Movies

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.

With Comic-Con's rise in the popular imaginaion over the last decade, we've heard many folks mutter over the years "I need to write a screenplay about Comic-con!" If you have been working on such a script, it is time to quietly set it aside and start working on that oil spill comedy you had been pondering. In keeping with the times, Comic-Con will be the subject of a geekumentary by Morgan Spurlock (Super-Size Me) following the fan's journey of seven con attendees. But Spurlock's not going it alone, because that would be too much for any man.

Some pissing and moaning this week about the fact that Marvel/Deisney will be shooting the Captain America movie in the UK instead of the US. The reason? Oh, budget and so on.

Today is the 30th anniversary of the release of THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, probably the single greatest event in the history of nerddom. STAR WARS might have been new and cool and funny and fresh, but EMPIRE was all that AND sad and tragic and shocking and filled with the kind of terror and awe that the greatest storytelling inspires. From the frozen beauty of an icy horizon studded with AT-ATs, to the steaming green swamp where Luke Skywalker begins his archetypal but unique hero's journey, to the crimson horror of the carbon freezing chamber, to the primal red and blue of the final battle between Luke and Vader, no SF blockbuster has ever captured the imagination so cleanly and completely. It was grown up in an unself-conscious way that nothing to do with Star Wars would ever be again. (Almost certainly because it was the last one that producer Gary Kurtz would in involved with; after EMPIRE it was George Lucas all the way.)

The young people of today can hardly be expected to understand the impact that Tim Burton’s Batman had on movie-goers in the summer of 1989. The general audience of 1989 knew Batman only as the campy, self-conscious, broad-daylight superhero of the Adam West TV show. Nothing in movies prepared viewers for this radical re-thinking of the character, the weird darkness of the themes, the dense, oppressive production design or Jack Nicholson’s performance as The Joker. All of it was alarming, electrifying stuff back then. (Of course, it was all familiar territory for people who had read The Dark Knight Returns and The Killing Joke, but that’s another story.)

More leaks from the set of GREENLANTERN, this time, via Splash Page, Ryan Reynolds in his mocap suit. Aside from noting how fit Reynolds...