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Carla Gugino gets to work with Zack Snyder as he directs Sucker Punch, an action fantasy for Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures. You might be familiar with Gugino’s work in Snyder’s Watchmen where she portrays 1950s version of Silk Spectre.  

Gugino joins a fine cast of actors Emily Browning, Vanessa Hudgens, Jamie Chung, Jena Malone, and Abbie Cornish. They all star in the 1950s-set tale of a girl (Browning) confined to a mental institution by her evil stepfather, who intends to have her lobotomized in five days. She and her friends enter an alternate reality where they begin planning an escape. Wow!

Gugino is playing Mrs. Schultz, an adult figure in the institution.

Snyder also wrote the script and is producing with his Cruel & Unusual Films partner, wife Deborah Snyder.

Sounds like the actors are getting serious for a pretty heroic adventure because they are currently in fight training. After the cast completes their fight training, shooting will begin this fall in Vancouver.

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The testosterone-fuelled 300 drew audiences in the hundreds of thousands, and Hollywood isn’t about to pass up on following up one of its poster-boys for the highly impressionable male audiences. Rumors of a 300 sequel have been a long time in the coming, but Zack Snyder finally set everything in stone when he was out doing promotion for the upcoming Watchmen DVD and Blu-ray release.

“I know for a fact that Frank [Miller] is writing right now,” said the director. “[He's] drawing away and seems to be knee-deep in it. I think he’s going to head back to Greece again and do another reconnaissance.”

Snyder doesn’t expect much to change from the first film, though the budget will be kept more in check this time as they will be using the same technology.

“We’re going to see Athens and the Aegean and other places,” he detailed. “There would be an opportunity for bigger visions, though I’d hope for the same aesthetic. The tech we used for ‘300′ was not a revolution. It’s basically what the weatherman has.”

From Entertainment Weekly comes word that Zack Snyder has gathered an assembly of young actresses for his upcoming action fantasy Sucker Punch.

Amanda Seyfried, Vanessa Hudgens, Abbie Cornish, Evan Rachel Wood and Emma Stone are in talks to star in the film. Set in the ‘50s, it will follow a girl named Babydoll (Seyfried) who is taken to a mental institution by her stepfather, who intends to have her lobotomized in five days.

During this time she imagines an alternative reality to hide her from the pain, and in that world begins planning her escape, needing to steal five objects to help her get out before she is deflowered by a vile man.

The other four actresses will play Seyfried’s fellow inmates who also travel into the alternate reality.

Hype can be a dangerous thing. While the right kind of hype distributed across enough time can spell big bucks in Hollywood, hype can also lead to disappointment. Just look at the reaction of most to the fourth and unnecessary Indiana Jones film. Watchmen, the latest adaptation of a work by graphic novelist Alan Moore, has had a shady history, spanning decades. With Terry Gilliam initially excited about making a version, like most Gilliam dreams it dissipated. Next (after tantalising news that Darren Aronofsky was attached to direct) came Paul Greengrass’s inevitably gritty version that screeched to a halt due to financial difficulties and a change in studio upper management. Even this release had its fair share of difficulty, when Fox and Warner Bros went to court over who had rights to the story.

But the real difficulty lay in adapting such a wide-reaching meta-narrative. Set in an alternative 1985, in which the USA won Vietnam, Nixon is still the president, and the world holds its breath as nuclear warfare looms closer, the tale starts with the death of a superhero known as The Comedian. By the 80’s superheroes have a bitter association, but the mysterious yet psychopathic and misanthropic masked detective known as Rorschach has a gut feeling that the murder leads to something big. His investigation brings us to his associates, the Watchmen, including the aging Daniel Dreiberg, a bookish man who longs to return to his superhero identity as NightOwl, Ozymandias, the smartest man on the plant who is attempting to prevent WWIII by creating an alternative energy source, Dr. Manhattan, the only real superhero, a man made of energy who can control time and space and the sole reason for the USA winning the Vietnam war, and Laurie Jupiter, his girlfriend who feels Manhattan is losing his touch with humanity.

The comic book adopts multiple stories and narratives, all building not just on a series of characters relating to a single plot, but building a fully realised alternative world, all contributing to a sense of dread at the impending doom. But what’s most important is that the comic takes time to delve into the heros’ lives and feelings, to elevate them beyond merely figures of action. To be able to recreate this in 160 minutes is no easy task, and it’s a shame that director Zack Snyder was allowed to take the reins on this. Snyder impressed with a tense remake of Dawn of the Dead, and then made the unintentionally hilarious 300, a vacuous film that would have been half the running time if the slow-motion sequences were played at normal speed. Neither of these films displayed the director’s understanding of character, and sadly this weakness is what lets Watchmen down. Read the rest of this entry »

Having finished work on Watchmen, Zack Snyder is moving ahead with his “Alice in Wonderland with machine guns” project dubbed Sucker Punch. He aims to start filming this fall in Vancouver.

Snyder revealed that the story takes place in the late ‘60s and that it is “about a girl that’s been committed to an insane asylum and she fantasizes that she can escape and she has these crazy adventures in her mind where she goes into the past and into the future.”

The script is based off a short story Snyder and Steve Shibuya wrote.

For those of you who haven’t sensed a central theme running through the last few days of Watchmen Video Journal discussions, this one, second to last from the mobile site, will actually sum it up.  It’s all been about the attention to detail, and that’s exactly what number nine covers.

You may not know that Zack Snyder draws his own storyboards. You may not know that the actors all handle props.  You may not even know that the crew, from the costumers and the hair designers and so on were partially selected based on their knowledge of Watchmen.  Pretty much everything seems to have been decided by committee, where everything was discussed and rediscussed between Zack Snyder and the crew.

It’s deep. It’s complicated. It’s heavily detailed.  And it’s only a matter of time until we get to see how it turned out.

Director’s cuts usually don’t make it to the big-screen, but Watchmen might be different, as Zack Snyder, while talking to VH1, revealed that the 190 minute director’s cut will be hitting DVD and Blu-ray in July and, if the theatrical cut performs well, the director’s cut will get a theatrical release in Los Angeles and New York around the same time.

It should be noted that this won’t be the 205 minute cut that incorporates the 24-minute “Tales from the Black Freighter” animated short – it is exclusive DVD and Blu-ray only.

Watchmen opens in theaters March 6.

Zack Snyder’s Guardians of Ga’Hoole has signed on Jim Sturgess, Geoffrey Rush, Rachael Taylor, and David Wenham as the voice cast of the animated project.

Zack Snyder is directing the film, which is currently shooting in Australia according to Variety.

Guardians of Ga’hoole is based on the first three installments of Kathryn Lasky’s children’s book series, centered on a young barn owl and his friends as they escape a band of rogue owls.

Watchmen and 300 director Zack Snyder launched cruelfilms.com, the website for his production company Cruel and Unusual Films, and has provided EW.com with this never-before-seen image from one of the opening scenes from Watchmen, which opens March 6. You have to go to EW.com to see the image.

The image, Snyder says, is one of the first glimpses audiences will have of the film’s anti-hero, Rorschach, as he shoots a grappling gun into the Comedian’s apartment while investigating his fallen comrade’s mysterious death. “We just wanted to have a place where people could see what we’re up to,” Snyder tells EW.com exclusively about the site. “As a company, we’re into a lot of cool stuff, like aesthetic and design. The movies we make, and are making, feed a lot off of pop-culture.”