Here's the poster for this year's forthcoming superhero event movie:
A fabulously moody piece with all the recognisable trimmings.
The real question is, can The Cap work in a world that has moved on? After all, he was created in a time when standing united behind the American flag meant that you were less likely to be investigated as a potential communist. While the movie is supposed to be set during the Second World War, will it look old hat in a world where the name 'America' is associated with the phrase, 'fuck yeah'?
Maybe that's the plot of the film- how will Spider-Man dress for the fight? His enemy is a rogue sewing machine hell-bent on stiching fabrics together poorly. Luckily Gwen Stacy makes costumes, but she gets kidnapped by the sewing machine. A fight ensues.
So the first one was released back in October (what a strange time to begin building hype for a horror movie), and now the second one is out. So here you have them - both trailers for Scream 4, or Scre4m, if you're in marketing, apparently.
The first one is the suspense trailer, while this latest one is the fun one. It would seem that the brilliant sense of humour from the original movie is making a comeback, which is fantastic. The only question is, how can Scream survive in this modern age of horror? After all, the reason that horror exists in all its forms nowadays - from PG-13s like Prom Night to laugh riot of the hyper violent Saw franchise - is because the original Scream shattered all those boundaries. Will it work? We'll find out in April.
Firstly, Survival of the Dead was good. Not great, but not terrible either. You've put it on the same list as Resident Evil Afterlife, and for that, sir, we shall duel with swords.
Secondly, Shutter Island was okay. Nothing special, but the performances were so strong I was intrigued even when it got silly.
My worst films of the year:
Resident Evil Afterlife Pandorum (because Paul WS Anderson is associated with it - I haven't seen it) Valentine's Day Saw 3D: The Final Chapter Part VII And We Mean It This Time The Karate Kid Vampires Suck
I saw plenty of perfectly average films this year and a fair few good ones. My problem is trying to remember which was which.
I'm fairly certain I'm the only person on earth who really enjoyed Iron Man 2.
It's not often that a star apologises for their film. Joel Schumacher said sorry for foisting Batman and Robin on us, but other than that, it's rare that someone in Hollywood recognises a pile of twaddle when they see one. So it's refreshing that relative newcomer Sam Worthington found the time to say sorry to those who waded through the quagmire of sludge that was Clash of the Titans and offers fresh hope for its sequel, which is probably not titled Clash of the Titans 2: Clash More, With Feeling.
"I just think we can improve on it. I think the first one, we kind of let down some people. And yeah, I totally agree. The only point of doing a sequel is either the audience demands it or you believe you can better the first one. What we're setting out to do with this one -- the writers and the director and myself -- is improve. I think I can act f***ing better, to be honest ... Just take all the notes from people that I have been reading about on the 'net and give them a movie they f***ing want. This one I want to kind of try to satisfy a lot more people. I've always said you make movies for an audience, that's who you make movies for. If the audience is speaking, it's like the old gladiator thing, they give us the thumbs up/thumbs down, you want to stay alive in that coliseum as long as you can."
Worthington is currently filming Man on a Sledge, a film about dinosaurs. Maybe.
There's something remarkably likeable about Kevin Smith. It could the unflinching honesty, the way he views the world through his movies or just the fact that does whatever he wants to promote his films. The upcoming Red State is no exception.
This time Smith asked his fans to pledge $1,000 in just half an hour to a charity he's recently set up - http://viewaskew.com/thewaynefoundation/ - which aims to help victims of sex crimes. His fans pulled through and Smith obliged, so here is Kerry Bishe as 'The Virgin'.
Well, it would seem that the seemingly eternal wait for the next Bond film is almost at an end. MGM's financial quagmire is almost at an end. The biggest question, though, is whether or not director Sam Mendes is still on board.
According to ex-wife Kate Winslet, he is. In an informal (note: keyword here is informal) chat with the Daily Mail, Winslet revealed that, if all goes well, she'll be moving over to England with the kids to support her ex-husband during production.
Quote
Sam is doing the next Bond film, all being well, and we’ll all be in England if that happens. It’s such a massive commitment for him and it’s not fair for him to commute backwards and forwards to New York from London. It would be impossible. The children will be there with me.
Though she laughed off the idea of playing a Bond girl in the movie.
Next up is the news that Mendes' friend Simon Russell Beale is currently performing on stage in the play 'Deathtrap', which has been viewed by producer Barbara Broccoli... twice. Without trying to stoke the fires of speculation (maybe she just likes the play?), could this man be the next Bond villain?
