Rojo

You can check out a picture of Justin Chatwin as Goku from the upcoming Dragonball Z movie below.

I haven't talked about this one much because frankly I was just never into the cartoon, but from what I've seen so far it looks like they're really trying to capture the look of the characters (lots and lots of hair gel required, no doubt).

The movie is being directed by James Wong, and that's about all I know about it. :-)

I guess it'll have lots of martial arts action in it, and it'll be interesting to see if Wong tries to emulate the anime style of cinematography in a live action film. Of course we've seen how that might go over in Speed Racer's box office numbers...

Thanks to "Roman" for the shout.

Dragonball Z opens on April 10, 2009.

Sources: DBtheMovie via ComingSoon

So what are your feelings about this? Are you guys looking forward to it?

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In our never-ending quest to find new ways to mock contemporary popular culture whilst celebrating the classics, we bring the first ever (ever!) SpoutBlog Photoshop Contest. We have a George Romero DVD two-pack to give away: a copy of the new Diary of the Dead, and the 40th Anniversary edition of Night of the Living Dead. Here’s the quip from the press release:

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I hate twist endings, especially those in the films of M. Night Shyamalan. Maybe it’s because I was told the twist of The Sixth Sense prior to seeing it and haven’t been able to appreciate the filmmaker ever since. It’s not so much that I believe films shouldn’t have twist endings, it’s that I believe films that have twist endings should be enjoyable even when you know the secret (Psycho is still great after a thousand viewings, for example). The only one of Shyamalan’s movies to hold up even with the spoilers revealed is Unbreakable.

So, I had no problem reading about the big secret of Shyamalan’s latest, The Happening. An early review of a rough cut of the thriller has shown up on Collider, and in addition to claiming the thing is “a terrible, terrible movie,” and that, “Mark Wahlberg might very well give the worst performance I’ve ever seen in anything,” the critic includes a complete plot synopsis, including the big revelation of what is causing people to suddenly kill themselves (surely you’ve seen the trailer).

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• Skype sponsored a panel at Cannes today called “Buzz Builders,” and it featured a number of Friends of SpoutBlog: Alison Willmore, Michael Jones, Eugene Hernandez and, via the sponsor’s internet based calling system, David Poland. Poland used the panel to announce that he’ll “be very surprised is still [around] three years from now.” Jeff Wells’ commenters used the opportunity to make cracks at Poland’s track record with predictions.
• Girish calls Robert B. Ray’s The ABCs of Classic Hollywood ” the best new film book I’ve encountered in a long while.” It sounds fascinating: “Ray’s starting point is this quote from Vincente Minnelli: “I feel that a picture that stays with you is made up of a hundred or more hidden things. They’re things that the audience is not conscious of, but that accumulate.” Ray proposes a fascinating and unorthodox method for discovering these hidden things.
  

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Waltz With Bashir, the first official trailer from cinemascopian.com on Vimeo.

Jeff Wells points to Cinemascopian, where blogger Yair Rave has posted the Vimeo trailer for Cannes competition entry Waltz With Bashir. This film wasn’t on my tentative must-see schedule (which I’ll be posting here before I get on a plane tomorrow), but I might find a place there, thanks to my Sita Sings the Blues-rekindled love of grown-up animation. Cinemascopian calls it an “animated quasi-documentary”; style-wise it looks a lot like A Scanner Darkly meets Persepolis, with an element of, like, Grand Theft Auto: Beirut. An aside: does any location for the next GTA seem *more* logical than the Holy Land?

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After watching this comprehensive interview with reviled filmmaker Uwe Boll, I can’t imagine there’s anything more that needs to be written on the guy. Ever. Seriously. Considering he’s seen here chewing Stride Gum (which is against him — even if for marketing purposes), he addresses all the recent stories about him and shows us how much he’s able to make fun of himself, and he confesses that he would not actually quit filmmaking if the anti-Boll petition does acquire one million signatures (though he would at least stop adapting video games), it’s clear that he deserves the final word.

