Screenhead

Fox Searchlight sent me eight featurettes for the movie Mr. Fantastic Fox.  I found this one to be the most interesting of them all, so enjoy!

Then, I watched this one, below, and found it to be the most interesting one of all.  Which one do you like?

A new trailer for Illumination Entertainment’s 3-D CGI Feature Despicable Me has just debuted online!   

The new Despicable Me trailer doesn’t reveal much about the movie, but it’s worth watching for enjoyment.  The movie includes a wonderful cast including Steve Carell, Jason Segel, Russell Brand, Will Arnett, Kristen Wiig, Danny McBride, Miranda Cosgrove, Jack McBrayer, Mindy Kaling, Jemaine Clement and Julie Andrews.    

Movie will be in theaters July 9, 2010!

In a happy suburban neighborhood surrounded by white picket fences with flowering rose bushes, sits a black house with a dead lawn.  Unbeknownst to the neighbors, hidden beneath this home is a vast secret hideout.  Surrounded by a small army of minions, we discover Gru (voiced by Steve Carell), planning the biggest heist in the history of the world.  He is going to steal the moon. 

Gru delights in all things wicked.  Armed with his arsenal of shrink rays, freeze rays, and battle-ready vehicles for land and air, he vanquishes all who stand in his way.  Until the day he encounters the immense will of three little orphaned girls who look at him and see something that no one else has ever seen: a potential Dad. 

The world’s (second) greatest villain has just met his greatest challenge: three little girls named Margo, Edith and Agnes. 

You know what…the trailer doesn’t show any of this story. You can see it at Apple.

This is a fun movie and I am sure we will see more trailers on this film.  It’s a good trailer to watch on a Monday after a weekend of Halloween. It put a smile on my face.  Enjoy!

I’m aware that, chances are, after you read that headline above, you’re probably going to have a minor embolism.

Rest assured that you DID read that correctly, and by all accounts, someone, somewhere,  at Disney has greenlit a sequel to Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

You may not, however, be aware that Who Framed Roger Rabbit was actually based on an old conspiracy theory proven terrifyingly accurate about how a coterie of companies came together to take down the Los Angeles streetcar system and replace it with a freeway, which is pretty much what happened in the original.

There are some rumors that say that we’ll have much the same thing in this one, with another conspiracy theory being targeted and analogized to fit into a ninety minute cartoon / live action hybrid film.  Naturally there’s no proof of this as the script hasn’t even been started on yet, but the concept remains, and in all honesty, I’m looking forward to it!

I loved that film when I was a kid, and have fond memories of going along with a group of childhood buddies to catch it.  It was downright amazing.  And I can only hope that a whole new generation of kids will have the same opportunity to laugh at a moron bunny that I did.

Watching Astro Boy, the mostly new remake of the original anime / manga, was a lot like using a new version of Windows for the first time.  It’s got a whole lot of fancy bells and whstles, and it’s downright charming in some senses, but it’s also got a whole lot of serious problems that get in the way of realizing its full capability.

The plotline is where most of these problems crop up.  When young Toby Tenma, an unaccountably brilliant lad who’s so hated by his classmates that they’re throwing things at him when he leaves a room, is accidentally killed by a new military robot, his grieving father (who, just incidentally, happens to be the father of modern robotics as well) decides that he’s going to build a replacement son.

Naturally, it’s not long before what he has a “what hath science wrought??” moment and figures it’s for the best to just shut the boy down.  But after the Toby-robot, later called Astro Boy, escapes and makes his way to the wreckage outside the town (actually BENEATH the town if you want to be specific) he briefly grew up in, he discovers that most everything and most everybody serves some purpose in life…even those things that were formerly unwanted.

Let’s get the problems out of the way first.  The plot has so many holes in it it’s a wonder how it manages to stay in one piece.  Enormous segments of events will be left utterly unexplained.

For instance: if the surface dwellers could just fly up to Metro City in any old hovercar, as they’re shown doing in the end, why didn’t they just pack up a few dozen busloads and take back the town themselves?  And while I’m at it, how did Cora manage to leave Metro City in the first place?  Don’t even get me started on why the Peacemaker robot, which is clearly absorbing EVERYTHING IN SIGHT when we first see it, up to and including the barrier in front of it, suddenly becomes SELECTIVE about his absorption capabilities in the final minutes.  He could’ve absorbed the entire city at the rate he was going.  And where did that ALIEN come from in the last thirty seconds?  Seriously?  Can we get a few BIGGER plotholes?  It’s almost blocking daylight at this point!

But.

But…Astro Boy is, let’s face it, a charming little romp with a hyperkinetic boy robot that features lots of high-speed action and sufficient gunfire to keep any anime or action buff occupied.  The only bad things that happen in the end are to the people who deserve them.  The ending could not be much happier.  They will even SAY as much IN THE FILM ITSELF.  You can’t telegraph a punch any more clearly than this one was.

The Screenhead Ten Scale likes a feel-good movie you can’t help but feel good about, but at the same time realizes that this dog will NOT hunt in terms of plot, and thus hands it a thoroughly mixed-bag five out of ten.

For those of you hoping that there would be a Monsters Vs. Aliens sequel, bad news for you today.  It’s just not going to happen.  Sorry, that’s it, game over, at least for now.

Apparently despite the fact that this essentially decent cartoon cleared nearly two hundred million at the box office worldwide, and picked up who knows how much cash on DVD, that wasn’t enough for Dreamworks, who went on record with this:

“I’d like to tell you there’s a perfectly rational, clear and easy answer as to why not, but there isn’t,” studio chief Jeffrey Katzenberg told a group of industry analysts on Tuesday. “There was enough of a consensus from our distribution and marketing folks in certain parts of the world that we would be pushing a boulder up a hill.”

They make some sense, actually–what were they going to do, have more monsters?  Bring back the rest of the aliens?  No, they probably pretty much did all they could here, and so they called it quits while they were very, very much ahead.  A prudent move for Katzenberg et al.

So I’ve stumbled onto a big batch of a minor league movement in short film making–a strange kind of psuedo-machinima involving characters from The Sims in short film settings, and today we’ve got The Punishment up for review.

Basically, a bunch of children that look like they were pulled whole and breathing out of Village of the Damned go forth and set fire to things, and people, with their minds.  But what happens to these “demon spawn” is more horrible than you can imagine.

Actually, it’s not so much horrible as it is hilarious.

In all honesty though, for a quick two minute shot of movie, it won’t be half bad.  It’ll actually be pretty entertaining.  Oh, sure, I have no idea where these children came from or how they got to be pyrokinetics, or anything like that, but I know what happened to them in the end and I know it’s pretty funny.

The Screenhead Ten Scale stifles its laughter long enough to hand over a six out of ten for this slightly better than average low budget romp.

Disney has released one minute of Pixar’s newest short film, Dug’s Special Mission. The short will be released with the UpDVD/Blu-ray on November 10, 2009. It’s a brandnew five minute short film that is a prequel to Up, following “the good-hearted dog, Dug as he is sent on a series of quests by his mean canine bosses.”  Truthfully, it looks like Dug’s canine bosses are trying to get rid of him.

Dana Goodyear wrote an astounding 12-page article for the October 26, 2009 issue of The New Yorker, in which she goes on the set of James Cameron’s Avatar for an early look at the 3-D world that Cameron has created for the upcoming movie.

Goodyear’s article is more than about Avatar. It’s about Cameron and his moviemaking boldness and assertiveness that brings light to an artist’s desire to be the best he can be in film. 

The director of Aliens, Terminator and Terminator 2 and Titanic, he’s also a writer and producer.  “Maverick” best describes the filmmaker — place him next to Walt Disney, Stanley Kubrick or Charlie Chaplin — all visionaries of the future.

Click on Cameron and you’ll be at the article. Enjoy — it’s quite a read!

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