Some years from now, after the dust around the megabudget John Carter debacle settles, and the heads that do wind up rolling in its aftermath come to rest, some expert arbiter of Hollywood travails will survey the carnage and write the definitive tale of what went wrong with Disney and director Andrew Stanton’s sci-fi gamble. And you know what? I’d bet $10 right here and now that the real story won’t deviate much from the one depicted in this no-budget animated retelling. If there’s any justice in the world, Disney’s special-edition DVD/Blu-ray of John Carter will showcase this video among its special features — not so unlike The Battle Over Citizen Kane accompanies its own classic subject. This is history! [ NMA ] Follow S.T. VanAirsdale on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Monday we unveiled the American poster for the Tribeca-bound import Death of a Superhero , and now it’s time for a first look at the film’s trailer. It’s got it all: Live-action, animation, death-defying stunts, the irresistible Aisling Loftus on a scooter, and no less than Andy Serkis demanding to see young star Thomas Brodie-Sangster’s war face. Rahhhr! Read on and have a look. As noted yesterday , Superhero debuts April 17 on cable VOD, iTunes, Amazon and Vudu, then splashes down at the Tribeca Film Festival before a limited theatrical roll-out commences May 4 in Seattle. [Photo credit: Allen Kelly] Follow S.T. VanAirsdale on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Per mogul Richard Branson : “Great news today news from our Astronaut Relations team at Virgin Galactic: our 500th future astronaut customer has just signed up! Even better news is that number 500 is Ashton Kutcher. I gave Ashton a quick call to congratulate and welcome him. He is as thrilled as we are at the prospect of being among the first to cross the final frontier (and back!) with us and to experience the magic of space for himself.” And you don’t have to pay a dime! According to reports , Kutcher covered the $200,000 cost himself. Coulda (shoulda?) been you, Charlie Sheen! [ Virgin ]
Let’s talk Turkey! Ahem. Literally: The country’s CNN outpost brings viewers worldwide this heartwarming story of a teenager in Adana who reportedly sneaked into a railyard where the cast and crew of Skyfall had taken up production of a fight sequence. The young man was caught, queried and removed from the set — but not before smuggling out footage of James Bond slugging it out atop a train. Yaşasın! Honestly, from Ain’t it Cool News’s ” discovery ” of the wholly Turkish-language video to the more professional B-roll footage backing up İbrahim Ali Özden’s well-placed amateur camerawork to a major news network’s earnest interest in some 17-year-old who crashed a movie shoot, I’m not ready to believe this leak wasn’t entirely contrived by Sony’s super-savvy marketing team as the latest crumb in the Skyfall viral campaign. Still! James Bond fighting on a train, etc. etc. Perhaps needless to say, spoilers follow — as does a 30-second ad just ahead of the news story. I can only hope you are fortunate enough to get the Turkish Head and Shoulders spot that I was subjected to, which is roughly 100 times more entertaining than Skyfall will ever be. Bu video Adobe Flash Player’ın son sürümünü gerektirmektedir. [ CNN Turkey via AICN ] Follow S.T. VanAirsdale on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Screening the first 12 minutes of Sound of My Voice and a dynamic new trailer, Fox Searchlight opened WonderCon 2012 with everything they’ve got — footage, star/co-writer Brit Marling and director Zal Batmanglij, that viral secret handshake, and an in-character appearance by the film’s cult members Klaus and Mel, who addressed the Anaheim Convention Center crowd with a pitch to join them on a spiritual journey. Their invitation: Join them at Booth #348 today, where they’ll be happy to meet you, discuss their beloved leader from the year 2054, and “answer any questions and help you with your future.” Fox Searchlight has a lot more to work with here than they did with Marling’s previous film, Another Earth … will the cult viral elements and the played up sci-fi angle they’re working here today at WonderCon help entice audiences? Follow Movieline on Twitter today for updates from WonderCon.