Finally, here's an excerpt from an interview with Bond composer David Arnold, asked about the score for the next film:
Quote
I haven’t thought about it yet. We only just got the news that we’re back on. But ‘there’s many a slip twixt cup and lip’ So I will keep quiet until I get a script and then start writing ideas. I just hope the next one is as good as my favorites, as I think everyone does. And I’m always interested in what Daniel Craig brings to the part. But like most things with movies, if it ain’t on the page etc… All I can say is that I’m looking forward to a great script for it, alongside every other Bond fan in the world!
Jesus Christ, is this really the seventh film in as many years? Yes, it’s Saw o’clock and it must be time to completely forget what made the first film so good (all over again.) While the original entry had the brilliant concept of people being placed in devious traps they had to survive in order to appreciate their lives, it was also great because it was a) relatively bloodless and b) you didn’t want to see a man cut off his foot. Every subsequent sequel has ignored that second point and been stuffed to the gills with complete bastards that the audience is supposed to want to see be tortured and die horribly. If this isn’t torture porn one step removed from snuff, then what is?
Series villain Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) died back in Saw III, only to have his work continue in the sequels by corrupt cop Hoffman (Costas Mandylor) in Saw IV. After dispatching of vengeful FBI agent Strahm in Saw V, Hoffman assumed that he would be the only one to carry on Jigsaw’s work in Saw VI. Naturally, Jigsaw had already planned ahead for this event and got his wife Jill (Betsy Russell) to place Hoffman in his own trap should Hoffman try and screw up the master plan. Hoffman miraculously survived and is now on a revenge mission, bringing him in confrontation with Internal Affairs officer Matt Gibson (Chad Donella).
Meanwhile, Bobby Dagen is enjoying the limelight, having written a self-help book about his experiences in surviving a Jigsaw trap. Only problem is, he’s lying about the entire experience. While attempting to reunite all previous survivors together in a self-help group, Bobby is kidnapped and he and his entourage are placed in a brand new game. How will it all end? If you reckon anyone is walking away from this, you’re clearly new to the Saw franchise.
If the above paragraphs made it appear as though there is a coherent story to be found in the latest Saw movie, then that is entirely the fault of the writer. The Hoffman/ Jill battle of wills takes place over roughly three scenes (two of which are at the very beginning) and immediately gets sidelined by the need to have a series of harrowingly violent deaths for no real reason. Part of the problem is that this film is two Saw movies shoved into one. Without any balance between the lengthy deaths and the more arguably more interesting revenge subplot, what’s left is an hour and twenty minutes of pointless gore broken up with people triggering flashback montages to explain plot holes. In terms of a final episode, this is more about as dramatic as an episode of Hollyoaks.
Once again, character depth is eschewed in favour of unlikable bastards who somehow deserve what’s happening to them, instead of being relatable people. This time, you can’t help but feel that Jigsaw is completely in the wrong about Bobby. Granted, he’s making money off a lie, but he’s hardly the worst person in the world – after all, he’s getting out the positive message Jigsaw himself tried to tell (cherish your life), and he’s doing it without the ludicrous amount of bloodshed. But Jigsaw seems to always get things wrong – there are people in this world who are far more evil and deserving of suffering than some bloke who wrote a self-help book based on the suffering of others. Politicians, warlords, slave owners, bankers – the list is really quite long. Nope, it’s got to be the guy who’s made a quick buck from selling a positive message.
As for the traps themselves, this film brings us a whopping eleven grizzly death scenarios, although three of them hardly count (one’s a short flashback, one’s a dream and another is pretty pointless.) Eyes get stabbed, women sawn in half, jaws ripped off, teeth yanked out and throats jabbed, all in glorious 3D. Of particular note is the opening trap, which takes place in a shopping centre in front of hundreds of people. Why is this? It’s mentioned that the three involved are airing their dirty laundry in public, but surely the real point is to spread the good word amongst more people? Why is this not remarked upon? What is the chronology of this sequence? Another key point is that the 3D technology doesn’t make much of a difference, aside from a few body parts/ saws/ bits of shrapnel that get launched towards the screen. Only a couple of the traps are designed to slowly approach the screen, so quite what the point of the use of the 3D technology was (aside from raising the price of the ticket) is another mystery entirely.
