Category: Movies

Tremors TV show moves from Amazon to SyFy.

It’s still being made, though.

After several sequels, a prequel and a different TV series, Kevin Bacon is returning to the Tremors franchise. After 27 years, a new TV series about the giant, killer sandworms, known as Graboids, is heading to TV and, after some months in limbo, it looks like the project is headed to SyFy. The network is going to make a pilot and, if all goes well, the new take on Tremors will go to series for at least one season.

I noted back in September 2016 that this show was going to be on Amazon (yay!) and would be retconning (boo!). It looks like this version is going to instead going to go see what Bacon’s character is doing now, twenty-five years on: which would mean no real need to retcon.  As one of the people writing on this noted, this is a series about people shooting giant worm monsters. There’s not much in the way of contradictory canon to work around.

So, apparently the Book of Henry was pretty wretched.

I wonder if the Guardian is feeling well. Why? Because they didn’t write a single word in this review of The Book of Henry that makes my teeth ache.  I’m not entirely certain that such a thing is permitted, under international law:

Note to screenwriters: if, when you are writing an 11-year-old character, it becomes necessary to remind the audience repeatedly that “he’s a child”, you may have an issue with the authenticity of the voice. In fact, it’s easier to imagine some of the dialogue in Mr Peabody & Sherman genuinely coming out of the mouth of a dog than it is to believe that a pre-teen would drawl Henry’s world-weary bons mots. That, however, is a minor quibble in this toxic swamp of cynicism and manipulation.

Continue reading So, apparently the Book of Henry was pretty wretched.

So I’m hearing that maybe Cars 3 doesn’t entirely suck?

66/77 percent on the Tomatometer/Audience Score, over at Rotten Tomatoes.  That’s pretty respectable for the third movie in a series.  Particularly since Cars 2 kind of sucked. On the other wheel, I’ve already got a list of movies to catch, and it’s not on there.  On the back hatch… OK, OK, this is a stupid attempt to try to make the Cars world work in terms of our own.

So, anybody see it?

So. …Did anybody* like Transformers: The Last Knight? :my wife interrupts:

…to tell me that Alyssa Rosenberg did. Kind of. In a way.  It’s not a bad review, either (Alyssa’s always been thoroughly sound on nerd-like activities), but it doesn’t exactly fill me with an urge to see the film, either. Which is a shame, because normally lines like this: Continue reading So. …Did anybody* like Transformers: The Last Knight? :my wife interrupts:

Is 4K too many Ks for a restoration of The Thing?

I mean, don’t get me wrong: I’ve only seen low-resolution copies (relatively speaking) of John Carpenter’s The Thing.  I’m theoretically down with them doing a restoration of the movie. But I do wonder whether the special effects that Stephen Green rightly praises here will hold up under the impersonal glare of a 4K scanning process.

It’s the combination of time and expectations here that worry me. The Thing came out in 1982, and obviously the state of the art for special effects has improved significantly since then. And so have our standards as to what qualifies as a good special effect. It’s OK when we’re watching the movie at regular DVD levels; it looks old, and because it looks old we forgive it for being old.  But if we make the image too sharp, will we be able to forgive The Thing for remaining, ah, frozen in time like that?

I don’t honestly know.

Tweet of the Day, This DOES Encapsulate Ron Howard’s Han Solo Movie Problem edition.

Yeah, it’s pretty much official: Ron Howard has taken over directing the Han Solo flick, and the “Help me, Opie-Wan” jokes are already blossoming all over the Internet.  And the dread pronouncements of the word “Willow.” And the folks asking if there’s going to be any narration by Howard.

So finding somebody saying something new to say was a bit of a challenge:

https://twitter.com/bobbyrobertspdx/status/877383644259565568

Continue reading Tweet of the Day, This DOES Encapsulate Ron Howard’s Han Solo Movie Problem edition.

Ron Howard to be replacement director on Han Solo movie?

Well, that would be interesting.

Deadline hears that Ron Howard has emerged as front-runner to replace Phil Lord & Christopher Miller on the untitled Han SoloStar Wars spinoff film. Disney dropped a shocker this afternoon with the announcement that the duo exited a picture that has been in production since February at London’s Pinewood Studios.

I mean, they gotta get somebody. But Ron Howard hasn’t had a real hit for almost a decade. Does the Mouse even want him directing a Star Wars flick? Han Solo is not really his style. — Note that I’m assuming that the Mouse can get him, if the Mouse happens to want Ron Howard.  You can do that, when you’re well on the way to owning the entire American film industry outright.

Then again, I can’t think of anybody offhand who might be good for directing the Han Solo standalone. I’m not even sure what the Han Solo standalone would be about. Besides spectacle, of course.