So long, Pittsburgh and thanks for all the fish.
“The Dark Knight Rises” wrapped its shooting in The Steel City last night, Batman-News reports. But before Christopher Nolan 
and Co. packed it in, a lucky few were treated to the sight of star Anne Hathaway (Catwoman) taking a spin on the Batpod.
Here’s the clip (it’s not as dramatic as you might expect. But still pretty neat).
Just watch it:
From Indiewire:
Now four years on since it was first announced way back in 2007, Martin Scorsese‘s appropriately expansive documentary “George Harrison: Living In The Material World” is now ready to be shown to the world, and if this trailer is any indication, it’s going to be a must see.
Boasting interviews from friends colleagues and collaborators including Eric Clapton, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, George Martin, Paul McCartney, Yoko Ono, Tom Petty, Phil Spector, Ringo Starr and Jackie Stewart, the roughly three-and-a-half hour documentary will dig deep into Harrison’s life and career from The Beatles through to his years as a solo artist, his work as a film producer, a philanthropist and more. The scope and size is no surprise especially given the similarly detailed treatment Scorsese gave Bob Dylan in “No Direction Home” and certainly, everyone from die-hard Beatles and Harrison fans to the casual observer will be well served by the doc.
Read the full story here.
From The Guardian:
Author Neil Gaiman told the crowd at the Edinburgh Books Festival this weekend that he’s set to bring his best-seller to pay cable.
Cinematographer Robert Richards (“Inglourious Basterds“) makes his directorial debut with the series. Tom Hanks’ Playtone is producing, The Guardian reports. Gaiman hopes to write the pilot, the last episode and maybe the middle.
Of Richards’ involvement, Gaiman told the Edinburgh festival that, “he loves it, he has all these great, mad ideas. Having fallen in love with it while other people fell by the wayside, he stayed with it.”
Read the full story here.
Side note: Gaiman’s first “proper” book “Neverwhere” is a huge favorite of mine. And if you haven’t seen the BBC series on DVD, I don’t know what you’re waiting for.
Here’s Some Tantalizing Avengers News …
… from this weekend’s D23 fest out in California: Disney studio bosses previewed some footage from the Joss Wheedon-helmed superflick.
Via AceShowBiz, here’s some of what attendees were able to see (WARNING: SERIOUS FREAKING SPOILERS AHEAD):
“The first snippet presents a scene taking place in S.H.I.E.L.D.’s Helicarrier. Fury gives Loki, who is trapped inside a hi-tech chamber encased by glass walls, a warning. He will plummet 30,000 feet to his death if he tries to escape. When Loki says, “It’s an impressive cage, but not built for me,” Fury replies, “Built for something a lot stronger than you.”
After it is uncovered that the cage was actually built for the Hulk, Loki mocks Fury by saying, “How desperate are you, to call on such lost creatures to defend you?” In turn, Fury says, “How desperate am I? You threaten my world with war. You steel a force you can’t control. You talk about peace, but you kill because it’s fun…”
… The second scene, meanwhile, gives a look at Stark in what looks like a private bar, and also involves Loki. “Let’s do a head count. Two world class assassins,” he says as the camera cuts to shots of Hawkeye and Black Widow. “A demigod,” he adds when it cuts to Thor, and says, “A living legend who actually lives up to the legend,” when a glimpse of Captain America is shown.
The Iron Man alter-ego then tells Loki, “And you, big fella, you have managed to p*** off every single one of them.” When Loki responds by saying, “I have an army”, Stark strikes back, “We have a Hulk.”
The Avengers opens May 2012.
It was a big weekend for “The Help.”
The flick about domestic relations in the Civil Rights-era South finished atop the weekend, sending “Rise of the Planet of the 
Apes” down to second place.
The weekend’s two big openers, Robert Rodrigquez’s fourth entry in the “Spy Kids” series and the “Conan the Barbarian” reboot both had a tough time. The flicks finished at third and fourth respectively. Not exactly the kind of savage victory that befits a bad-ass barbarian, especially when your movie cost $90 million to make.
Finally, the Anne Hathaway-starrer “One Day” just about clawed its way into the Top 10 in its opening weekend, taking in $5.1 million on $5.1 million on a budget of $15 million. Sometimes it doesn’t hurt to think small.
Courtesy of the folks at Box Office Mojo, here’s the weekend by the numbers:
Name: Weekend: Total:
1. The Help $20.5m $71.8m
2. Rise of the Planet of the Apes $16.3m $133.7m
3. Spy Kids: All the Time in the World $12m $12m
4. Conan the Barbarian $10m $10m
5. The Smurfs $8m $117m
6. Fright Night $7.9m $8.3m
7. Final Destination 5 $7.7m $32.3m
8. 30 Minutes or Less $6.3m $25.7m
9. One Day
$5.1m $5.1m
10. Crazy, Stupid, Love. $4.9m $64.4m
Writing in the pages of The Observer of London on Sunday, film critic Peter Conrad wonders whether the world really needs new adaptations of “Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights,” both of which are set to hit the small screen in the UK soon.
The answer, he concludes, is yes, particularly in the hands of filmmakers Andrea Arnold (Wuthering Heights) and Cary Fukunaga (Jane Eyre).
Here’s the germane part of the story:
“Certain books – by the Brontës and by Jane Austen and Dickens – are indispensable to us and accompany us through life. When we first read them, they prospectively sketch our quest to discover who we are and our struggle to impose ourselves on the world; in later decades, they remain as markers of our progress or testaments to our disillusionment. In Jane Eyre, a disadvantaged girl prevails by force of will and by the intensity of an uncompromising imagination. Oliver Twist is about an even more disadvantaged boy who survives thanks to the kindness of strangers and remains angelically immune to the depravity around him.
Wuthering Heights warns that the outcome may not be so fortunate: the past with its ghost or demons is inescapable. Pride and Prejudice – superficially frothy, actually profound – calculates the odds against personal happiness in a society ruled by cash and class. It dispenses with the fictional magic on which the Brontës and Dickens rely and forces us to ask whether love is just an enlightened calculation of financial advantage and whether, if we make an error of judgment, we can expect a second chance.”
Read the full story here.
Here’s the first (semi)full cast photo (sans costumes) of next year’s Avengers’ flick. It was taken backstage at yesterday’s D23 Expo in California (via The Reel Bits). The actors were joined, natch, by a few Disney and Marvel suits as well.
Left to right: Walt Disney Studios Chairman Rich Boss, Scarlet Johannson (Black Widow), Jeremy Renner (Hawkeye), Tom Hiddleston (Loki), Cobie Smoulders (S.H.I.E.L.D Agent Maria Hill), Robert Downey Jr. (Iron Man), Chris Hemsworth (Thor), President of Marvel Studios Kevin Feige and President of Marketing Walt Disney Studios MT Carney.
Notably absent from the pic is Samuel L. Jackson, who plays S.H.I.E.L.D boss Nick Fury and Chris Evans, who plays Captain America. They were probably off fighting bad guys or something.
The good folks at ComicBookMovie have all your Avengers needs covered.
Here’s some set video from current filming in Cleveland. It happens kind of fast, but there’s a good shot here of Chris Evans’ (Captain America) stunt double being tossed out a window. The reaction from the crowd is worth the price of admission:
And here’s a still photo:
Digital Spy UK has what it says is a synopsis for the upcoming “Man of Steel” movie with Henry Cavil as Supes and Laurence Fishburne as Perry White. The movie’s take on the origin supposedly explores the split between Clark Kent/Kal-el’s alien birth and human roots and the tension they cause for him.
It’s an intriguing premise. Click through at your peril. Granted, this might not be real. But if it is, serious spoilerage ahead.
Two weeks after Britain erupted into the worst riots in a generation, The Guardian takes a look back at the 1979 
filmed version of The Who’s “Quadrophenia” and finds it eerily prescient.
Here’s the takeaway:
“Back in 1972, Stanley Cohen concluded: “The intellectual poverty and total lack of imagination in our society’s response to its adolescent trouble-makers during the past 20 years, is manifest in the way this response compulsively repeats itself and fails each time to come to terms with the ‘problem’ that confronts it.” Quadrophenia is a striking and evocative reminder of a bygone age when Britain was … well, basically exactly the same as it is now.’
For me, though, the movie raises another interesting question: Whatever became of the youth cult?
From Teds in the 1950s to Punks in the 1970s to 1980s New Romantics and even the grunge adherents of the 1990s, every decade of the rock era has been marked by some vast movement that’s brought with it a seismic wave of change and reinvigorated the form.
The Who spoke for their generation and The Clash captured the rage of the Notting Hill riots in the 1970s. And for a lot of people my age, Kurt Cobain’s Nirvana still remains a musical high water mark. But who speaks for today?
I suppose you could argue that the advent of hip-hop also brought with it a brand-new youth culture, one that did not include skinny white kids with guitars. And perhaps the rise of dance music and the bedroom musicians of chill wave also represent a movement in itself. But all these seem peculiarly niche-y, without the wider cultural impact of earlier tidal changes. Blame the fracturing of culture brought on by the Web. With a greater array of choices comes a loss of unanimity of sentiment.
In his book “Retromania” released earlier this year. critic Simon Reynolds argues that pop culture has stopped advancing and is now simply content to cannibalize earlier sounds and sights. Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep,” may be a great tune, for instance, but it’s just a few steps removed from Ronnie Specter. And why on Earth is Hollywood rebooting “Spiderman” barely a decade after the first movie hit the theaters?
It’s been the history of pop culture that great movements come out of times of great unrest — from the Vorticists of the pre-World War I era to the Moderns who followed the Great War, right on down to the Mods of the 1960s youth riots and the punks who followed.
With the exception of Green Day releasing “American Idiot” at the height of the Iraq War, I can’t think of another record or film that’s encapsulated or captured the unease of the times we live in now. You can make an argument that we’re in economic times as unsettled as any since the 1930s. But where’s the artistic revolution in film, music or literature that’s accompanied that time of upheaval?
It seems, instead, that we’re more comfortable in these times to retrench, to take comfort from what gave us joy when times were good, rather than taking the angst and uncertainty and creating something new.
And that’s too bad.
IO9 dangles this tantalizing possibility:
“We received this tip from someone claiming to have been around for the August 15 filming at Valley West Community Hospital in Sandwich, Illinois. Here’s a description of what was filmed:
They were filming a scene in the hospital where the Kents were taking a young Clark in for a checkup. Kevin Costner was on set, as well as two boys who were playing young Superman. The scene included breaking of windows on the front of the building, a fish tank, a gumball machine, a mug as well as windows on the Green 1970 Nova and the station wagon all as a result of young Superman letting out a Super Cry.”
Read the full piece here.
The Crunchable Net/Work
The Cineaste's Lament. 