Friday in Washington D.C., Secret Service agents arrested protesters gathered at the Sudanese Embassy to draw attention to the ongoing humanitarian and food crisis in the North African nation. Among those charged: Members of Congress, Martin Luther King III, the president of the NAACP, journalist Nick Clooney, and his son, George Clooney , whose star power lent the protest an elevated media platform. Ol’ George has long been vocal in his political activism, using his celebrity to help shed light on humanitarian concerns, and as evidenced by these 9 most handsomely stoic of Clooney shots from today, he makes social activism look darn good. I’m partly jesting, of course. The suffering of the Sudanese people is far more significant an issue than pictures of a movie star stumping for on his day off. But to many, Clooney’s paparazzi-captured arrest is the first they’ll hear of the conditions in Sudan — or the culpability, as the protesters decried, of the Sudanese government in its own people’s suffering. Here’s a case in which celebrity power can be used to raise awareness on real issues and not, say, Kim Kardashian’s divorce. And it’s shots like these that sometimes get the world’s attention. So shall we take a cue from Clooney? Click for images . Before his arrest, Clooney spoke to journalists gathered outside the Sudanese Embassy. CNN — who identifies Nick Clooney as “Father of George Clooney” in their video coverage, incidentally — reports : “We are here really to ask two very simple questions,” Clooney said moments before his arrest. “The first question is something immediate — and immediately, we need humanitarian aid to be allowed into the Sudan before it becomes the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.” The second thing, he said, “is for the government in Khartoum to stop randomly killing its own innocent men, women and children. Stop raping them and stop starving them. That’s all we ask.” [Photos via Getty Images] [ THR , CNN ]
This is pure speculation, but it’s St. Patrick’s Day weekend! Let’s connect the dots: Lionsgate and WWE Studios are teaming up on a reboot of the 1993 pic Leprechaun , the creature comedy-horror which infamously featured a young Jennifer Aniston and kicked off a series of terrible films centered on a murderous Irish fairy hell-bent on recovering his precious gold. World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), meanwhile, has a diminutive wrestler named Hornswoggle under contract, whose ring persona is that of a mischievous leprechaun. Pure coincidence, or will Leprechaun mark the next screen debut for a WWE star? Granted, it’s a bit of a longshot given that Hornswoggle (real name: Dylan Postl) isn’t one of the major stars in the wrestling world. And beyond its slate of tailor-made wrestling champ vehicles ( The Scorpion King , The Marine , The Condemned ) WWE Studios have been branching out, picking up titles for distribution that don’t feature any of their wrestlers-turned-thespians. But it’s kind of too perfect an opportunity for cross-branding to pass up, don’t you think? No stars have yet been announced for the Leprechaun reboot, so marinate on the possibilities over a mug of green beer this weekend. I mean, who doesn’t want to see Warwick Davis’s shoes filled by an actor who has a finishing move called the Tadpole Splash? [ Variety , @lytrules ]
In Seeking Justice , a man whose wife is assaulted and raped makes a deal with a mysterious vigilante organization that exacts revenge on his behalf but demands from him a favor to be named later. If you’re thinking that sounds like something that will turn out to be a bargain he regrets, you are correct! And if it also sounds like the kind of disposable movie you’ll not catch the title of but will happily half pay attention to on cable some day, well, you’d be right on that account too, though this film has a cast peculiarly heavy on name actors for something getting a minor release. Nicolas Cage plays the husband in question, a New Orleans teacher named Will Gerard, and January Jones (perpetually bored and disdainful) is his wife Laura. Guy Pearce is the head of the unnamed group, Harold Perrineau and Jennifer Carpenter are the couple’s friends. Roger Donaldson, of The Recruit, Species, Cocktail and others, directs this thriller, which goes from adequate to ludicrous but is only ever compelling enough to serve as audiovisual wallpaper while you’re focused on something else. Some of the film’s limpness is due to the fact that Cage plays Will in a minor weird key as opposed to one of his major ones — there are no fits of operatic oddness. At this point in his career, Cage doesn’t seem capable of playing normal, only varying degrees of strange, and having him take on the