cult of Clampett. The latter follows a debate that had played out following Barrier's earlier comments about the merits of Clampett's Buckaroo Bugs; you can follow that earlier debate through links from the more recent piece. If you're not that familiar with Clampett, I would humbly point you towards my earlier essay on him, which was intended as introduction for the uninitiated.  Wall-E.T. The main trailer for Pixar's Wall-E is out. YouTube below, but the much nicer HD version is here. People are really flipping out over this movie. I don't know - I don't find the trailer as completely convincing as others do, and Pixar have lost that aura of invincibility. But here's hoping. Speed Racer Trailer Now here's one that redefines the term "garish." YouTube below but this one you really need to see in HD (here). Who knows what to make of this. It kind of looks hideous and badly shot, but then I've commented just recently on what good action directors the Wachowskis are. Harry Potter and the Multiple Films And apparently Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is to be two movies. Given the really good bits of the last book are in the second half (see here for my comments when the book came out) this strikes me as unwise. Perhaps they can give the first half of the book, where the kinds are wandering the country, an epic Lord of the Rings-ish scope. But I think they risk getting a real dud out of this. Labels: animation, bordwell, clampett, harry potter, humour, pixar, rumours, trailers Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 14.3.08 - 0 comments
Friday, February 15, 2008
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Quicktime Trailer
How very, very strange is it to actually see new Indiana Jones footage? But here it is, in the new Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull trailer. High quality download links (which gave Quicktime error messages for me - hopefully you have more luck) here, or YouTube below. A couple of the effects look overly computerised (that ravine-side car chase looks like the awful brontosaurus chase in King Kong, and some of the temple stuff looks like it belongs in one of the Stephen Sommers Mummy movies). But I really like the feel of the warehouse stuff: it has a good, classic Indiana Jones-ish feel to it. Incidentally, this film isn't far away: it comes out in May. So this is a pretty late teaser trailer. By comparison, The J.J. Abrams Star Trek re-launch has been pushed back to May 2009, but already has a trailer. Paramount and Lucasfilm really seem to be soft-pedalling Indiana Jones so far; it really seems that the bitter lessons of the overhyping of The Phantom Menace back in 1999 really struck with Lucas. For an interesting comparison, if you got the Yahoo movies link (the first link in this post) you can also see the trailers for the original three Indiana Jones films. Labels: indiana jones, spielberg, star trek, trailers Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 15.2.08 - 0 comments
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Franchising
This year is shaping up as a particularly big year for what you might call the "mega-franchises": the really big, big franchises that are particularly prestigious and long-running: there are new installments scheduled in the Batman, Indiana Jones, Star Trek and James Bond series. The last few days have seen interesting developments on all of these properties, so I thought I'd do a quick run down on all of them. The Dark Knight Heath Ledger's tragic death death was immensely sad, obviously on its own terms but also for film fans: to take just a single example, Brokeback Mountain is one of the best films I've seen in recent years, and Ledger was vital to that success. But nerds (not to mention Hollywood execs) are a ruthless bunch, and the attention of the online film sites very quickly turned to what this meant for the latest Batman movie, The Dark Knight. (The Digital Bits also had a thought for Terry Gilliam, who was making The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus with Ledger: "Man, Terry Gilliam just can't catch a break.") The answer is it won't appreciably affect the movie: Ledger's role was complete. But it creates some trickiness in the marketing. In one sense, its a plus... there was already a lot of buzz about Ledger's performance, and if it is indeed a good one, the fact that they are releasing it posthumously just makes it more iconic. I don't think the trailer we've seen so far will be seen as in poor taste; it shows the Joker but it doesn't seem "wrong" in any way. If you haven't seen it already, it's in YouTube form below (and in much better quality here). But as some have noted, it's going to seem in poor taste if we start having Ledger's face grinning down from bus stops. My hunch is that the solution will be to run with the more oblique approach of the early posters, which still highlight the Joker (the film's main drawcard, after all) but don't hit us over the head with Ledger's presence.   Indiana Jones The trailer's coming on the 15th of February, and Ain't It Cool have a totally unverified but fairly convincing description of it here. Spoiler alerts apply. I'm excited about this... but I don't know. The pulp science fiction elements (to put it delicately for the spoiler shy) of the plot sort of make sense given the 50s setting, but still don't feel right for Indiana Jones. But we'll see. Star Trek Here's the trailer for the re-launched Star Trek: (Clearer and in the correct proportions here). For those who haven't been following this, this is a re-launch by J.J. Abrams that gives us young Kirk and Spock - hence the Enterprise being built in the trailer (why are they building it on Earth, not in orbit?). I could be wrong, but that doesn't quite look like the original series' version of the ship in the trailer; perhaps the venerable design has again been given a subtle reworking? (The lines generally seem a little closer to the first re-jigged version from the movies, but then the warp nacelles look like more like the TV series version). James Bond The new Bond film has been confirmed to be called Quantum of Solace. Along with Risico and The Property of a Lady (both popular rumoured titles for the new movie) it's one of the few unused Fleming titles left. You can see why they kept away from it - you don;t want a three word title where many people will struggle with two of the words - but it has grown on me and certainly seems thematically apt given it will apparently centre on the fall out from the events of the last film. (Semi-serialized Bond films, just like the 60s. Awesome). The reaction to it has generally been pretty ignorant, largely ignoring the fact that the title has its roots in Fleming and misrepresenting the generally positive fan reaction. For a spirited defense of the title, see CommanderBond.Net here. Here's the official plot summary, also courtesy CommanderBond.Net: QUANTUM OF SOLACE continues the high octane adventures of James Bond (DANIEL CRAIG) in CASINO ROYALE. Sounds good to me. Labels: batman, indiana jones, rumours, spielberg, star trek, superheroes, trailers Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 26.1.08 - 0 comments
