The trailer and website for director Robert Zemeckis' motion-capture follow-up to the disappointing Polar Express, Beowulf are online. The film is computer animated and will use motion capture techniques similiar to Polar Express.
Beowulf tells of a warrior (the title character, played by Ray Winstone) who must protect his town from the monstrous Grendel (Crispin Glover reuniting with Zemeckis for the first time since Back to the Future); an evil thing out killing all the towns folk. But once he gets Grendel out the way, then comes Grendel's mother (Jolie) -- a powerful woman who looks to seduce Beowulf before exacting her revenge for the murder of her son.
Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman are the screenwriters for it. Gaiman described the film as a "cheerfully violent and strange take on the Beowulf legend."
Beowulf will be projected in 3-D in over a thousand theaters for its release date in November 2007. It will additionally be released in 35mm alongside the 3-D projections.
Kevin Smith’s revealed to Rotten Tomatoes that the title of his long-discussed horror movie is Red State, and that it will deal with a Fred Phelps type. If you’re not familiar with Phelps, he’s an Evangelical Christian who, along with members of his church, show up in public with signs saying things like “God Hates Fags,” at funerals for gay people (including Matthew Shepard) with signs saying "Your Son Is Burning In Hell" and at armed services member funerals with signs saying that 9/11 happened because "God Hates America."</a>
"That dude has always fascinated me and he's really informed the horror movie that I'm working on," Smith told Rotten Tomatoes, "The movie's called 'Red State' and it's very much about that subject matter, that point of view and that position taken to the absolute extreme. It's certainly not Phelps, himself, but it's very much inspired by a Phelps figure.
“[T]he notion of using a Phelps-like character as a villain, as horrifying and scary as that guy can be, there's even something more insidious than him that lurks out there in as much as a public or a government that allows it and that's the other thing that I'm trying to examine in a big, big way. It's weird because for a few months I've been saying 'horror movie' and technically it is, but it's also not a very traditional horror movie in the sense that people have been asking me, 'Is it a slasher movie? Is it like the Japanese horror flicks?' It'd be much easier to just show it to them when I'm done and be like, 'This is what I meant.' At which point I'm sure there'll be people saying, 'This ain't a horror movie!' But to me, it is."
-Tobey Maguire said about making more SPIDER-MAN movies, "To me it seems like this is a natural point for the team to break up because we have a lot of story conclusions that were going along for the main characters for the first two movies and we kind of tie almost everything up for the third movie."
In a recent interview, Sam Raimi stated he's seriously considering a fourth film. He explains, "I love Spider-Man and I love working with Kirsten, Tobey, James Franco)... I just have to make sure that when I'm done with Spider-Man 3, I'm really still fascinated with the character. At this moment I'm fascinated with him." But Raimi says he "couldn't imagine" making a fourth installment if Maguire didn't sign on for it. -After the cut is an interview from chud.com with everyone's favorite Israeli comic book movie producer Avi Arad!
Dan Aykroyd made an appearance on a country music station and announced that a Ghostbusters III is happening.
Aykroyd told the DJ that the new film would be a CGI movie, which was the only way they could convince Bill Murray to come back.
Aykroyd said, "Ghostbusters 3 lives today. A year ago it didn’t.
“I wrote a script called Hell Bent, Ghostbusters go to hell basically. The premise is that it’s Manhellton. There’s Manhattan and ManHELLton. And if you can build an inter-dimensional phase system so that you can go from one dimension to another. We’ve succeeded doing that and we go to the hell side.
"Downtown, Folley Square - where the cops are, they’re all blue minotaurs. Central Park is this huge deep mine, green demons there, surrounded by black onyx thousand foot high apartment buildings with classic red devils. Very wealthy. And we go visit a Donald Trump like character - Mr. Siffler. Lou Siffler, Lucifer. So I will say we meet the devil in it.
"It won’t happen as a live action because Billy [Murray] won’t come on to the live action but he will voice his part, as a CGI animated project.
"With CGI, and animation, the way these cartoons are done, we can do everything I wrote in that script for a lot less money.”
In November of 2005, Harold "Egon" Ramis said, "What Danny had originally conceived was sending us to a special-effects hell, a netherworld full of phenomenal visual environments and boiling pits. But what works so well about the first two (films) is the mundane-ness of it all. So my notion was that hell exists in the same place as our consensus reality, but it's like a film shutter. It's the darkness between the 24 frames. So we create a device to do it, and it's in a warehouse in Brooklyn. When we step out of the chamber, it looks just like New York, but it's hell. Everything's grid-locked; no cars are moving and all the drivers are swearing at each other in different foreign languages. No two people speak the same language. It's all the worst things about modern urban life, just magnified."
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I'm withholding judgment, but I would hope that Aykroyd would have learned his lesson with Blues Brothers 2000.