role of an everyman in over his head is a futile endeavor — he already appears much nuttier than any conspiracy posse Seeking Justice can come up with. (Even the way he jogs looks just a little off.) The one it does present is so powerful you’d think it wouldn’t need to bother with its complicated recruiting structure, which offers a daisy-chain, Strangers on a Train- type process. The man who kills Laura’s rapist is doing so as payment for the avenging of the murder of his wife three months earlier. He knows the crime that was committed by the person he’s been sent to execute, but otherwise has no connection to him. Will receives the necklace that was stolen from his wife during the attack and knows the deed is done. Six months later, the two are putting their lives back together, though Laura is still anxious about making sure the doors are locked and is learning how to shoot a gun and Will is — dramatic music queue! — receiving a call instructing him to a meeting where he’s going to have to fulfill his end of the bargain. He’s handed a letter to mail, but later is instructed to open it instead — inside, he discovers photos of a woman and her two girls he’s told to follow and observe at the zoo. The second half of his deal involves his killing someone, a man (Jason Davis) he’s told is named Leon Walczak and is a pedophile. They give him a time and place and direct him as to the best way to make it look like an accident, but he doesn’t want to do it, he’s not a murderer, he made a mistake, and so on and so on. They threaten Laura, he cries foul but finds himself there at the appointed time and place trying to warn his intended victim, which doesn’t go well. And then Leon Walczak turns out to not be as described by Simon at all, and Will tumbles headlong into trouble. Seeking Justice is set in New Orleans, and there’s something potentially interesting to be found in the idea of a vigilante organization in a city in recovery that’s struggled with more crime than it has necessarily had the resources to deal with. “I got into this because I was sick of seeing this city rot,” a character explains, saying that he’s chosen to be active where “most good citizens are just along for the ride.” But the film has nothing intelligent to say about taking the law into your own hands. The organization, which uses the code phrase “the hungry rabbit jumps” (no one snickers when saying this or makes a “crow flies at midnight” crack, so you know they’re for real), is large, so large that every other man Will runs into seems to have a connection to it; it’s also operated in cells, one of which Simon heads up. The group seems needlessly fond of signaling by having someone buy an arranged candy at an arranged location or sneak into a classroom to write a number on a whiteboard instead of just calling, but why have a mysterious organization if you’re not going to take the opportunity to act mysterious? Despite their resources and the fact that they seem to know everything before it happens, they’re stymied by Will once he learns to get in touch with his inner tough guy (and doesn’t even need a fiery skull head to do so). The vigilantes make criminals answer for what they’ve done, but who will do the same for the vigilantes? In Seeking Justice , there’s no urgency to the question. Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Happy 69th birthday to David Cronenberg — a great Canadian and not a bad filmmaker, either. And because this has gone so well in the past , let’s celebrate by asking: What’s Cronenberg’s best feature film? His worst? And where do the rest fall in between? The answers are obvious: 19. Naked Lunch 18. Crimes of the Future 17. Fast Company 16. M. Butterfly 15. Stereo 14. They Came from Within 13. The Brood 12. A Dangerous Method 11. Rabid 10. eXistenZ 9. Crash 8. Spider 7. Eastern Promises 6. Videodrome 5. The Dead Zone 4. The Fly 3. Scanners 2. A History of Violence 1. Dead Ringers PREVIOUSLY
Who does the most accomplished canine performer in Hollywood have to lick to get some hardware around here? “He’s the toast of this year’s award season, now Uggie, the Jack Russell star of this year’s Academy Award-winning silent film The Artist , will walk the red carpet and serve as a presenter at the only major award show where animals take center stage – The Humane Society of the United States’ 26th Genesis Awards. ‘The Genesis Awards are about honoring the animal protection message, not the performance, but if we had an award for a dog who’s become a poster animal for people not giving up on their unruly companion animals, we’d give it to Uggie… now, there’s a thought!’, says Beverly Kaskey, senior director and executive producer of the annual Genesis Awards.” [ Genesis Awards ]