That said, I don’t mean to discourage him from continuing his antics. He’s now officially joined my list of filmmakers whose personalities I prefer to their films (despite never having seen a Boll film), which also includes John Waters, Kevin Smith, David Lynch and Martin Scorsese (yes, I like his personality that much and also his films that little). So, I’ll continue watching video interviews of him and reading things such as his recently published list of five favorite films, but I’m giving up following what others have to say about the guy. It all just seems so futile, doesn’t it?

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Fans of 2005’s The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe can rest easy, as Disney and Walden Media ensure the successful continuation of the Narnia films with this crackerjack sequel that matches, and in some ways surpasses, its predecessor. In this edition, the story picks up 1,300 years later (in Narnian time, only one year for humans), when the four young Pevensie siblings are summoned back to help Prince Caspian defeat his evil uncle and assure his rightful place on the throne. With the first film grossing north of three-quarters of a billion worldwide, and a prime summertime release, exhibitors should be minting money.

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As a rule, I'm not exactly a big Summer Blockbuster kind of guy (full disclosure: In my youth, I actually stood on line to get into the first showing of Who Framed Roger Rabbit on the day it opened. Boy -- there's a couple of hours I'll never get back). But that said, I must admit to being genuinely jazzed at the prospect of the forthcoming X-Files movie.

Yup, I'm a huge fan of the series. Star David Duchovny famously observed that they were doing feature quality work on a weekly TV schedule, and he obviously had that right; I can't think of another show that, at it's best, was as well-crafted on every level. But more to the point -- and you certainly didn't have to be a sci-fi geek to get it -- was the chemistry between its co-stars. For my money, nothing in TV history came close to the are-they-or-aren't-they? sexual tension between Gillian Anderson's slightly repressed Catholic school girl rationalist and Duchovny's passionately obsessive WASP with a dark side. Well, not really a WASP...they may have written Mulder as whitebread, but everybody who watched the show knew he was actually Jewish.

In any case, my favorite episode of all-time is still "The Post-Modern Prometheus" (1999), a black-and-white mini-movie that had nothing really to do with the show's Aliens Among Us mythology (neither does the new film, apparently); instead, it was writer/creator Chris Carter's loving homage to the Universal horror classics of the 30s and 40s. It's a ton of fun, overall, but the ending in particular is almost sublime; Mulder and Scully are watching Cher (a look-alike, but never mind) belting out "Walking in Memphis" in a club, and when he pulls her up to dance, the sly look that passes between them tells you all you need to know. Here's a clip of it -- make sure you watch through to the end for the big moment (and if it doesn't make you smile, you really need to have it looked at).

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So it looks like the marketing machine is finally getting in gear for The Incredible Hulk. We've got an new poster and a new trailer for the film which shows more action than we've seen before.

I'm hoping that this Hulk film ends up surprising everyone and exceeding expectations. I'd love to see a kick-butt Incredible Hulk movie as a follow up to the previous, much slower moving version.

Check out both the new trailer and the poster below.

Sorry about the quality of the trailer but there's not a better copy out there yet.

The Incredible Hulk opens on June13.

Sources: IGN.com (image) Trailer Addict (trailer)

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Next week there's a little film called Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull .

You may have heard of it.

If not you're either just back from Mars or you've just woken up from a fifteen year coma.

Well we are almost there folks and I can't wait - however I won't be there on opening night - I'm checking out a screening of Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist. I know, I know I should be at Indy - but that's life!

However, you can bet your backside that I'll be there on Friday night, popcorn in hand just like I was in 1989 when I watched The Last Crusade but enough about me - you want to know about Indiana Jones.

Indiana Jones is going to be a hit, we all know that. It won't be a hit like Speed Racer was going to be a hit, it will be a solid gold hit - a "blockbuster" in the true sense of the word.

In case you don't know, before it became corrupted by the studio marketing folks the term "blockbuster" was a film that had people literally queued around the block - it was therefore busting the block. These days films are pitched as being blockbusters before they are filmed - they are just big budget films that the studios hope will be hits.

Anyway, how big a hit will Indy 4 be?

Some are saying "Star Wars" big!

Studio tracking for the film is running better for Indy than for Prince Caspian, a film that opens this weekend! Hollywood.com states that:

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