“Autumn Frost [the nom de film for “Man of Steel”] will film in the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island from early September through to the end of January 2012,” Rino Pace, locations manager for production company Third Act Productions Inc., wrote in a letter to Ucluelet council as reported by Globalnews.Ca.
Some details are offered up as to what scenes and where the shooting will take place:
“While in Ucluelet, filming will take place on land owned by a local First Nation and on a municipal street and the town will play the role of a small, Alaskan fishing village. Filming will also take place on the ocean and at an industrial dock.”
The letter goes on to say that the filmmakers are looking for “”older men and women with ‘character faces’ and some ‘commercial fishermen types.”
And a spokeswoman for the City of Vancouver has said that city officials are hearing filming could take place in the city of Vancouver.
If you’re a serious spy junkie or a television fan of … ahhh … a certain age, then the chances are good that you either know of, or have seen, “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.”
The show, which from 1964 to 1968 on NBC, cast Robert Vaughn and David McCallum as a pair of secret agents for an equally top-secret spying outfit. If you’re guessing if this was TV’s attempt to cash in on the James Bond franchise, then you’d be correct.
And now … drum roll, please … Hollywood wants to reboot it as a film franchise.
“The studio is planning a remake of “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” and plans to put some pretty heavy resources into the movie. Steven Soderbergh is directing and David Dobkin, Jeffrey Kleeman and John Davis are producing.
Now the search is on for some male leads.
There was talk that George Clooney, who frequently works with Soderbergh, was set to play the lead, but the actor is not in.”
A couple of days after ringing in his 44th birthday, the English action star chats with The Guardian’sCatherine Shoard to do a bit of promotion on his new film “Killer Elite,” which also stars Robert DeNiro and Clive Owen, and above both of whom, we’re informed in the story, Statham receives top billing.
Here’s a taste:
“Statham’s genius lies in repetition. He is to action movies what the Chinese Sung ceramicists were to pots, producing ever more perfect repeat ware with only the subtlest variation over long periods of time. If your beat-em-up act ain’t broke, why fix it?
Time moves one way, though, and Killer Elite is persistently interested in how long Statham’s character can maintain both his ability and stomach for the work. So how long can Statham himself keep it up? His eyes widen. “That reminds me of another film I did! Ha ha ha. As long as it lasts. As long as people keep going. There’s a shelf life for everything, I suppose, but you have to keep people guessing – well, not so much that … As long as you make entertaining films, that’s the goal. And as long as people get their money’s worth they’ll go back, and if they don’t you’ll be on the shelf like many others.”
The piece is yet another warning on the malaise afflicting Hollywood as the nation struggles to throw off the shackles of The Great Recession. It’s definitely worth your time to read.
Here’s the nut graf:
“An analysis published in Slate last August showed that the patient might already have flat-lined. The profitability of 3-D cinema had dropped since the start of the vogue several years earlier, and more recent films were barely breaking even on their 3-D screenings. Now we’ve got another year’s worth of data—12 months’ more evidence that the medium is in peril. According to a New York Times business story from June, waning enthusiasm for 3-D has brought the vultures circling, with shares of DreamWorks Animation, the studio managed by Jeffrey “2-D films are going to be a thing of the past” Katzenberg, in free-fall. Shares of RealD, one of the big players in stereo projection technology, have also been in a tailspin, losing 70 percent of their value since May.”
What’s always surprised me is the fact that Hollywood thought that 3D held the cure to its ills.
In general, 3D films tend to be more about spectacle than they do plotting and character development. And, in most cases, the 3D is slapped on in post-production, rendering the effects immaterial to the actual action (Oh! Look! It’s Thor’s hammer! Flying straight at me! Whoa!). And it doesn’t matter how you gussy things up. Audiences will figure out that a bad movie is a bad movie, no matter how much CGI or 3D gets slapped on top of it.
That Hollywood got from “Avatar” which was beautifully rendered in 3D to “Shark Night 3D” in less than three years should tell you all you need to know about the dangers of embracing faddish filmmaking.
The filming technique still works well in an iMax setting, where the huge screens really do it justice (U23D remains one of the best-ever concert films for this very reason. You literally feel like you’re onstage with the band during its performance). Audiences have been trained to pay higher prices at iMax theaters. But to ask them to pony up an extra $5 or $6 at the Multiplex just seems offensive.
