Movies

The first time we mentioned Morgan Spurlock's upcoming documentary set at Comic-Con, both we and commenters were a bit skeptical that the casting call...

Yesterday video and photographic evidence of the Smurfs movie was released, and we're glad to see that New York City, the Beat's hometown, is once again the setting for the deeply profound story of alien-in-America and what we can learn about ourselves and others, especially when the others are small and blue.

Batman: Mask of the Phantasm is in interesting entry in the world of long-form cinematic Batman stories for a few different reasons. First, it manages to do what the Tim Burton movies were unable to — make Bruce Wayne/Batman the protagonist of his own story. Second, it’s primarily a detective story as opposed to an action story. Third, at least half of the story is told in flashback, a parallel-action setup ambitious for an animated movie thought of as primarily for kids. Lastly, the story it tells is rather emotional and internal — Bruce/Batman broods a lot in this movie, even by his own standards. The action sequences feel perfunctory and tacked-on. The two that come to mind — a truck chase and the explosive finale — are poorly motivated and don’t advance the plot in any meaningful way.

Universal has released individual posters for the seven evil Exes that Scott PIlgrim must battle in the upcoming Scott Pilgrim Vs the Worls movie. In case you don't know them it's Satya Bhabha as Matthew Patel, Chris Evans as Lucas Lee, Brandon Routh as Todd Ingram, Mae Whitman as Roxy Richter, Shota and Keita Saito as Kyle Katayanagi and Jason Schwartzman as the Gideon Gordon Graves. Rating: Awesome.

As we alluded to the other day, concept art for Chris Hemsworth as Thor and Chris Evans as Captain America have been leaked....or "leaked,"...

Well, well, it looks like things are shaping up for Joss Whedon's AVENGERS movie , as Oscar nominee Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker) ahs joined the cast as Hawkeye. So far we have RDJ as Iron Man, Chris Evans as Cap, Chris Hemsworth as Thor, Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury, ScarJo as The Black Widow, and Don Cheadle as War Machine. That's a hefty and costly lineup of stars, but thrifty Marvel is asking the actors to take pay cuts and otherwise watching the budget very, very closely, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

All the news we missed in the last week from Captain America's new zipper to Matt Kindt's movie news to the first look at brain eating walking dead zombies to the Black Spidey to who will take over the Hobbit movies.

Hank Azaria was surreptitiously filmed in his role as Gargamel in the upcoming Smurfs movie, and as you can see, it is a chilling portrayal of ultimate evil that will scar our nightmares. Actually, it is quite terrifying.

You know, we've been expecting that this thing will be awesome, and this just confirms it, but seeing it all laid out like that makes us wonder if the movie going audience -- which has recently shown itself to be pretty reactionary and unadventurous -- will really except a teenaged romance comedy with lots of fighting. Either the girls will love the romance and the guys will love the fighting...or the girls will hate the fighting and the guys will hate the romance like they usually do. More to the point, can Hollywood successfully MARKET a movie that has crossover appeal?

Like Batman, Batman Returns presents three protagonists, almost the same protagonists as 1989‘s Batman — a deformed freak of a gangster (this time the Penguin instead of The Joker), a blonde who’s crazy about bats (Catwoman subbing for Vicki Vale), and Batman himself. In addition to its three protagonists, it offers an antagonist from outside the traditional Batman world — a ringer, if you will, in the form of businessman Max Shreck.

It would be great to report that Batman Returns takes all of these worthwhile, interesting characters and weaves them into a single, unified story, but it does not. Instead, it presents two separate stories, each compelling in its own right, and kind of sutures them together like the irregular chunks of vinyl of Catwoman’s bodysuit. As this is an unusually complicated narrative with three separate, competing plot strands which actually take place in utterly different genres, let’s separate out each character’s storyline and examine them one at a time.

And on a somewhat lighter note...Fox has released stills from this summer's doggie comics movie, which stars Owen WIlson as the voice of Marmaduke, along with Lee Pace, Fergie, Goegre Lopez and William H. Macy, among others. The film is based on the comic strip featuring the large Great Dane by Brad Anderson, which began in...1954. The film is a combination of live action and CGI. Can Fred Bassett be far behind?

With Cowboys and Alien on the way to becoming areal live movie starring move stars like Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig and directed by Jon Favreau, Platinum Studios is on its way to being a real live content provider, and so ICM has signed up to rep them, Deadline reports.