See the original post:
Click on the player above to check out hip-hop and R&B singer Natasha Mosley‘s new song, “Over,” from her album, “Rose Hall!”
Posted in Celebrities, Hollywood, Hot Stuff, News
Tagged Album, check-out, check-out-hip, Hollywood, Music, natasha, natasha mosley, new-artist, new-song, player, r&b, the-player
See original here:
www.OnlinePianist.com Beginner version available on our website!! Request a song – http Learn how to play Nothing Like Us by Justin Bieber (from the “Believe Acoustic” album) on the piano with the only animated piano tutorial online! For the full piano lesson with personal adjustment of the player’s feature visit www.onlinepianist.com http://www.youtube.com/v/lCLoDpMBp84?version=3&f=videos&app=youtube_gdata See the original post here: Justin Bieber – Nothing Like Us (Believe Acoustic Album) – Piano Tutorial
Justin Bieber – Nothing Like Us (Believe Acoustic Album) – Piano Tutorial
Posted in Celebrities, Gossip, Hot Stuff, TV, Videos
Tagged acoustic, beginner, bennyhollywood, celeb news, feature-visit, Music, only-animated, piano, piano lesson, player, the-player, TMZ, video, Youtube
Samuel L. Jackson has created, as he put it, ” the most reprehensible negro in cinema history ,” with his portrayal of Stephen, the slave who runs Calvin Candie’s ( Leonardo DiCaprio ) Candyland plantation in Django Unchained . But, the actor told Movieline that he’s even more despicable in scenes that were cut from the final print of Quentin Tarantino’s spaghetti southern. Jackson’s character treats his fellow slaves with great cruelty as runs his master’s plantation with an iron fist and a calculating intellect. “I am the power behind the throne …the Spook Cheney of Candyland,” Jackson said of his role at a jammed press conference for the movie on Sunday morning that included Tarantino, Jamie Foxx , Kerry Washington , Christoph Waltz , DiCaprio, Don Johnson, Walton Goggins and Jonah Hill , despite that last actor’s miniscule cameo as a Klansman identified only as “Bag Head #2.”. Jackson’s sinister performance is one of the artistic high points of the movie and will have cineastes dissecting the complexity of his character for a long time to come. And if Tarantino decides to release a director’s cut of Django Unchained , there will be much more to discuss. In an interview with Jackson that will run in its entirety later this week, the actor told me, “There are scenes we shot that aren’t in the movie in which I do some things that are way more reprehensible than the things you actually see on screen.” Without getting too spoilery here, Jackson explained that a pivotal scene in which Django is captured originally ran much longer and involved Stephen torturing Foxx’s character. ” I burn his nipples off with a hot poker. I do all kinds of shit to him in that scene that would have just made people go Ahhhhh!” said Jackson, squirming in his seat for effect. (Tarantino may finally have shot a sequence more horrific than the ear removal sequence in Reservoir Dogs .) He added that the hot poker scene amounts to payback for another, earlier scene that was also cut from the movie in which Stephen and Django ( Jamie Foxx ) have a physical altercation upon the latter character’s arrival at Candyland. Although the tension between Django and Stephen is palpable in the final cut of the movie, Jackson said it underscored the two characters enmity for each other. Jackson also told me that the excised torture scene was his favorite of the movie, in part, because he got to explain to Django, “I’m doing this because you put your hands on me.” Although there’s no shortage of bloody brutality in the cut of Django Unchained that will open in theaters on Christmas Day, Tarantino explained that the scenes he cut would add a lot to the plot and in some ways change the story. Though he said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if I did” eventually release a director’s cut of the movie, “I want this to be the story for a while.” Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
Read the original here:
Samuel L. Jackson Says He Burned Off Jamie Foxx’s Nipples In Cut ‘Django Unchained’ Scene
Posted in Celebrities, Gossip, Hollywood, Hot Stuff, News
Tagged bennyhollywood, Christmas, movie, power, sherlock-holmes, stars, story, the-player
