Sid Ganis, president of The Motion Picture Academy, announced today the best picture category at next year’s Oscars will be enlarged from five nominees to 10. Ganis said, “Having 10 best picture nominees is going allow Academy voters to recognize and include some of the fantastic movies that often show up in the other Oscar categories but have been squeezed out of the race for the top prize.” Translation: The Pixar mafia henchmen beat the ever-lovin’ snot out of them …
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Anime (Japanese animation), in the U.S. at least, has always been a niche format. I’m not sure why it’s been so hard for American audiences to embrace it, but it’s probably because a) the style is reminiscent of Saturday morning cartoons (ie-“crappy”) and b) years of ridiculous dubbing have made it a running joke (“NO! NNNNNNN… IDON’TWANTOTOGOWITHYOUWAITWHATAREYOUDOINGNNNNNYAAAAH!”) Over the last few years, Disney’s been trying to bridge the cultural divide with their U.S. releases of Studio Ghibli/Hayao Miyazaki films Spirited …
Hoooo boy! It would seem the Transformers sequel, what seemed to be a surefire summer blockbuster, is now headed full steam ahead for ignominy and a Golden Raspberry award. As of this writing and today’s release, “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” stands at 22% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes.com. And the reviews are brutal. Here’s a sample of what some notable critics are saying about Michael Bay’s Autobots vs. Decepticons movie. A great grinding garbage disposal of a movie, “Transformers: Revenge …
Damn you Stephen Sommers. George Lucas has already sullied my childhood with the pooptastic “Star Wars” prequels, and now you come a long and fail miserably at bringing Snake Eyes, Storm Shadow, Duke, Cobra Commando and Destro to the big screen. How do I know this? Easy, because this second trailer you’ve assembled for “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra” is just like the first – hollow, effects-laden, silly and ridiculous – and leaves me with zero desire or anticipation …
So the last few years haven’t been good for one Manoj (that’s “M.” for short) Night Shyamalan. The trouble all started with The Village, which was genuinely creepy but lost audiences with bait and switch marketing and yet another twist ending that deflated almost all of the preceding narrative. Lady in the Water, commendable for its intent, failed to connect with anyone but the actors, ego and monkey tree-things it cut paychecks for. The Happening… wince. So yeah, yeah, M. …
So, according to the Mayans, the poop is going to hit the fan for good on December 21, 2012 and everybody on Earth is going to get flushed down the giant doomsday toilet via some terrible catastrophe. What the Mayans didn’t predict is that director Roland Emmerich would get a second shot at a punch-the-earth-in-the-soft-parts movie after his “The Day After Tomorrow” was a critical and box office failure in 2004. No offense to Emmerich, but he hasn’t made anything …
I don’t think you can say Tim Burton is a bad director, but to call anything he does “visionary” any more is a big, fat overstatement. His stuff isn’t so much “visionary” as simply stamped “Tim Burton”– all the stripes and gaunt makeup and twisted architecture are variants on everything else he’s done to date and is expected. Of course, the whole conceit usually works, but I do have two nitpicks/requests: A) Give the hollow/red-tinged eyeball socket a rest and …
So everyone knows Inglorious Basterds is coming, but you may not know what it’s about beyond a bunch of hairy Americans putting Bowie Knife and baseball bat to Nazi noggin. Wonder no more. The new trailer reveals the alternate universe plot and has worked my heart over from brittle and jaded to warm and mushy.