The acting is atrocious throughout, with most dialogue consisting of lengthy screams and grunts of pain. Series mainstay Tobin Bell gets roughly thirty seconds of screen time (bring a stopwatch, it’s probably less), making him pretty much redundant in his own franchise. The characters are also completely idiotic, especially Matt Gibson, who – bafflingly – believes that he’s smarter than Hoffman, despite the amount of officers that have died trying to bring Jigsaw down. He also willingly walks into the world’s most obvious trap and is useless throughout the movie, so quite why the franchise has ended on his involvement is yet another unresolved mystery.
At the end of the day, the Saw franchise has finally come to its bitter end. Despite having more incessant violence than any other film in the series, this one feels the most toothless. Pointless, silly, unnecessary, tiresome and completely predictable, this is the end of what was once – around seven years ago – a truly horror great. Game over.
Paranormal Activity 2 rolled out across America to the sound of critical shoulder-shrugging and money going in the tills. The film opened on Midnight last Thursday to the sound of $6.3 million.
This makes it the highest-grossing R-rated midnight opening ever, as well as the highest grossing October midnight release. The film beat out Zack Snyder's naked blue man film Watchmen, which held the previous best of $4.6 million in March 2009.
Expect Paranormal Activity 2: Paranormal To The Max to follow a similar pattern as its predecessor, which held only midnight screenings until the fifth week of being on release.
For its weekend run, Paranormal grossed over $41 million - possibly a new record for a horror film. A third film will be announced next week.
From the ‘creative talent’ behind such insightful and hilarious jokes like, ‘hurr hurr, Jennifer Lopez has a big bum’, ‘hurr hurr, the Spartans look a bit gay in that one film’ and ‘hurr hurr, Sarah Jessica Parker isn’t conventionally attractive’ comes a whole new film and a whole new low. Without a doubt, Vampires Suck is a sign of the end times, a piece of crap that barely qualifies as a film. This is so devoid of entertainment value that you should ask for your money back even if you haven’t watched it.
Becca (Jenn Proske) moves to Sporks (HA) to live with her dad where she meets Edward Sullen (Matt Lanter) and falls in love with him. However, he turns out to be a vampire and soon dumps Becca and moves away, forcing her to hang out with Jacob White (Christopher N Riggi). However, Jacob turns out to be a werewolf and Becca’s heart yearns for Edward. Everything collides for some reason at the Prom, where everyone is dressed in red capes to save the production filming in Italy. Edward turns Becca into a vampire. The end.
Did you laugh at that plot summary? No, of course not. But the above paragraph is roughly four hundred times funnier than the film – after all, there had to be some thought put into it to make it flow and work coherently, which is far more than can be said for Vampires Suck. It’s a film made by Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, which should immediately tell you that slowly dying alone in the woods is much, much more preferable than sitting through ninety minutes of slow torture.
Here’s a small snippet from the script:
BECCA I don’t like cold, wet things.
EDWARD You must hate slushies.
He picks up a slushie and drinks it
This is what you can expect from Vampires Suck: a series of scenes where people reference random outside products or celebrities for the sake of making a stupid low-brow joke. The film is basically a copy-and-paste job from Twilight and New Moon, with references made to other popular films and TV shows, like Dear John and Gossip Girl. The funniest this film will get is when you attempt to remove your own eyes with the drinking straw in the overpriced Coke cup.
Any ‘jokes’ that might have been funny when written down are completely mauled in their delivery. The cast posses the comic timing of dying sea animals and the editing is so sloppy that quick gags seem to take an eternity to get anywhere. This is the cinematic equivalent of accidentally crapping out your insides and being forced to look at your entrails as you lay among them, whimpering and crying.
There are two points that really need to be praised, and quickly: firstly, Jenn Proske has Kristen Stewart’s mannerisms down perfectly. Secondly, Ken Jeong – one of the most brilliant but underused comedy actors currently working – appears in a small role. While Jeong is clearly doing it for the money, he appears to be taking the piss out of the entire movie with his performance, and that makes him ever greater than he already is.
A long time ago, the humble parody was the greatest form of comedy in the world, destroying Leslie Nielsen’s acting career and entertaining countless millions with classics such as Airplane! or The Naked Gun, Hot Shots and Police Squad – hell, even Top Secret has its moments. The thing that these films understood was that in order to be funny, the target really had to deserve parody and there had to be a series of timeless jokes that would always make audiences laugh. If that seems a little pretentious, compare ‘I am serious… and don’t call me Shirely’ to a joke about Amy Winehouse looking like a Neanderthal and ask yourself which one will still make sense to your children.
