Category: Movies

‘The Mummy’ featurette.

OK, this is actually kind of reassuring, for two reasons.

  1. The zero-G scene. I just assumed that they crew did all that stuff with wire-fu.  Which they probably mostly did, but they also took the cast up into an airplane and shot takes while in actual free fall conditions. That’s… clever.
  2. The use of on-location sets generally. You can probably thank J.J. Abrams for that: the ridiculous amount of money The Force Awakens made may have suggested to Hollywood that spending more of the budget on real things instead of CGI could be the smart call.

Also… Tom Cruise is fifty-four.  He’s either got a grandmaster-class plastic surgeon, the Longevity advantage, or both…

Why are they remaking Escape From New York?

No, I’m serious.  Why are they remaking Escape From New York? What is the motivation, here? Particularly since I’ve heard that the plot as well as, effectively, the location is going to be remarkably different.  Why not call it… something else?  Something that won’t tick off people who saw nothing wrong with the original.

Moe Lane

PS: Besides, Escape From New York had a worthy remake.  It was called Arkham City, and it managed ‘worthy remake’ by the bold move of replacing Snake Plissken with Batman.  That’s the only way you can get away with doing something like that, really.  Batman trumps all.

So Paramount is making ‘The Pro’ into a film. …Of course it is.

Oh my, oh dear, and oh brother:

With R-rated comic book movies like Deadpool and Logan doing massively well at the box office, Paramount Pictures appears to be looking into their own hard R comic book adaptation. Deadline has the news, reporting that a The Pro movie is in the works, based on the 2002 one-shot from Image Comics and the creative team of writer Garth Ennis, the husband and wife art team of Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti, and colorist Paul Mounts. Although the original article does not mention that an R rating is being targeted by Paramount, it’s hard to imagine the source material getting adapted any other way.

Continue reading So Paramount is making ‘The Pro’ into a film. …Of course it is.

The ‘My Cousin Rachel’ trailer.

Come, I will conceal nothing from you: I find this movie of interest because it stars Rachel Weisz, who was a delight in the first two Mummy movies and I will hear no ill words spoken about either of those films. …Well, OK, people are allowed to dislike either because it’s a free country. But I will still scowl at those people because they’re, well, wrong and so forth.

Anyway, it needs more supernatural, but I guess that complaint should have been forwarded to Daphne Du Maurier.

The most interesting cinematic conspiracy theory I’ve seen today (Spider-man/Life/Venom).

OK, so basically Sony is going to make a Venom movie.   …OK.  You know something?  That’s fine. That could be watchable. Lord knows Sony is probably smarting at the way that it had to kiss up to Marvel to get Spider-Man to appear in the MCU; they want to make some money of their own, they’ve got the rights to Venom, it might not suck.  And, hey, it can back into the MCU the way that Deadpool kind of pretended to do with the Helicarrier and everything. So… all right.  Good luck with that, Sony. I mean it. Continue reading The most interesting cinematic conspiracy theory I’ve seen today (Spider-man/Life/Venom).

Tweet of the Day, You Had Me At ‘Wallace & Gromit’ edition.

When I saw that there was a new show coming out called ‘Early Man,’ I confess: I shrugged.  Why should I care about animated cavemen?  Well, I should care because it’s the same people who did Wallace & Gromit, Shaun the Sheep, and Chicken Run.  And Chicken Run is AWESOME and anybody who tells you otherwise is probably not FEELING WELL and you should be KIND to them, out of PITY.

So there.

Two of my three favorite MST3K episodes coming to Netflix tomorrow.

The two being The Giant Gila Monster and Teenagers from Outer Space.  The missing one is The Killer Shrews, alas.  That last one made me laugh so hard during the last ten minutes that I was on the ground and half-blacking out from lack of oxygen. I’m not even entirely sure why: it was just something about the ‘shrews’ and the dialog and the snark and the costumes at the end.  When MST3K was on, it was on.  So much so, that I worry that they won’t be able to bottle that lightning again.

Still: what a time to be alive!

The reassuring ‘American Gods’ series trailer.

‘Reassuring’ in that I kept recognizing characters and scenes on sight, which tells me that the original novel was not an afterthought to the people who made the American Gods series. Certainly Neil Gaiman seems to be happy enough.  It’s a real shame that I’ll need to wait for the DVD for this one: