Screenhead

And it’s not the early print, either.

Seriously, I’ve heard of some doomed productions in my day, but The Green Hornet could well make a movie about their own doomed production.  They’ve been stuck in development hell, played musical actors with their Kato,  and then the low blow came when a car crash happened on set.

At least, until today…when someone found a bomb on the set.

Now, I’ve heard of movies being CALLED bombs before, but actually finding one?  That wasn’t supposed to be there?  Now I’ve heard everything!  So on top of all this, the Los Angeles bomb squad comes out and blows the thing up with their bomb disposal robot.

While I’m shocked that someone would put a bomb on a film set, I have to wonder, offhandedly, if maybe they got some stock footage out of the deal.  Either way, though, this is the strangest production shoot I’ve heard of in quite some time.

Yeah, I know…most of us Venom purists out there (of which I happily count myself among) were pretty convinced that casting Topher Grace as Eddie Brock was some kind of insult, either that or the result of the studio being utterly convinced we all had the mental candlepower of certain kinds of fish.

But I got one real good reason to cheer up and look forward to that Venom movie–two of the writers come from Zombieland.

Ohhhhh yeah.  One of the freakiest looking action horror titles of the year and they’ll be writing the Venom movie.  Apparently the script is already in Marvel’s hands, and from here it’s all a matter of getting it produced.  The current suspicion is that Spider Man 4 will actually be used to set up the Venom movie, so it’ll be at least two years before Venom actually gets a watchable big screen experience.  Ah well…we’ve waited longer for worse, and I’m definitely looking forward to this one.

Good news, everyone!

If you read that in Professor Farnsworth’s voice, you have my sincerest apologies, but it really makes sense.  Seems that what you’ve heard about the Deadpool movie being DOA because Ryan Reynolds decided to jump Marvel / Disney ship and take on the Green Lantern role has been somewhat exaggerated.  Indeed, he WILL still be handling the ring and lantern, but he’ll ALSO be signing up for merc-with-a-mouth duties as Deadpool in the stand-alone that was greenlit not too long after the Wolverine movie cleaned everyone’s box office clock.

Included in the upcoming release will be “loads of killing” and a healthy dose of “breaking the fourth wall”, which is frankly awesome in its own way.  That and I think Ryan Reynolds really IS about the only person with that mix of action hero and comedy figure to handle the part–his George Lutz in the Amityville remake was almost as good as the original.

No word on release dates yet–this sucker’s still downright embryonic–but you can look for it to hit pretty soon, I’d say.

This one made me cough up a perfectly good bottle of Dew, folks.  ALL over my keyboard. It was vile.

See, I was cruising the news sites, looking for something interesting to talk about.  What do I find?  I find that none other than Guy Ritchie has been detailed to handle directing duties for the upcoming Lobo movie.

First, I’m amazed, because I never thought anyone would try and bring The Main Man into things.  If there was ever a comic book movie I wanted quite so badly as a Venom / Carnage, Deadpool or Transmetropolitan movie, it was clearly Lobo.  Better yet, shooting’s going to start early next year by last report.

Okay, sure…so putting Guy Ritchie in charge pretty much ensures that it’s going to turn into Lock Stock and Two Fraggin’ Barrels O’ Fun, but it’s Lobo.  How bad can it be with The Main Man on the scene?  You know you can’t go anywhere with the Last Czarnian without lots of things blowing up and some choice one-liners.  Even with Guy Ritchie it can’t be too highbrow.

I’ll take bets right now–two to one Ron Perlman gets an offer to play Lobo.

No, really. He DOES.

Folks, in case you’re not currently aware, the first five minutes of Iron Man 2 have been leaked to the internet.  And director Jon Favreau would really like you to watch and give him some feedback on his Twitter.

I caution you, the footage is not that great–it’s on YouTube and it’s in very much bootleg condition.  But the director seems happy about this.  It’s kind of odd to think of a director as being happy about a leaked bootleg, but considering that it’s footage from a convention, it’s not really that much of a leak.

However, I can say this much.  Based on the footage that I’ve seen so far, this ought to be a really, REALLY awesome movie.  If you weren’t already looking forward to Iron Man 2–and chances are, if you saw Iron Man, you were looking forward to Iron Man 2 about five minutes before Iron Man ended–you should be after seeing this footage.

And this may have been the point all along.

I’m not sure, exactly, why the folks behind G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra felt the need to keep this one out of the critics’ hands.  You’ll find out why in just a second.

First, the plot.  Someone apparently took the Patriot Act WAY too far and built a clandestine team of highly-powered and extraordinarily well-equipped soldiers from around the world (I don’t even want to think about how much international law THAT maneuver breaks).  And frankly, it’s a good thing they did, because they find themselves facing a nearly-equally highly-powered and well-equipped force of terrorists / mercenaries / general bad guys.  There’s a lot more than that going on in here, but suffice it all to say that the plot can basically be reduced to “G.I. Joe is going to fight Cobra, much like it did back in your childhood”.  Though don’t expect this to look too much like your childhood–they have, of course, dispensed with canon.  Which kind of sucks–I WISH they’d kept Cobra Commander as a former used-car dealer turned mercenary.

Let’s be clear–this is NOT an Oscar contender.  This is Short Attention Span Theatre at its absolute zenith.  I didn’t think to bring a stopwatch with me but something or someone will get shot / blown up / stabbed / sliced / run over with alarming frequency.  The movie is essentially one long fight scene occasionally broken up by dialogue.  Sometimes the two will even overlap, causing a kind of plot development and backstory.

In the strictest sense, this really isn’t that great a movie.  It has precious little story to it, and doesn’t really challenge the viewer in any way. This may well be why no one wanted critics there–so that they couldn’t go on any diatribes (like this) about how the film community is basically out to turn the world, in a truly Cobra Commander style plot (double bonus irony points! Woo hoo!). into a legion of mindless sheep by feeding them a steady diet of crap.

Basically, they could’ve titled this movie “Violence!” and no one would’ve noticed a difference, nor likely cared.

But that was the point.  This is just a fun movie, something you go see for an adrenaline rush and to watch hot chicks fight and see stuff blow up on a regular basis.  It’s quite possibly the new gold standard of “popcorn movie”.  This movie might well appear in a dictionary entry next to the phrase “aggressive mediocrity”.

Thus, the Screenhead Ten Scale awards it a seven out of ten for doing EXACTLY what it set out to do and nothing more.  In the grander sense, it’s a C-student–make no mistake about that–but it’s definitely the BEST C-student ever.  There’s nothing wrong with this movie–but there’s not as much right as there could have been, either.

Why do I feel like I have been shot dead when I look at this poster? Who is holding the smoking gun?  There’s my killer. 

Kidding aside, I like this poster for The Losers, directed by Sylvain White who also directed contrasting films: I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer and Stomp the Yard.

The Loser stars Chris Evans, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Zoe Saldana, and Columbus Short and is based on comic property created by Andy Diggle and Jock for Vertigo. The movie opens April 2010.

(Source)

Someone once described high school, about ten years or so ago, as having too many characters and not enough plot.  Ironically, about ten years later, give or take, that same person will have described a movie based on a comic book by a man whose time would have to come–The Spirit.

The plot, such as it is, really isn’t much.  A kind of criminal genius–he’s a master of disguise (he changes costume at least five times in the movie) and a genetic engineer, as well as a drug dealer–by the unlikely name of The Octopus is after a rare and powerful artifact containing the blood of Heracles.  It’s been chained to a box containing the Golden Fleece, and The Octopus is desperate to get his hands on it because it will combine with his own drug-laced blood to make him a god, or nearly so.  But it’s left to an undead cop to find it first.  Along the way, said undead cop, now called The Spirit, will hit on literally tons of women that he apparently knew at one point or another.

See what I mean?  This sucker isn’t exactly that long on plot.  I tell you no small thing when I tell you that The Spirit is going to spend more time macking on chicks than he will actually advancing the plot.

I will admit, however, that when The Spirit DOES spend one of its rare moments actually doing something that moves what little plot there is along, it will do so in a smooth, efficient, and wholly capable fashion.  It will offer plenty of action in those segments (watching The Octopus take on a helicopter is a jaw-dropper) even pack plenty of humor into the proceedings, and that’s just awesome.  While relative unknown (I literally could not tell you the last movie I saw him in, because I have not clue one what else he’s done) Gabriel Macht handles The Spirit fairly well, it’s not him that’s the best part of the movie.  And it’s not one of the ladies that The Spirit will CONSTANTLY throw at us, either, though they generally handle their parts competently and look like they’re having a great time doing it.

No, the clear high point of this whole thing is The Octopus, played by none other than Samuel L. Jackson.  The great Sam Jack is handling this one, and man…he’s clearly loving this part.  In fact, thanks to this movie, he’s now on my short list of actors who will ALWAYS turn in a good performance no matter how questionable the rest of the movie around them is.

Yes, The Spirit is a downright beautiful movie.  It LOOKS fantastic.  The characters all look fantastic.  Even the little things like clouds of explosions that look like octopi and The Spirit’s trademark red tie all look fantastic.

But from a narrative standpoint this is a vastly overlong movie that never really should have been.  It may look pretty but that’s not enough to save it from a really, REALLY, weak sauce script.  This is a LOUSY movie.  They spent more time introducing characters than they did advancing the plot, and that’s the first through tenth signs of a really, REALLY bad movie.

Way too many characters, and not nearly enough plot.  It’s high school, and it’s The Spirit.  It’s a fun and pretty little title but it has nothing even resembling substance.  It’s a great rental, but not one you’re going to want to keep around.

The latest comic book to get adapted will be upcoming horror comic book mini-series The Night Projectionist, which is being transferred to the big-screen courtesy of Myriad Pictures and publisher Studio 407.

The story takes place on Halloween Eve in a small town movie theatre, where an all-night Draculathon draws throngs of moviegoers who find themselves locked inside the theatre, which is slowly filling up with vampires.

The first issue will hit stores next month. Production will begin later this year.

“Emo Boy” is going to the big screen with Kyle Newman to direct the adaptation. Stephen Edmond, the comic’s writer-artist, is writing the screenplay.

Emo, a cult comic book series, has a unique quality developed around fashion and music while an emotional description of someone who is overly sensitive or angst-ridden.  The story is riddled with satirical travails of the most self-dramatizing young man ever in the history of the world. His emotions are so intense he has “emo powers.”

According to Hollywood Reporter, the movie will lean towards music as a key component of the project, which has been described as being in the tone of Napoleon Dynamite, Harold and Maude and Zoolander.