Movies

  It's a busy day in this post-holiday Monday, with the entertainment industry back up and rolling, and as such there's been a few casting...

    Prior to the official word of his casting as Stephen Strange in Marvel's 2016 release Doctor Strange, despite months of rumors, Benedict Cumberbatch remained...

  Yesterday, Marvel Studios released an "ant-sized" version of the teaser for the Ant-Man trailer that is debuting during the premiere of Agent Carter on...

Here's a fun little "what if..?" to start off your new year. The mastermind behind the Academy Award nominated District 9 and the less...

Michael Keaton finally had his big comeback year in 2014. With Birdman, and his very meta portrayal of a washed-up superhero actor, Keaton now...

Guest post by T Campbell. Can the soul of Western civilization be found in a pair of red briefs? Was our first great superhero at his strongest, his noblest, his superest, before modern interpretations stripped him of his underwear? Is there a connection? A generation ago, when those red briefs were an inseparable part of Superman’s design, he was the most familiar superhero by a wide margin, leading the field in film adaptations,[1] headlining cartoon shows,[2] and even winning over famous media critics who were fiction writers in their own right. Even now, if you believe superheroes have anything to say to American culture or the human experience, you sort of have to start with him, because he’s the prototype. Umberto Eco called him “the representative of all his similars” [3] and Harlan Ellison described him as one of “only five fictional creations known to every man, woman, and child on the planet.”[4] Born in the early hours of a visual, easily reproduced medium, he was popular enough to codify most of what being a superhero meant. The Oxford English Dictionary even mentions him by name in its definition of “superhero”:

There is a tower defense game I love to play on the iPad called Kingdom Rush. Not too long ago they released a new version called Kingdom Rush Frontiers which is the most imaginative and adorable version of the game yet. Like all fantasy games, it's completely tangled up in the vision of JRR Tolkien, with elves, dwarves, rangers and even in this version an ent. Each stage has many extras like little dragons, gnomes, fairies, magic mushrooms and even a game of Simon. It's adorable and a great way to pass the time. I found the first Hobbit movie two years ago to be similar to a tub of Cosy Shack rice pudding in that I never got sick of each and every bite, and I just liked watching people named Thorin and Elrond run around. Since then, while I have yet to tire of Cosy Shack, I have tired of Peter Jackson's Hobbit movies because they are nothing but a map in Kingdom Rsh blown up to IMAX size and length and noise. Maybe it's just me being 11 years older than when the Return of the King came out, or Peter Jackson being 11 years older, but The Battle of Five Armies seemed to take as much from Jackson's fanfic King Kong remake as it did the slim book it was based on. And that is not good.

In case you missed it, Sony Pictures has been forced to cancel the theatrical release of The Interview after hackers have released a catastrophic trove of private emails and scripts, and threatened to bomb theaters showing the film—and theater owners began saying they wouldn't carry it. The film follows a pair of bumbling journalists sent to North Korea to assassinate Kim Jong Un, and apparently, Supreme Leader did not like this plot line. The repercussions of this Hollywood disaster will be felt for years to come, but one piece of collateral damage was a planned adaptation of Pyongyang, Guy DeLisle's graphic novel about his two months spent in the North Korean capital working on an animation project. New Regency has pulled the plug on the project which was to have starred Steve Carrell and be directed by Gore Verbinski from a Steve Conrad script. However the log line for the movie bears little resemblance to the book that I read:

http://youtu.be/b443LL0vkT4 She Makes Comics, Marisa Stotter's documentary about women in comics, is now available. You can download it for $9.99 or pre-order a DVD...

Oh man, everyone in the comic book media game decided to overload the circuits with a flood of casting announcements yesterday! What are YOU...

This gets a HYPE ALERT rating since I'm in it, but Marisa Stotter's documentary She Makes Comics will finally be available on December 9th—either...

Suicide Squad is the first of a variety of DC movies based on non Superman or Batman heroes, set for August 5, 2016, and Variety has just listed the cast and its a big one: