“Believe in your own power, you must.” Words of wisdom from Star Wars guru Yoda have finally found their true purpose: Instructing a nation of instant noodle-eaters to activate their inborn power… to boil water! Seriously. You thought Vader’s ” Nooooo! ” was blasphemous? Where’s your god now, nerds?
A Very Movieline Thanksgiving continues! Like Louis Virtel and Julie Miller , I’m quite grateful for the cinematic discoveries that came my way in 2011. Raise your glass along with me as I give thanks to five of the movie-related things that kept me going this year, including the sweet sounds of the Baby Goose, the best film fest-karaoke super fun time of the year, and — yes — Tyler Perry.
We rarely think of as great movies as breezy ones: Breeziness is supposedly only for disposable entertainment, though achieving filmmaking greatness in the way we normally think of it — with impressive sets, heavy-duty acting and ultra-polished cinematography — is probably easier than brushing a movie with just the right amount of gold dust. Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist is a gold dust movie, a picture whose very boldness lies in its perceived lightness. This is a silent movie in black-and-white, and if it were only that, it would be a pleasant novelty. But The Artist isn’t a nostalgia trip, nor is it a scolding admonishment to honor the past. Instead, it’s a picture that romances its audience into watching in a new way — by, paradoxically, asking us to watch in an old way. The Artist is perhaps the most modern movie imaginable right now.
With J.J. Abrams finally all-the-way onboard for sure, the Star Trek sequel is moving firmly ahead, settling into a May 17, 2013 release slot. What’s more? Abrams and LOST veteran Damon Lindelof are co-scripting with Trek writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman. What’s even more-more? Star Trek 2 will reportedly be filmed in 3-D. Get ready for lens flares in yo’ face! Beam me up, Scotty — right into the freaking screen ! Bring your own vintage, pre-annihilation Romulan ale and Federation perfume come May 2013 and make it a 5-D experience. Now that’d be going boldly where no filmmaker has gone before. [ Deadline ]
“Starting today, the company will offer the features as part of its iPad application, letting users browse merchandise from shows and movies. [… Steve] Yankovich, 50, was inspired to develop the technology while watching the movie Something’s Gotta Give , which featured a toaster he wanted. ‘You’ll be able to buy exactly what’s there,’ said Yankovich, who runs mobile services at the San Jose, California-based company.” [ Bloomberg ]
Tragic news from the New Orleans set of G.I. Joe: Retaliation , where a crew member suffered fatal injuries after an accident while breaking down the set. Filming closed earlier this week under director Jon M. Chu , who had already Tweeted his departure from the set days before the incident occurred. The tragedy marks the latest in a string of on-set accidents on big budget studio productions including The Expendables 2 and The Hobbit .
As arguably the film world’s closest contemporary equivalent to Sir Laurence Olivier, the classically trained, commercially adventurous actor/filmmaker Kenneth Branagh makes an ideal candidate to play the great man in this week’s My Week With Marilyn .
Though The Avengers doesn’t come out until May, it’s already time to play the same game we did with Bridesmaids ‘s first poster : Who goes hardest ? Is it Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man? Is it Scarlett Johansson as Natasha Romanoff? What about Jeremy Renner as Clint Barton? We score all eight characters’ ferocity and pick a winner after the jump.
To dispatch with the pleasantries and get straight to the but : Arthur Christmas favors the late-century style of computer animation that turns characters into smooth, plasticky dirigibles, adding a Made-in-China cello-skin to faces and scenery alike and vacuum-sealing the works for maximum digital freshness. I’ve never cared for the look — if cartoons could be embalmed, that’s how I imagine they’d be — and in sharing a release weekend with a Muppets revival, the limits of Arthur ‘s CGI puppeteering seem even more stark. That is of course, until you consider almost everything outside of my but — which may well not be yours — which is to say the near-total mitigation of aesthetic bummers with an avalanche of charm, wit, and enlivening, highly oxygenated performances.
If you have $10,000 and no soul, I’ve got the perfect Christmas gift for you: The engagement ring that Roman Polanski bought for Sharon Tate in 1967 — the one she was wearing when the Manson family murdered her and her unborn child — can be yours ! The website GottaHaveRockandRoll.com is graciously putting the Valley of the Dolls star’s jewelry up for auction, and if you wanna go a little helter-skelter this holiday season, I suggest you snatch up the pricey trinket without looking back. Fancy and fun! Coming up next on GottaHaveRockandRoll.com: Some plane debris with Jim Croce’s entrails on it. [ TMZ ]