Here’s at least the second look-ahead to the fall cinema season that I’ve seen on WordPress.
It’s been fascinating to see which films people think will resonate with audiences and which won’t.
My hope is to get to the cinema at least three or four times this autumn — the budget, and access to a sitter, willing.
via Times Like Those
Courtesy of IO9, here’s a new Avengers’ teaser poster:
And from Comic Book Movie, here’s some early teaser interviews with Christian Bale and Anne Hathaway for “The Dark Knight Rises.”
The full interviews have been removed, but highlights from Hathaway include:
“Anne Hathaway was happy to be able to finally talk about the movie, then proceeded to not have much to tell because things are “still under wraps”.
-She was asked about her reaction to the catsuit photo going online and said that it was “overwhelming”.
-When asked about the other women who played Catwoman and she said it was an honor to be among them, blah, blah, blah. She says she didn’t want to use any of them as inspiration since they all had their own take.
-Even though her big break was in The Princess diaries, as a child she had always wanted to be Catwoman rather than a princess.”
And from Bale:
“Bale says he will miss playing Batman after this–even wearing the suit is just too “f*cking cool”.
-He’s asked a couple questions he refuses to answer about Bruce’s relationship with Selena Kyle.
-When asked if this movie truly ends with the trilogy, he says that he doesn’t really know but is just doing what Nolan tells him to because he really has a handle on where this is going to end up. But that HE feels its the right time to wrap it up.
-Bale confirms that Batman’s drive is still fueled by his parent’s death, but that he realizes that he’s sacrificed a lot of his life to it and that he’s going to have to relearn to enjoy life.
-Bale says he’s impressed with Tom Hardy (BANE) who is a facinating actor who is “gleeful” coming to work every day.
-When asked about their fight scenes, he gives the standard answer about following the fantastic stunt guys instructions and trying to tell a story in the fight so it won’t get dull.”
Courtesy of ScreenRants, here’s a closer look at actor Henry Cavil in the new Supes suit. Fanboys are already ranting about the fact that it leaves out the red briefs. This should provide even more fodder for debate.
It’s bad enough that, in “Revenge of the Sith” prequel, George Lucas took one of the most frightening 
villains in the filmdom and transformed him into a fallen Jedi with one too many Fallout Boy records.
Now, courtesy of IO9, comes news that, in the soon-to-be-released “Star Wars” Blu-ray DVD collection, old Darth will lose even more of his dignity. Read on …
“Lucas had promised that fans would have a few new details here and there to notice in his newly remastered HD versions of his classic trilogy — and now the first details are leaking out. And fans are not happy. Some of the fans have gotten hold of the Blu-ray footage, and they’re dissecting it at TheForce.net, the Blu-Ray.com forums and the DVDTalk forums. And a couple of changes to the soundtrack have already become apparent, at least if some recent leaks are to be believed.
UPDATE: Badass Digest says “a trusted source” confirms that these changes are real.
Most notably, “Vader now screams NOOOOOOOO when he throws the Emperor” in Return of the Jedi. And it sounds, quite frankly, kind of silly.”
Here’s a video of what it all sounds like. It’s about as awful as you’d imagine:
And Lucas has also apparently screwed with the famous “dragon call” Obi-Wan used to scare off the Sandpeople after they beat the snot out of Luke in the first movie. Regardez:
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Someone just needs to make Lucas stop. Better yet, don’t buy the movies and maybe he will.
A truly disturbing report and a reminder that there is more than one film business in California (via The L.A. Times).
“An adult film performer has tested HIV-positive, prompting a temporary shutdown of productions across the Los Angeles area 
until further testing is completed.
“Until we know for sure, we’ve asked the industry to have a moratorium on production,” said Diane Duke, executive director of the Free Speech Coalition, a Canoga Park-based porn industry trade group.
Duke’s group became aware of the possible HIV case Saturday. Duke would not say how her group learned about the case and did not release the name, age or gender of the performer, citing medical privacy laws.
She said she notified adult film production companies Monday morning that a performer had tested positive and urged them to temporarily halt productions until further tests were completed.
All the company officials she spoke with, including those at well-known studios such as Hustler Video and Evil Angel, agreed to the temporary shutdown, she said.”
Read the full story here.
If you’re not English or if you don’t watch BBC America, then you probably have no idea what this fellow is talking about.
On the other hand, if you are any of the above, then you know this is a genuine phenomenon.
From IO9, here’s some video of Captain America (Chris Evans) fighting Loki (Tom Hiddleston)
And here’s a pretty cool teaser poster as well.
As you might expect, what with a major hurricane slamming into the East Coast, 
this weekend’s box office take was a touch on the sluggish side.
“The Help” stayed atop the box office heap, while “Colombiana” and “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark,” opened with respectable numbers, despite some lukewarm reviews. Here’s the weekend, by the numbers:
Title: Weekend: Total:
1. The Help $14.3M $96.6m
2. Colombiana $10.3m $10.3m
3. Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark $8.7m $8.7m
4. Rise of the Planet of the Apes $8.6m $148m
5. Our Idiot Brother $6.6m $6.6m
6. Spy Kids $5.7m $21.7m
7. The Smurfs $4.8m $126m
8. Conan the Barbarian $3.1m $16.6m
9. Fright Night $3.02m $14.2m
10. Crazy, Stupid, Love. $2.9m $69.5m
Meanwhile, The New York Times reports on a new website that’s looking for your memories of your favorite movie house.
The site, Cinema Treasures, bills itself as “building the world’s largest guide to movie theaters.”
The site boasts a growing collection of photos of theaters across the country and a recent blog entry recollects the departed “Jerry Lewis” chain of theaters of the 1970s. A theater near where I grew up in Connecticut was a Jerry Lewis theater. I never could figure out the connection to the famed screen comedian.
Here’s the nut graf from the NYT piece:
“Rediscovering an old theater can be cathartic, particularly if you once spent a lot of time in the dark, imagining new futures. “You’re there for two hours, and maybe it’s a comedy, or it’s something inspiring, but it changes you in a way,” said Patrick Crowley, a founder of the site. “A lot of times theaters are just torn down unceremoniously, but people — lots of people — sat and dreamed in these spaces.”
Mr. Crowley, 37, a Web designer in San Diego, and Ross Melnick, 35, an author and assistant professor of English and cinema studies at Oakland University in Rochester, Mich., met in New York in 1999, when both were working in the tech industry. They began Cinema Treasures in late 2000 as a way to preserve and celebrate what they saw as sacred space. “I remember being 10 or 12 and going across town to see the movie ‘Big’ for the first time,” Mr. Crowley recalled in a phone interview. “The theater was pretty unremarkable, a run-down twin screen in South Carolina somewhere. But I have this very distinct memory of going home from the theater and sitting in the back of the station wagon just glowing from the experience.”
One of my earliest — and fondest — cinema memories involves the old Warner Theater in Torrington, Conn.
It was a glorious old movie house, dating to 1931, with a balcony, a thick red curtain around the screen and, as I recall, ornate scrollwork on the walls. There was a sense of occasion about seeing a movie there, one that you didn’t get by venturing into those windowless concrete boxes that popped up like weeds across the American landscape.
If I remember correctly, the first movie I saw at the Warner was the original Christopher Reeve “Superman” from 1978 and the last movie I saw there was the atrocious “Moonraker,” which, even as an 8-year-old, I knew was an attempt to cash in on the success of “Star Wars.”
The Warner was on its last legs by then, and would shortly close, reopening several years later as a repertory theater, hosting revivals of classic musicals and the occasional touring act. A search of the Web reveals that it’s still open. And the Indigo Girls will be playing there next month.
In his new book “The Good, The Bad and the Multiplex,” Observer of London and 5 Live film critic 
Mark Kermode issues a scathing critique of the film industry and the alleged contempt that big studio film directors allegedly harbor for the audiences that fill their pockets.
In an excerpt published in The Observer this morning, Kermode, a witty and intelligent critic, mostly blames director Michael Bay “(“The Transformers” and other big-budget insults to audiences’ intelligence) for the current lamentable state of blockbuster cinema.
Here’s the crux of Kermode’s argument: Big-budget movies have been getting so steadily bad for such an awfully long time that audiences have been conditioned to have lowered expectations when they head to the theater. In other words, if the movie isn’t completely awful (ie: “Pearl Harbor”) and it makes its money back, then it’s considered a success.
Here’s the nut graf:
“‘There are tons of people who hate me,’ admits Bay, who turned an innocuous TV-and-toys franchise into puerile pop pornography with his headache-inducing Transformers movies. “They said that I wrecked cinema. But hey, my movies have made a lot of money around the world.” If you want kids’ movies in which cameras crawl up young women’s skirts while CGI robots hit each other over the head, interspersed with jokes about masturbation and borderline-racist sub-minstrelsy stereotyping, then Bay is your go-to guy. He is also, shockingly, one of the most commercially successful directors working in Hollywood today, a hit-maker who proudly describes his visual style as “fucking the frame” and whose movies appear to have been put together by people who have just snorted two tonnes of weapons-grade plutonium. Don’t get me wrong – he’s not stupid; he publicly admitted that Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was below even his own poor par (his exact words were “When I look back at it, that was crap”), after leading man and charisma vacuum Shia LaBeouf declared that he “wasn’t impressed with what we did”. But somehow Bay’s awareness of his own films’ awfulness simply makes matters worse. At least Ed Wood, director of Plan 9 from Outer Space, thought the trash he was making was good. Bay seems to know better and, if he does, that knowledge merely compounds his guilt. Down in the deepest bowels of the abyss there is a 10th circle of hell in which Bay’s movies play for all eternity, waiting for their creator to arrive, his soul tortured by the realisation that he knew what he was doing.”
Read the full story.
Meanwhile, in case you needed a reminder, here’s some Transformers footage that is truly appalling in its scale of offensiveness.
A solid list of films from Hollywood’s Golden Age.
If you haven’t seen them yet, what are you waiting for?
The Crunchable Net/Work
The Cineaste's Lament. 