Pixar’s Stanton to Adapt John Carter of Mars

Now it’s official: Finding Nemo and WALL-E director Andrew Stanton will be helming his first live-action movie, John Carter of Mars. The movie, based on the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, will be released under the Disney banner and not the Pixar banner, as was originally rumored/hypothesized, and will be hitting theatres sometime in 2012. [...]

Continuing Up

Finishing up my inadvertent Week of Pixar-Related Stuff: For the second straight weekend, Up was the top movie at the box office in the United States Ummm, oops, scratch that…Up was the second-place movie at the box office in the U.S. this last weekend – its gross dropped only 35% from last weekend to this [...]

Review: Up

I read a discussion of Up recently — I don’t remember where — which said that the movie was ultimately about acceptance of death, which is an awfully adult theme to find in a kids’ film. (Truth be told, of course: Pixar movies are family movies, not kids’ movies, and there’s a big difference.) I [...]

Ten2One: Ranking My Pixar Favorites

Welcome to the first installment of yet another new ongoing series I just now thought up: Ten2One, which is, in all honesty, just a fancy handle for a fairly standard Top 10 list. To kick things off, in honor of the opening of Pixar’s tenth animated feature, Up, I present to you my ordering, from [...]

Undecided Basterd

I have a quandary to work through and just under three months to do so. Well, truthfully, I have more time than that, but the jist is this: Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds comes out on August 21, and I have to decide if I want to go see it or not. I’m a little surprised [...]

Trailer Park: Sherlock Holmes

And now, presenting the trailer for one of my most heavily-anticipated movies of this winter: Sherlock Holmes. Starring Robert Downey Jr. as Holmes, Jude Law as Watson, and Rachel McAdams as…er, some scantily-clad woman. And directed by Guy Ritchie, who’s way overdue for making a good movie again. Cannot wait for this one. Enjoy! ETA: [...]

Review: Star Trek

Now this is what I want out of a summer blockbuster. Star Trek delivered all of the action, all of the spectacle, all of the emotion, all of the characterization I could have asked for and then some. [1] I found myself immersed in the world, in the stunning visual design and the engaging characters, [...]

Review: The Dark Knight

If Batman Begins represented a step or several forward from the superhero movies that came before, so does The Dark Knight represent another leap. The Dark Knight retains all that I loved about its predecessor – note-perfect acting[1], solid writing, gorgeous cinematography and art direction – and adds several new flavors to its casserole of [...]

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Review: WALL-E

For all of the usual Pixar brand of amazing technical virtuosity on display in WALL-E (and believe me, there’s plenty of it), it’s the wonderful characterization which makes the movie such a joy to watch. That director Andrew Stanton and his wizards at Pixar were able to draw such well-developed characters with such little dialogue [...]

Review: Superman Returns

There’s a scene early on in Superman Returns which beautifully establishes director Bryan Singer‘s priorities for his latest superhero epic: the Kryptonian rocket which Superman has apparently been using during his mysterious time off Earth crashes in a cornfield near his mother’s farm in Kansas. We don’t see the ship land, however, not directly; we [...]

Review: X-Men: The Last Stand

Let’s say for just a minute that you’re not just like everyone else. There’s something about you, either something with your body, your heart or your head, that sets you apart from what society likes to define as “normal.” Maybe you hate whatever it is that makes you different; maybe you adore it; maybe you’ve [...]

Review: The DaVinci Code

Ron Howard’s good with actors. That’s obvious both from the quality of the actors who have appeared in the movies he’s directed and the quality of the performances he gets out of them. The thing is, though, The DaVinci Code really shouldn’t have been a movie about the actors or the characters — it’s a [...]

Review: Walk the Line

In the opening moments of Walk the Line, Johnny Cash (Joaquin Phoenix) gently thumbs the edge of a buzzsaw in the wood shop of Folsom Prison moments before his infamous concert before its inmates. The blade of this saw, an instrument which altered the course of Cash’s life when he was eleven years old, sums [...]

News Roundup for January 5, 2006

» In a move that genuinely brought a smile to our faces, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences today announced that Jon Stewart will be hosting this year’s Academy Award ceremonies. That move alone should make the telecast much more watchable than usual. (Reminder: Oscar nominations will be announced on Tuesday, January 31, [...]

Good Deal

As I’ve been predicting since early in the negotiations, Disney and Pixar are nearing a deal to re-up their distribution deal, which was set to expire after the release of Cars next year. I can’t honestly see how anyone might have believed this deal wasn’t going to happen–both companies stood to lose way, way too [...]

Review: War of the Worlds

One of the things I most admire about Steven Spielberg is his ability–and his willingness–to balance his desire to make his deepely personal Films with his desire to make big-budget crowd-pleasing popcorn-chomping Flicks. He’s equally adept at making both kinds of movies and has created classic examples of each, though I have to admit I [...]

Review: The Upside of Anger

Joan Allen does staid-and-proper so well, she seldom gets the chance to play sexy. In fact, I can’t remember ever finding her particularly sexy in any movie I’ve ever seen her in. I don’t mean that as a knock against Allen; so many of the parts she’s played have called for Frosty Joan or All-Business [...]

Trailer Park: Harry Potter, “Shining”

The trailer for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (QuickTime or Windows Media) looks pretty impressive to me, even though as one of my co-workers noted, it seems that they’re trying to shove too much impressive stuff into one two-minute trailer. Still, it’s a pretty massive book, much bigger than the three previous books [...]

Review: Layer Cake

Take a story about several denizens of the criminal British underworld, mix in a few spoonfuls of dark humor and a couple of cups of violence, a handful of plot twists to taste, and what do you end up with? Snatch. Well, OK, yes, you do, but if you mix the recipe up a bit [...]