In this summer of comic book heroes coming to a theater near you to rescue you from heat, boredom or both, Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008) muscles it’s way out front of a pretty competitive pack. The visual effects alone are worth your ticket price. From start to finish the solid cast of actors sells this fantasy and we are presented with something not often found in this genre; well fleshed out characters. Sure, there are plenty of things getting blown up, ripped apart and beaten up, just as one would expect from any self respecting action movie; but Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008) delivers even more and like the title character, this movie has heart. (more…)

Funny Games is about two preppy young men who psychologically and physically terrorize an upper class family in their home. This is the Americanized version of the 1997 film. Although artistic and well crafted, the film is about as unpleasant as the countless number of torture porn movies that are manufactured these days. The irony about Funny Games is not that it isn’t funny but that the joke is on the audience and the director, Michael Haneke, is the only one who’s laughing. (more…)

Filed under: Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Celebrities and Controversy, Fandom

What is it about ice cream that makes distinguished former astronauts get so cranky? Buzz Aldrin, the second man to step foot on the Moon, says that "fantastic and unbelievable" science fiction movies and television shows are partly to blame for the boredom young people have with the modern space program.

During an ice cream party this week, Aldrin told Sci-Fi Wire: "All the shows where they beam people around and things like that have made young people think that that is what the space program should be doing. It's not realistic ... you can't possibly live up to the expectations you have created in young people. Why do they get bored with the space program? That's why."

Aldrin doesn't hate all science fiction films and TV shows -- just the ones that deal with "fantasy and ... traveling seven times the speed of light." He spoke favorably about Ron Howard's Apollo 13 and Tom Hanks' From the Earth to the Moon series: "They were fascinating, because it was reality history, and reality fiction can be good if you stick to reality." Got that?

While not mentioning Star Trek or Star Wars, I'd guess those were some of the culprits he had in mind. When he's not busy slagging science fiction and fantasy, Aldrin hosts Unseen Moon, a National Geographic Channel show. Hmm, I wonder if his show is "reality history" or "reality fiction"?

[ Via Classic Horror Film Board ]

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Filed under: Action, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Universal, Celebrities and Controversy, Distribution, Politics, Remakes and Sequels

When it comes to Hollywood movies, Chinese censors have always been a little strict. Case in point: The State Administration for Radio, Film and Television tells Variety that the upcoming release of The Mummy 3 Tomb of the Dragon Emperor is still pending until Universal makes unspecified changes to the flick. The censors didn't give any details about what would have to be cut from the film, but speculation has it that the source of the problem is "usually themes involving ghosts are taboo in China".

Emperor sets the new and improved O'Connell family (Brendan Fraser, Luke Ford, and Maria Bello) smack dab in the middle of another adventure battling a tyrannical emperor (Jet Li) and his legion of undead armies. Universal already made some concessions to the Chinese government in exchange for permission to shoot on location. According to Variety Universal was urged to make the film, "less political and more focused on fantasy than real history" -- Less political? Now that's a word I would have never associated with the Mummy franchise.

A flack for Universal has already released a statement saying, "Universal does not anticipate any obstacles to clearing the film for China and looks forward to releasing "The Mummy: Tomb of The Dragon Emperor" in the country where it was set and shot." Translation: We just spent $145 million bucks on this movie, and we want some of those Chinese box-office dollars. Emperor is just the latest Hollywood production to get a rough deal from Chinese censors, but at least they are in good company. On the upside, I guess the Chinese will never know what they're missing.

The Mummy 3 Tomb of the Dragon Emperor opens on August 1st, 2008.

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Filed under: Classics, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Warner Brothers, RumorMonger, Celebrities and Controversy, Family Films, Newsstand

Warner Bros has finally broken their silence when it comes to the much talked about Where the Wild Things Are. As you must remember, the film has been dogged with rumors of reshoots and recasting. The last news we heard wasn't good, as the studio had casting calls out for reshoots.

But finally, someone has managed to get the studio to say what the heck is going on. LA Times writer Patrick Goldstein sat down with studio chief Alan Horn, who finally gave the studio's side of the story. Horn denied all reports that Spike Jonze had been taken off the project, but admitted the film was being reworked. "We've given him more money and, even more importantly, more time for him to work on the film. We'd like to find a common ground that represents Spike's vision but still offers a film that really delivers for a broad-based audience. We obviously still have a challenge on our hands. But I wouldn't call it a problem, simply a challenge. No one wants to turn this into a bland, sanitized studio movie. This is a very special piece of material and we're just trying to get it right ... The jury is still out on this one. But we remain confident that Spike is going to figure things out and at the end of the day we'll have an artistically compelling movie."

Continue reading Warners Finally Says (Exactly) Where the Wild Things Are

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One of my favorite filmmakers, Bruce Conner, died the other day. His work won him "avant-garde" classification, and while that seems right, since he was experimenting on his own movie island, it keeps - and has always kept - his films at a misleading distance from ready access. Stock footage and original and found film were the raw materials for his collages, and they probably kept him from getting his due as a seminal artist. His bewitching blend of archival material (what did Conner film; what did he find?) is used, most famously in 1958's "A Movie," not simply to tell stories but to critique culture while worrying your conscience.

Like Andy Warhol, Conner was a pop-art polymath, having, for example, made his own deconstruction of Marilyn Monroe (1974's "Marilyn Times Five") and sculpted, sketched, and inkblotted, too. His early pieces were kaleidoscopic assemblages of found material that put him closer to Robert Rauschenberg's combines and straddled the line between chic and junk. Seeing them was like visiting some decomposing thrift shop, and his self-photograms were surreal phantasmagorias. One of the happiest things he ever did was filming Toni Basil dancing to her song "Breakaway" in 1966.

But Conner was probably never ambitious enough to become a brand, an industry, or an icon. He didn't have Warhol's star quality. He didn't want it. He gathered his creative strength during the atomic age at the early height of the Cold War and during the early apex of television advertising, and he was active in 1960s countercultural San Francisco. So on the one hand his films were playful (cool: found footage!) but his mood often headed into an exhilarating combustion of awfulness: they erupted with these apocalyptic orgies. Even by the time he was working with David Byrne and Terry Riley and making films out of Devo songs, he was still giving us nuclear TV nightmares.

Conner was using the movies not as a medium of entertainment or escape but a tool for kaleidoscopic critique, and being ahead of his time it took forever for the culture to catch up with his perceptions, his suspicions, his fears, and, even then, it never truly did. He died still ahead of his time.

Meandering through a Dallas suburb, Richard Linklater’s characters are vaguely connected by circumstance rather than plot. As the title suggests, they are slackers. None seem to work or have anything of particular importance to be doing as the film simply runs along like a slow motion relay where the focus of attention baton is passed along. What motivates you to care enough to sit through all 97 minutes is that these slackers are quirky, amusing and interesting.
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