What Friedberg and Seltzer gloriously fail to understand in any of their films is that the targets they go after are not ripe for parody. Everyone with eyes had a giggle about how gay the Spartans looked during 300 – they didn’t need a film made entirely around the premise. Friedberg and Seltzer became known after Scary Movie, which is possibly the world’s most unnecessary parody, considering how hysterical the original Scream is. The very fact that they decided that simply copying Sacha Baron Cohen’s peerless Borat would make their film funny in its own right is probably a hint that they need to be tried as witches and burned at the stake.
Once again Friedberg and Seltzer have managed to miss the point – the entire Twilight saga doesn’t need a parody. Anyone with half a brain cell can see that those films are utterly hilarious and will have already made every single joke in this film with their friends on the way home. ‘Hey, didn’t those werewolves seem really gay?’ ‘Yeah, and what about that vampire council? Were they camp or what?’ ‘Bella’s really stupid, why would she kill herself after her first relationship fails?’ These are the points Vampires Suck harps on about near-constantly. In fact, because the film is only based on the first two Twilight movies, there are whole swathes of story left unresolved simply because the third film hadn’t come out by the time this went into production.
Any deep or thoughtful point you might be able to come up with concerning Stephanie Meyer’s bafflingly popular series is completely ignored. Potential jokes – like how Bella represents the domestically abused girlfriend, how ludicrous it would be to even consider suicide after your first crush dumps you and how there is literally no reason for Bella and Edward for be attracted to each other – are all eschewed in favour of having a stupid one-note joke about how Lady Gaga is a bit weird or having pointless physical comedy because people punching each other is ‘hilarious’. There’s even a decade-late joke about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is so unfashionable that the actress has to wear a t-shirt with the word ‘BUFFY’ on it because you’ll have forgotten her. The phrase ‘lowest common denominator’ is actually far too good to describe this film.
You already knew this film was going to be bad, but maybe you didn’t know exactly how bad. Vampires Suck is a cancerous tumour upon cinema that will destroy the souls of all those unfortunate enough to wander across it. The only way to enjoy the film is to try and lower your IQ to a level where you find grass funny. Other than that, walk the hell away as fast as you can. If you ignore Friedberg and Seltzer, eventually they’ll go away. If you do pay for this, you'll find that the joke is ultimately on you. Hurr hurr.
Resident Evil: Afterlife - possibly one of the greatest films of the year, nay, of all time - has certainly proved how excellent it is in the worldwide box office.
After a reasonable start in the US, the perfect - absolutely perfect, no flaws in it at all - film has so far grossed $58 million. Considering its budget was $60 million, that's none too shabby. Consider further that it totally won't surprise people to learn that it cost $60 million and that it absolutely does not look like it was made in a weekend in someone's shed, oh no.
Internationally, the film has been doing very well for itself. Afterlife has grossed around $183 million from all the territories it has been released in. Of note is the Japanese accumilation, which is where the flick grossed its widest amount so far, with $45 million. This means that Afterlife is the highest-grossing of all the Resident Weavil movies and that the four films total gross is in excess of $500 million. This is not a sign of the coming apocalypse, it just means that more people have good taste.
In other news, apparently Resident Evil: Afterlife is based on a series of games for the Microsoft PlayStation 1 about mutated monkeys and stuff. Weird how a practically unheard-of game can turn into a multi-million dollar movie franchise.
Warner Bros. have announced in a statement that the first part of Harry Potter and the Film That Didnt Need Two Parts will be going ahead into cinemas in 2D only.
The company's statement reads:
"...we will not have a completed 3D version of the film within our release date window," adding "despite everyone's best efforts, we were unable to convert the film in its entirety and meet the highest standards of quality. We do not want to disappoint fans who have long-anticipated the conclusion of this extraordinary journey."
In other words: "Clash of the Titans looked rubbish, it's a lot of money to do, we really should have considered this three years ago. Dammit."
While there's still no word on what this means for a 3D version of part two, we now know that watching the film on November 19th will cost a couple of quid less.
Potter director David Yates said of the decision, "This decision, which we completely support, underscores the fact that Warner Bros. has always put quality first."
Kick-Ass, Scott Pilgrim, Inception and Toy Story 3 are already my top four for this year.
And HOW CAN YOU NOT BE EXCITED BY TWILIGHT? This is the film where - lest we forget - an adult werewolf basically adopts the child of his love and love rival and tells them that he's going to fuck her when she's old enough.
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