Sunday, August 26, 2007
The Beowulf Express
A new trailer / preview reel for Robert Zemeckis' Beowulf has hit the net. The best version is here, but there's a YouTube version below in case that's too much of a download. Unfortunately, though, the trailer is sufficiently dark and choppy that it looks pretty awful when it's been Youtube-ised. I'll skip my standard spiel on the uncanny valley (see here for some of my earlier comments). What this Beowulf trailer made me think about is how conflicted I am about the potential of these sort of highly digitised movies. By that I mean movies where most or all of the environments are either computer generated sets, or highly manipulated with computers, whether these use human actors (as in Sin City) or live-action-like motion-capped animation (a la Polar Express or Beowulf). The divide between the animated and non-animated films in this genre seems to be largely trivial now: because these projects use animation that is motion-capped off real performers, and which aspires to photorealism, in an aesthetic sense they are essentially the same thing. (True animated films, like those made by Pixar, are a different beast again.) The films I'm thinking of are distinguished instead by their aspirations to harness realistic-looking performers to highly artificial environments. There are a whole lot of techno-geek directors who seem to have decided this is the way of the future: Zemeckis is one, but there's also James Cameron (with his uber-sci fi project Avatar), Robert Rodriguez (Sin City), George Lucas (given how far the new Star Wars films went down this road), and Peter Jackson & Steven Spielberg (with their upcoming Tintin movies, which I talked about here). As I said, I have mixed feelings about this. Looking at this Beowulf footage, and discounting the pointless pseudo-animation on the humans, you can see that there is enormous potential in this technology: it frees filmmaker form all sorts of logistical and technical shackles that go with traditional techniques. And we saw in Sin City that you could get a really distinctive look in this way. Yet so far for the most part what we are seeing is the aesthetics of computer games transferred to the cinema. The elimination (or minimisation) of sets means that we get the free-floating camera familiar to gamers. The fact that it's all put together in the computer, rather than having to work around the realities of celluloid and lenses and light, gives us the same cinematographic tics you get in games (bleach-bypassed looks like in 300, or other highly synthetic visual schemes). The bad animation in the Zemeckis films is reminiscent of game cutscenes. And when you add in all the other cliches of computer-effects (massive battle sequences, swarms of objects or creatures), you start to get a series of fairly indistinguishable looking films. I'm not such a luddite that I think the emergence of computer game aesthetics in cinema is an inherently bad thing. But what we're seeing at the moment is the influence of computer game cliches. Filmmakers are being granted enormous freedom, but having won that freedom they're all choosing to do the same thing. Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 26.8.07 - 0 comments
Sunday, May 06, 2007
The Crudtastic Four
Before the disappointing Spider-man 3 there is a trailer for the next Fantastic Four movie: my possibly unfair assumption is that it will suck, which might burst the recent superhero revival bubble somewhat (although there is still the next Batman film to come). But it could be so much worse. For example, had you realised that in 1994, Roger Corman produced a version of The Fantastic Four? The rights to the series were contractually tied to the production of a movie by a certain date; if no movie was made, the producers' option would lapse. So a movie was produced, on an absolutely rock-bottom budget, with no intention of ever releasing it (at least not through conventional channels). And of course, it now circulates as a bootleg. Here's the trailer: And here's the ending. Spoiler and shonky rubber arm warnings apply: The funny thing is, the costume for the Thing is actually not so bad. Labels: corman, humour, superheroes, trailers Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 6.5.07 - 0 comments
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Harry Potter and the Adults Who Read Children's Books
For those who are keeping track of such things, here's the latest trailer for the new Harry Potter. (It's available in much better quality here). The fifth Harry Potter book is easily the weakest so far, but it may well make the best film. The other films have been too crammed with plot to be very satisfying; J.K. Rowling's plots generally don't condense very well. Yet Order of the Phoenix, the book, was different in that it was very light on plot for a book of its length. The most interesting thing about it was its vision of Hogwarts' conversion to a repressive fascist institution under a government in denial, but this element felt lost in a book that was much too long. With everything shrunk down to two hour length, however, it could make a very strong through-line indeed. I also like the bold new long-haired look for Draco Malfoy.  Oh, wait: that's Luna Lovegood. Labels: harry potter, rumours, trailers Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 25.4.07 - 0 comments
Sunday, December 24, 2006
The Daily Grind
The trailer for the Tarantino / Rodriguez collaboration Grindhouse can be found here, or at a much lower quality on the embeded link below. I suspect the trailer is more fun than the movie will be, but then I said that about Kill Bill. I like the irony of them advertising two movies for the price of one after Kill Bill gave use one movie for the price of two. Perhaps it's their way of clueing us in that the movie will be overlong. Labels: trailers Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 24.12.06 - 0 comments
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This page is for assorted musings and editorialising that don't fit elsewhere on Cinephobia. Coolest Movie News Since.... Ever? Quantum of Solace Trailer Stan Winston and the Monsters that You Can See Hit and MIFF Because We All Remember How the Last Movie I Poste... Return of the Spielberg Guy Stills Avery, Jones, Clampett The Other Jones December 2003 May 2004 December 2004 January 2005 February 2005 March 2005 April 2005 May 2005 June 2005 July 2005 August 2005 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 January 2006 February 2006 March 2006 April 2006 May 2006 June 2006 August 2006 September 2006 October 2006 December 2006 January 2007 February 2007 March 2007 April 2007 May 2007 June 2007 July 2007 August 2007 September 2007 October 2007 December 2007 January 2008 February 2008 March 2008 April 2008 May 2008 June 2008 July 2008 Want to contact me? 
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