Game developer Crytek has hired director Albert Hughes to bring its Crysis gaming franchise to the big screen. Half of the Hughes brothers team behind Menace II Society and T he Book of Eli , Albert is directing The 7 Wonders Of Crysis 3 , an online series set in a reforested future New York 2047. Behold the teaser: Production companies often have trouble converting video game properties to film, which is why Crytek isn’t bothering — with the production companies. Using no actors or movie cameras, Hughes is directing the game engine itself, rendering his cinematic vision with the same software players will use to shoot each other in the face. And here are four reasons to look forward to it. 1. The Greatest Graphics The Crysis series has always been famous for its stunning visuals. While other games worry about the mass-market, Crytek’s approach is “Bring us your most powerful and expensive computers and we will make them cry gorgeously detailed tears with realistic fluid dynamics.” Its CryEngine is the heart of the entire company, rendering massive, fantastically detailed worlds. In fact, Crytek’s first game, Far Cry, began as a technology demo which impressed people so hard it was developed into a full game. The engine has been constantly updated every since. The latest iteration, CryEngine 3, eats supercomputers and spits out state-of-the-art graphics cards. 2. A True Video-Game Movie It was only a matter of time until someone saw video games and asked “Wait a minute, why do we even still need people?” The answer is lots of reasons. But when most of the people in your film are extras designed to catch the heroes’ bullets, those reasons become less important. The technology for vactors — “virtual actors” — simply isn’t ready yet. But computers have been better than reality at special effects for years. Live-action movies already use computers for all the difficult bits. So when you’re setting the entire movie inside a computer, the whole world’s a stage: a special-effects stage loaded with pyrotechnics. And when you consider that Crysis 3 is about a nanosuit-enhanced soldier battling corrupt security forces, like the guy above, whose name is “Psycho,” and aliens, which do you think will be a bigger part of that story: facial expressions or explosions? Big-name videogames have become more like movies every year. Where once the player was a roving character exploring a maze of hallways, now they’re a single cog in a vast cinematic machine. Carefully guided from set piece to set piece by invisible walls and an omnipresent director, distributing cutscenes between every 10 explosions. Setting the game to “play” itself by hiring a director to say what happens instead of a gamer is just the logical next step in that evolution. 3. The Product Is The Advertisement Calling The 7 Wonders of Crysis 3 a fusion of video games and cinematics would be incomplete. It’s really a combination of video games, cinematics, and advertising. And that’s no bad thing. Sure, it’s blatantly designed to show off the proprietary Crytek graphics, but video games, movies, and adverts are the three fields most based on showing off amazing visuals and compelling stories that completely capture our attention. The resulting cinematic chimera has great promise. After all, Guy Ritchie has already directed an ad for Black Ops II . When the guy behind the Sherlock Holmes franchise is directing the star of that franchise in a video-game commercial, anyone who doubts they’re just as big as movies simply hasn’t been paying attention. Besides, any product is meant to be its own advertisement. Here that advice is literally true. Games As Art (And New Ideas) Hybridization always creates new ideas. And the only people still arguing about whether video games are art were eligible to retire before we started playing them. Even the most violent shooter can be stuffed with artistic flourish and deeper meanings. Bioshock was a beautiful steampunk fantasy which turned a generation onto Atlas Shrugged . The “soldier shoots other soldiers, also aliens” might not sound like a vehicle for quite as much content, but it’s beautiful. Crysis has always been about binaries, and not just in the 1s and 0s that make it happen. Every aspect of the games has a duality. You fight armed human soldiers, then inexplicable aliens. You’re outfitted with state-of-the-art technology but find yourself enmeshed in nature. You’re encased in a nanotechnological miracle of body-enhancing armor and you find yourself wielding a bow and arrow. And it looks awesome. And it looks awesome. The series started on Dec 12. You can watch the first episode right now on the Crysis YouTube channel . (Be sure to choose max HD quality for the full effect.) Luke McKinney loves the real world, but only because it has movies and video games in it. He responds to every tweet . Follow Luke McKinney on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
Here is the original post:
Four Reasons To Be Excited About ‘The 7 Wonders Of Crysis 3’
Posted in Celebrities, Gossip, Hollywood, Hot Stuff, News
Tagged attention, awards, celeb news, crytek, entire, Game, hughes, movie, People, players, psych, sherlock-holmes, the-player, wonders
Killing Them Softly is set in Boston, maybe. Someone mentions living in Somerville, a scattering of the characters have the accent, and they talk about going down to Florida. But the film was shot in New Orleans, often in the industrial edges still ragged from Hurricane Katrina, and the only people who seem to inhabit its universe are gangsters — high level ones with pretentions of civility and hardscrabble losers struggling to get a few dollars together by way of hazardous schemes. What ties this abstract, violent place to the real world is the 2008 presidential election, which provides a backdrop for its tale of an ill-advised robbery and the guy brought in to clean up after it. There’s George W. Bush talking about the bailout on a TV in the corner as two guys knock over a card game; there’s Barack Obama promising change on a billboard over a neighborhood filled with empty lots and abandoned houses. It’s a neat idea, matching the brisk kill-or-be-killed business of unforgiving criminal life to an America staggering from the economic crisis. But as in his last feature, the gorgeous and stiltedly self-conscious The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford , Australian filmmaker Andrew Dominik shows a tendency to lean too hard on his symbolism rather than letting it exist as part of the whole. In Jesse James it was the tying in of the last days of the outlaw to a meditation on celebrity. Here, it’s the capitalism-as-a-disease parallels on a national and narrative scale that start to feel on the nose long before a character barks “America’s not a country, it’s a business — now fucking pay me!” and Barrett Strong’s “Money (That’s What I Want)” plays over the closing credits. But when Dominik , working off his own screenplay adaptation of a novel by George V. Higgins, is less focused on trying to make an important movie, he turns out an indisputably fun one, a stylish and flamboyantly macho affair that cribs pleasantly from Mamet, Blue Velvet , Tarantino and Scorsese . The film starts with Frankie (Scoot McNairy), a ferrety guy recently out of prison and eager to convince his Australian pal Russell ( Ben Mendelsohn , memorably scary in Animal Kingdom ) to get in with him on a job. Russell’s working his own scheme involving kidnapping purebred dogs and using the money to buy an ounce of heroin and become a dealer, but Frankie’s pal Johnny (Vincent Curatola) has what he claims is a foolproof gig. They’ll rob a poker game run by a guy named Markie ( Ray Liotta ), who arranged to hold up his own game once in the past and got away with it. The games are protected, but if his gets robbed again everyone will assume he’s the one behind it. Killing Them Softly starts off with its main heist, if it can be called that, and then turns to the fallout, letting things rattle along for a considerable amount of time before introducing Jackie ( Brad Pitt ), a guy who can’t really be described as a hero or antihero. Jackie’s a fixer and a hitman who’s filling in for the last go-to guy, Dillon (Sam Shepard, glimpsed only in flashbacks), and he’s a competent, no nonsense figure in a world full of fuck-ups. Dominik’s film is interesting in that the crimes themselves, whether stick-ups or killings, are rarely difficult — it’s the aftermath that gets people in trouble, when they can’t keep their mouths shut about what they just pulled off or don’t know when to cut their losses and get out of town. Dominik shows an open appreciation for his actors and for the way tough guys, aspiring and genuine, talk to each other — and Killing Them Softly is as much centered around talking as it is action. Pitt, playing a practical know-it-all who falls somewhere between Rusty Ryan and Tyler Durden, is terribly entertaining shooting the shit with Driver (Richard Jenkins), the representative of the unspecified group who hired him, the two complaining about the new “total corporate mentality” like disgruntled office workers on a smoke break. Later, he brings in Mickey (James Gandolfini) from New York to help out, and watches him with worried calculation as he turns out to be in rough shape. If gangsterism is just capitalism in a more raw form, then Jackie is the creature best suited for this world. He knows the rules and enforces them without prejudice, because it’s just business and this is just a job. Killing Them Softly doesn’t give that idea its intended sting. The film wants to be angry and scathing, but, to its credit, enjoys its characters and its mechanics too much to have a sharp edge. Whether it’s showing someone’s death in a luxurious slow motion spray of bullets and glass or lingering as someone drunkenly reminisces about a girl he sometimes sleeps with but has no hold on, the film is too fond of its rich details to allow them to become damning symbols of the system in which they can be found. Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
View post:
REVIEW: Brad Pitt Makes One Glorious Bastard In Stylish, Self-Conscious ‘Killing Them Softly’
Posted in Celebrities, Gossip, Hollywood, Hot Stuff, News
Tagged america, audio, driver, outlaw, quentin-tarantino, representative, review, softly, the-player, Videos
James Rolfe is the Angry Video Game Nerd, a man who knows how to define a niche. His eponymous online videos have featured on YouTube, ScrewAttack, GameTrailers, Opie & Anthony and Cinemassacre, and for eight years anyone who ever wanted to watch a man get extremely angry while screaming about old video games knew exactly where to go. And a lot of people did. The series is the textbook — no, the wiki entry — for online viral success. Initially made as a laugh for a few friends, the early videos became YouTube sensations and spawned over a hundred episodes, millions of hits, multiple DVDs, and now the the impossible dream of most online video makers: a full feature film. It’s another victory for crowd funding. Rolfe http://www.indiegogo.com/Angry-Video-Game-Nerd-The-Movie
See more here:
F-balls And Yuengling For Everyone! The Angry Video Game Nerd Is Making A Movie
Posted in Celebrities, Gossip, Hollywood, Hot Stuff, News
Tagged audio, excellent-twist, filmography, interior, mexico, quentin-tarantino, the-player, video, Videos
Now that the scariest parts of Silent Hill: Revelation 3D are proving to be the grisly reviews and box-office results, it’ s a good time to look at a handful of choice video games that have much greater potential than the Konami franchise to be blockbuster horror movies. In at least two of the examples I cite below, along with the pros and cons of adapting them, the film industry apparently agrees — or did at one point — that the game titles would translate well to the big screen. Actually making the movies adaptations of the games has not worked so well. 5. BioShock In 2009, BioShock looked like it was destined to be a movie. Pirates of the Caribbean franchise master Gore Verbinski was slated to direct the visually stunning game in which a plane-crash survivor in 1960 finds himself in the underwater Art Deco-style city of Rapture and its mutated inhabitants to survive. When the project ran into budget issues, Verbinski turned over the director’s reins to 28 Weeks Later filmmaker Juan Carlos Fresnadillo and agreed to serve as a producer. Last May, however, Fresnadillo told Playlist he was no longer involved and that the project was on hold because Universal Studios and the game’s creator couldn’t agree on a budget or whether the project should have an R rating or a PG-13, which would attract a broader audience. With the much-delayed third game of the franchise, BioShock Infinite due out in February 2013, and set, this time, in a floating sky-city called Columbia, it’s time to revive this project. Pros: BioShock is beautiful. Simply seeing the steampunk city of Rapture on the big screen would be worth the ticket. With more than 4 million copies of the game sold and a plot that a) is better than most fantasy/horror movies and b) has actually driven the argument of videogames as art, it’s remarkable that it’s not already a movie. Cons: Video games inevitably lose their interactive components when they’re adapted into feature films, but these elements are so integral to the telling of the story that removing them could prove problematic. Videogame tropes such as highlighted objectives and extended cut-scenes aren’t optional extras in this case: they’re built into the plot the same way your heart is built in to you. 4. Left 4 Dead Pros: Valve’s multiplayer masterpiece — and its sequel, Left 4 Dead 2 — are the most viciously fun co-operative games ever made. Four very different characters must team up to survive the zombie apocalypse, or at least make it a little bit further. In addition to the teamwork element, which would translate well to the big screen, Left 4 Dead has some of the best incidental writing in games. Valve understands that writing dialogue is just as important as writing code, because nobody cares if a character’s hair is beautifully rendered when they can’t stand to spend the time with him. Added bonus: the game treats each level as a movie, complete with loading screen posters. Cons: Since there isn’t exactly a shortage of zombie projects out there in movie land, the writing and direction have got to be exceptional. Done properly, the combination of white-knuckle action and well-developed characters could make zombie movies exciting again. Maybe Hollywood should give Valve a lot of money and ask it to produce a script.
Continue reading here:
Dark Souls: 5 Video Games That Should Be Horror Movies
Posted in Celebrities, Gossip, Hollywood, Hot Stuff, News
Tagged caribbean, david-wong, dimension, Game, gore verbinski, maybe-hollywood, mma, New Movie, project, survivor, the-player, writing
The Game’s Bond. James Bond. Which means that you will be Bored. Majorly Bored. Agent 007 should be perfect video game character. “Kicking ass with the latest fun gadgets” is his actual job description. So it’s a shame that almost every Bond game sucks. Not even Blofeld got to betray Bond this many times and come back to do it again. The funny thing is that Bond has even played video games himself. In Never Say Never Again, he plays Domination against villainous SPECTRE agent Maximillian Largo. Each round costs thousands of dollars and issues powerful electric shocks, making it a great analogy for the Bond video games that civillians get to play: expensive and painful. Domination is not nearly as much fun to play as it sounds. It has holographic 3D graphics and is based on satellite laser weapons and nuclear warheads, but Largo explains that it’s just a simple target game: shoot the things when they light up. That’s less gameplay than Minesweeper. It’s also badly designed, because it’s a crosshair shooting game controlled by a joystick. Which, if you’ve played twitch-shooters, is like trying to control a scalpel while riding a unicycle. And it’s still better than most real world Bond games. Why are they so bad? Because Bond might be perfect for great games, but he’s also so incredibly famous that he can sell shit ones. The Bond license has been shoved onto everything from text adventures to a side-scrolling “bouncing car getting blown up by spaceships and scuba divers” simulator. I’m not exaggerating. Rare Ltd finally realized Bond’s potential in 1997 when Eon Productions smartly licensed GoldenEye t o a studio that actually knew how to make good games. The resulting product wasn’t merely good — it was one of the most important console shooters of all time, because it proved that console shooters could actually be good, which they weren’t until GoldenEye . One of the most successful N64 games ever made, GoldenEye combined accurate shooting with an unbelievably faithful rendition of the movie. (The split-screen multiplayer mode remains one of the fondest gaming memories for an entire generation You didn’t just recognize parts of the movie in the video game, you recognized parts of the video game when you re-watched the movie. Rare understood that by printing “007” on the cover of a regular action game meant being smarter, sharper and simply better than everything else with guns in it. And it succeeded. The game was stuffed with love for the franchise. Not only was it an incredible recreation of the titular movie, but bonus levels brought in Moonraker lasers, Jaws, the Golden Gun and Baron Samedi. It was originally meant to be the best multiplayer ever made, with a mode where four players could each be a different Bond — Moore, Connery, Dalton, and Brosnan. But, as further proof that the lawyers of the world are sucking the fun out of life, this mode was removed from the final game. A wide range of cheat options extended playability. Unfortunately Rare really did understand the nature of James Bond — which is why they moved on to the next mission without looking back. It turned down the chance to make Tomorrow Never Dies , instead building the spiritual sequel of shooting excellence in 2000 with Perfect Dark . Stuffed with stylish shooting and cunning gadgetry, it would have made the perfect 007 game. But Rare was so good it didn’t need the license to succeed. From that point on, almost all Bond games were shooters, but they never mattered. Where Rare had been the elite double-oh agent, the others were an army of uniformed minions wildly spraying machine gun fire and missing the point. They took bog-standard gun games and put some Bond sprites on top. There was less passion and spark than a morgue during a power outage (except there are people who would actually enjoy that). As the games got more desperate they tried to replicate Goldeneye’ s success, the results were more disastrous than Dr. Frankenstein’s attempts to replicate life. GoldenEye: Rogue Agent literally put GoldenEye in the title of a totally unrelated shooter. The 2010 GoldenEye 007 remake rewrote the original with Daniel Craig, improved graphics, and blew more than that compressed air pellet Bond used to kill Dr Kananga. You just can’t re-skin something from 13 years ago and expect it to be impressive. The remake was aimed at exactly no one: retro fans were aghast at the altered level structure and models, while contemporary fans were turned off by the incredibly unimaginative level layout and zombie-grade enemy intelligence. Like all Bond technology, the original GoldenEye game was revolutionary at the time but almost unusable now. A true Bond game needs to be smarter, sharper, simply better at being Bond than everything else on the market, and we finally have the technology to make that happen. In the old days every shooter was the same game with different sprites. Now we can build entire game mechanics around the character. Batman’s Arkham City is the greatest character game ever made — everything from the graphics to the combat system flows perfectly from the character. Get it right and you’re unstoppable, but even one mistake and you’re in deep trouble. The Hitman series proves that we can build interesting worlds with multiple paths to reach our goal. Bond isn’t an Arnold Schwarzenegger shooting machine. Games which set him up against an endless wave of enemies don’t even know who he is. Bond is the elite. Bond is the best. The original GoldenEye understood that, offering amazing unlocks for not only completing the level, but doing it at maximum difficulty in record time. A Bond game should be a razor-sharp shooter in a sophisticated world. We don’t need another automatic-fire grinding chore like Gears of War . We don’t want another hallway shooter, where we run down pre-set pathways and the most amazing cut-scene — with helicopters crashing through skyways as we parachute to safety — are just glorified loading screens. All we did was “Press A to jump.” That’s less gameplay than an elevator and with the exact same function. Think Mirror’s Edge meets The Club with multiple paths and an upgrade system. Every level is a speed run with a score multiplier for combo shooting and avoiding damage, designed for replayability as you learn your trade. You can blast your way through a building of enemies for an “Agent” rating or rappel down the side snap-shotting guards as it collapses to earn “00”. Because you’re the one who worked out how to collapse it. Because you’re Bond. Improved scores earn “Q points”, unlocking new gadgets, each of which works on each level in different ways, and you have to choose which you bring on each mission. Think grappling hooks, glass-shattering sonics, vehicle remote control, each providing fun options in levels and new ones in old ones. Think of Hitman , where the very first mission can be completed in a few seconds if you return with later gear. Imagine replaying old levels to beat your high score (and earn more equipment), optimizing your strategies, trying out new things. Imagine working out how to beat your enemy in then fastest, coolest way possible, then realize that you’re not just controlling Bond: You’re playing as him. Luke McKinney loves the real world, but only because it has movies and video games in it. He responds to every tweet. Follow Luke McKinney on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
Read the original post:
A View To A Killing: Why James Bond Video Games (With The Exception of Goldeneye) Are Such A Sorry Lot
Posted in Celebrities, Gossip, Hollywood, Hot Stuff, News
Tagged baron, games, goldeneye, graphics, medium, nature, the-player, time, video-games
Also in Monday afternoon’s round-up of news briefs, Len Wiseman is being tapped to direct a classic thriller reboot. Innocence of Muslims actress is heading to federal court. And Benicio Del Toro eyes his latest project. Lee Daniels’ The Butler Heads to The Weinstein Company TWC picked up U.S. rights to the film by Oscar-nominated director Lee Daniels. Forest Whitaker stars in the true-life inspired story about an African-American man who served as a butler in the White House under eight U.S. Presidents. The film also stars Oprah Winfrey, Mariah Carey, John Cusack, Jane Fonda, Cuba Gooding, Jr., Terrence Howard, Minka Kelly, Lenny Kravitz, Melissa Leo, James Marsden and Vanessa Redgrave. The film traces the dramatic changes that swept American society, from the civil rights movement to Vietnam and beyond, and how those changes affected this man’s life and family. “Lee tells stories in a way no one else does,” said TWC head Harvey Weinstein. “What struck me most about this story is the perspective it comes from, which in this case is the butler- a man who was a fly on the wall for decades in the world’s most powerful home.” The Butler is currently in production in New Orleans. Around the ‘net… Jake Gyllenhaal Eyes Prisoners Gyllenhaal is in talks to star opposite Hugh Jackman the the gritty thriller, being directed by Incendies director Denis Velleneuve. The story centers around a small town carpenter (Jackman) whose young daughter and best friend are kidnapped. He in turn kidnaps the man he believes is responsible for the crime, THR reports . Len Wiseman to Direct The Mummy Universal Pictures has tapped Wiseman to direct the reboot of the franchise that took in $1.25 billion over three films. Jon Spaihts is writing the script for the studio which is looking at a possible Summer 2014 release, Deadline reports . Innocence of Muslims Actress to Sue in Federal Court Cindy Lee Garcia named YouTube, Google and the film’s supposed producer Nakoula Basseley Nakoula in a law suit alleging fraud and emotional distress. Claiming a copyright issue, her lawyer Cris Armenta said on the Today show that they will dismiss the state court lawsuit and head to federal court, Deadline reports . Benicio Del Toro Set for How the Light Gets In Del Toro and producer Laura Bickford who partnered on Traffic and Che are partnering on How the Light Gets In , described as a “contemporary love story set in New York, London, Paris and Berlin.” In the film, Del Toro will play a Chilean novelist living in Paris who falls in love. Variety reports .
Read the original:
Forest Whitaker, Oprah Winfrey’s The Butler Heads To The Weinsteins; Jake Gyllenhaal Eyes Prisoners: Biz Break
Posted in Celebrities, Gossip, Hollywood, Hot Stuff, News
Tagged biz break, companies, film, House, light-gets, London, mariah carey, mma, movie, oprah-winfrey, paris, the-player, white, writers
Everyone is either looking forward to Wreck-It Ralph or still refers to video games as “those beeping boximacallits.” There are no other options. Gaming movies have a bad reputation, which is weird, because, despite what you may have heard and read, they have yet to materialize. We’ve seen dozens of action movies that share the titles of video games and little else, and run from reprehensible to ridiculously profitable — sometimes in the same series . We’ve also watched feature-length advertisements for video games that we’ve paid to see in hopes that there might be a movie in there somewhere. Case in point: Universal Pictures’ The Wizard. But that may be about to change. Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph could be the first true gaming movie — the first of a genre that could some day stand alongside war, horror and gangster movie genres. It’s a genre whose time has come. The children being brought to the latest Disney movie have grown up with games, while their parents have watched their kids — and the games — grow from simple noise-making bundles of reflexes to fully interactive 3D characters. I haven’t seen Wreck-It Ralph yet, but I already know one thing that’s smart about it. The movie doesn’t tie itself to a single franchise, but populates its world with characters and cliches from all of them. Imagine Super Smash Bros Brawl without being limited to Nintendo, then give them time off to chill between battles. That’s the level of world we’re looking at here. Wreck-It Ralph puts together a dream team of retro characters from a savvily chosen array of games: Zangief from Street Fighter , Q-Bert, Sonic, Kano and even a Beholder. If you’re not familiar with that last creature, he exists in video games the same way Captain Kirk exists in video games — he’s certainly been there but comes from a whole other world: Dungeons & Dragons . The Beholder is an extremely cool nod to gamers. Better yet, the characters are all rendered with such love that even the zombie — the most generic enemy in videogaming history — is recognizably from a specific game series. The double-fire-axe and torn beige shirt distinguishes him as a walker from House of the Dead clearer than a passport with his bite-marks on it. Wreck-It Ralph is stuffed with so many celebrity cameos that Chun-Li, also from Street Fighter , as a background character. Other companies have built entire films around her, although considering how that turned out, it’s probably a good thing the producers didn’t follow suit. The cruelest (but most accurate) gaming revelation was the presence of Sonic and Bowser, but no Mario. The writers told TotalFilm.com that Mario is such a powerful character that there would be no way to put him in the movie without him dominating it. But Sonic? Sure, stick him in there. There was never any doubt about who won the ’90s battle between him and Mario — and his inclusion removes any doubt that the writers really understand the games they’re referencing. Others have bitched about Zangief ‘s presence in the Bad Guys support group when he’s just one of many playable Street Fighters, but come on: he was a Russian in a fighting game in the 90s. He was also almost unplayable in the original, so the only way most people saw him was from the wrong end of a devastating Screw Piledriver. He’s become much cuddlier since, and a surprisingly effective character in Super Street Fighter IV multiplayer. This detailed attention to our old gaming friends is glorious, but could cause a hardcore backlash. The trailers’ focus has obviously been on these recognizable characters, but they’re just as obviously trailer-trash. We’ve probably seen fully half their screen time already. This retro-disappointment is going to be a big complaint for people missing the point, but put it this way: These are Expendables cameos, not Expendables 2 cameos. We can expect these old-school characters to turn up for a few seconds then get out of the way of the main story. Still, for any veteran gamer it’s mind-boggling to see so many different game publishers cooperating. That many intellectual properties overlapping means more legal wrangling than the average nuclear test. That also probably means that none of these characters will actually do anything for most of the movie, but it’s a real coup just to have them along for the ride. Besides, even though, after seeing the trailers, some people are expecting this: The movie has to be about these guys: And that’s a good thing. Because this isn’t a retro movie . It’s a gaming movie. Sonic and the Beholder will get asses in seats, but it’s the original characters, and the, I hope, original story that will make the faces on the other ends of those asses leave with smiles. One of the parody games featured in Wreck-It Ralph , Hero’s Duty, fuses Halo , Call of Duty , Battlefield 3 and every other action shooter, while another, Sugar Rush couldn’t be more of a Mario Kart clone if it featured an Italian plumber. The filmmakers can make all the pointed jokes they want about these and other video games without their publishers complaining. (And it’s not like every other gaming company hasn’t made a knock-off of Mario Kart already.) The new characters are well capable of carrying the movie. Ralph is entirely believable as an 1980s game villain (and already has his own game ). Sergeant Calhoun is a tough female soldier who kicks ass and actually wears sensible body-covering clothing, meaning Wreck-It Ralph is better at character creation than most modern video games. Wreck-It Ralph is important because games aren’t a niche market anymore. They’re everywhere and everyone, from casual Angry Birds players to 80th level World of Warcraft Paladins. It looks like the movie industry is finally ready to take video games seriously. And by that, I mean, have some real fun with them. Luke McKinney loves the real world, but only because it has movies and video games in it. He responds to every tweet . Follow Luke McKinney on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
Originally posted here:
‘Everything Changes − Now!’ Why Wreck-It Ralph May Be The First True Gaming Movie
Posted in Celebrities, Gossip, Hollywood, Hot Stuff, News
Tagged beholder, celeb news, companies, fighter, Hollywood, mario, movie, nintendo, russian, Street, street-fighter, the-player, video, wreck-it ralph, writers
Breaking Sports Video
Pac-12 NCAA Sports
Justin Bieber Fan Site Breaking News