There was a reason why 3D had a brief heyday in the 1950s. It was kitschy and new. And then died. Why’s anyone surprised that it’s happening again.
I’ve said it before and said it again. If Hollywood stopped with the endless reboots, reimaginings and movies about freaking board games and concentrated on telling new and original stories with characters that audiences actually cared about (See “The Help“), then it might be able to reverse the death spiral.
“FBI officials Wednesday confirmed a “continuing probe” into “a series of computer intrusions” targeting celebrities.
FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller would not say how many people had been victimized or give specifics about the length of the investigation, the nature of the hacks or how many suspects were involved.
“I can confirm that the FBI is investigating a series of computer intrusions targeting high-profile figures,” Eimiller said.
I’m not going to repost the photos, which are easily findable if you really want to do that sort of thing. I’d urge you against it.
Even if you haven’t seen “She’s Out of My League,” you’ve seen a rom-com like it before.
Hey, look! It’s the nerdy protagonist who falls head-over-heels for the the insanely beautiful blonde who seems utterly unattainable, but is just looking for love. There’s her spiky and snarky best friend. Have I mentioned that the hero’s family is a bunch of brutal boors who humiliate him and taught him all his life that he’ll amount to nothing? Of course, he has a bunch of slacker friends who give him the most dudish advice. But you just know that their hearts — developmentally retarded though they may be — are in the right places.
By rights, with that many rom-com tropes shoehorned into one movie, “She’s Out of My League,” should be one hot mess that plain just doesn’t work. But it does. Dude … it totally does.
Why?
Because newcomer director Smith and writers Anders and Morris have absorbed a decade’s worth of horrible movies, boiled them down to their best and most essential parts and precision-machined a piece of efficient entertainment that brings raunchy laughs at a steady pace for the boys even as it delivers the heartstrings-tugging love story that adds up to date-night gold.
Baruchel plays Kirk, an amiable doofus of an airport security guard who chances to meet Molly (Alice Eve) a stunningly successful party-planner with stop-traffic curves, when she forgets her iPhone at his security checkpoint in the Pittsburgh Airport.
Kirk’s fresh off a disastrous relationship with an utter harpie (Sloane) who’s been adopted by his absolutely hideous family (who bat for the cycle when it comes to every low-brow, blue-collar cliche). The Darwinian clan is anchored by Debra Jo Rupp, who reprises the solid-but-ditzy Mom role she played on “That ’70s Show.”
Against all odds — and of course you see this one coming — Molly falls for Kirk, who’s so darn nice that, when he’s mistaken for a waiter at a French restaurant where he and Molly have gone on their first date, he dutifully steps aside to let customers pass. And this moments after he tries to return a sweater to a female patron who’s inadvertently left the garment behind (And, yeah, they try to tip him).
Eve, an Oxford-educated actress who starred this year as the seemingly icy magazine journalist who becomes object of Adrien Grenier’s affections on the final season of “Entourage” is effervescent as Molly. She’s drop-dead gorgeous. But she loves hockey and lives and dies with the Pittsburgh Penguins. And that makes her an automatic crush object.
But, really, the film’s finest moments come in the stoner-airport monologues with Kirk and his friends (one such scene transpires as they ride in endless circles on an airport baggage carousel. Who among us hasn’t wanted to do that?). They’re friends to the end. So much so, in fact, that when Kirk decides to engage in man-scaping in some hard to reach places, it’s his equally doofy friend Devon (Torrence) who helps him lift and separate. And when Kirk asks “How is this not gay?” you know exactly what he’s talking about.
Baruchel brings a loose-limbed believability to Kirk, a guy who has the trouble believing the best in himself, even when the angel he’s been waiting for is more than ready to believe the best in him. His struggles to transcend his family and his circumstances is one that every young person passes through — even if they don’t end up with a model-beautiful girlfriend by the end credits.
But he’s wishing for the same thing we’re all wishing for — a happy ending. And this being a smartly played rom-com, he gets one.
Here’s the skinny, via CosmicBookNews:
The Cineaste's Lament. 