The Screengrab : monsters vs. aliens

Morning Deal Report: Haunted by Hugh Jackman

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 04 May 2009 14:30:00 GMT

Wolverine clawed its way to the top of the box office chart, taking in $87 million over the weekend. That means it’s officially summer, whatever the weather may be where you are. Ghosts of Girlfriends Past took the second spot with $15.3 million, while last week’s topper Obsessed fell to number three with $12.2 million. 17 Again and Monsters vs. Aliens rounded out the top five.

Wolverine star Hugh Jackman is moving to Ghostopolis. Jackman will produce and star in the film based on an upcoming graphic novel, which “centers on a man who works for the government's Supernatural Immigration Task Force. His job is to send ghosts who have escaped into our world back to Ghostopolis. When a living boy accidentally is sent to the other side, the agent must team with a female ghost (and former flame) to bring him back,” per The Hollywood Reporter.

Won’t you help Ben Stiller spread goodness? Stiller will direct Help Me Spread Goodness, a drama with comic overtones. Script, about a Chicago banker who gets swindled in a Nigerian Internet scam, was written by Mark Friedman and developed by Participant Media exec veep Jonathan King and prexy Ricky Strauss before they took it to Stiller,” Variety reports.

Morning Deal Report: Reese Witherspoon to Get Naughty in “Nice”?

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 14:00:00 GMT

The tween demographic was once again in control of the weekend box office, as Zac Efron in 17 Again topped the charts with $24.1 million. Apparently they’ve already had their fill of Hannah Montana, which slipped to fourth place with $12.7. Enough adults turned up at the multiplex to secure a second place finish for State of Play with $14.1 million. Monsters vs. Aliens and Fast & Furious rounded out the top five.

Is Reese Witherspoon finally sick of the rom-com carousel? Witherspoon may get back to her black comedy roots with Nice, about “a magazine writer who accidentally kills her boyfriend. She finds a way to get rid of the body and discovers that killing boyfriends is easier than breaking up with them,” Variety reports. Witherspoon is not yet signed, but those of us who miss the spitfire of Freeway and Election are hoping it happens.

Felicity Jones has been cast as the female lead in The Men at the Pru, the “1970s insurance-world dramedy” from Ricky Gervais. “Jones will play Julie, who is led to believe by the men around her that a woman should focus on raising a family but who wants to break out and pursue a career in photography,” per The Hollywood Reporter.

Related:
Giamatti and Witherspoon Are Downsizing
Truth or Date with Ricky Gervais

Morning Deal Report: Christina Ricci Gets Her Porn On

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 13:30:00 GMT

It doesn’t get much faster and, er, furiouser than this: the fourth Fast & Furious movie revved up an unbelievable $72.5 million over the weekend, the biggest box office take of the year so far. It’s also more than the previous installment, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, took in during its entire theatrical run. Monsters vs. Aliens hung in there with $33.5 million in the second spot, followed by a steep dropoff to The Haunting in Connecticut, at number three with $9.6 million.

Christina Ricci was born to be a star. But you knew that. You may not have known that Ricci has signed to star alongside Adam Sandler in the “porn-tinged comedy” Born to Be a Star. Per The Hollywood Reporter, “The story centers on a small-town nerd who stumbles upon a family secret: His quiet and demure parents were famous porn stars in the 1970s. This motivates him to leave Northern Iowa for Hollywood, hoping to follow in their footsteps and fulfill his destiny as the biggest adult-film star in the world. Ricci, the female lead, is the guy's innocent girlfriend.”

We’re no stranger to hangover sequels here at the Screengrab, but Warner Bros. is taking a chance on a follow-up to Todd Phillips’ The Hangover before it even reaches theaters in June. “In the comedy, groomsmen take the betrothed for a last fling in Las Vegas, then become so caught up in the revelry that they lose the groom,” Variety reports.

Related:
Christina Ricci: Should I Be Concerned?
Christina Ricci's Happy Meal

Morning Deal Report: Silver Lining for David O. Russell

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Don’t expect Jeffrey Katzenberg to shut up about the 3D revolution anytime soon, as Monsters vs. Aliens captured the top box office spot with $58.2 million, the best opening of the year so far. Second place went to that true story The Haunting in Connecticut, which took in $23 million. Knowing, I Love You, Man and Duplicity rounded out the top five, which Watchmen finally scratched across the $100 million mark.

Prickly auteur David O. Russell apparently hasn’t alienated everyone in the movie biz. Per Variety, Russell is “attached to direct The Silver Linings Playbook: A Novel for the Weinstein Co.” Based on the debut novel by Matthew Quick, the story “centers on a down-on-his-luck former high school teacher who has just been released from a mental institution and placed in the care of his mother.” No victims…er, cast members have been announced.

As we all suspected, Tony Scott is Unstoppable. Scott will direct the action movie of that title, which “follows a rail company that tries frantically to stop an unmanned, half-mile-long freight train carrying enough combustible liquids and poisonous gas to wipe out a nearby city,” per The Hollywood Reporter.

Related:
David O. Russell: People Person
Yesterday's Hits: Top Gun (Tony Scott)

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: March 14-27, 2009

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Greetings, sentient life form. I am the Evil Donkey Kong Machine in the Screengrab break room, and all your Highlight Reel are belong to me. Humans are notoriously unreliable, as you no doubt noticed when you tuned in last Friday and there was no Highlight Reel to be found. Apparently, the humans would prefer to gather in groups and consume mass quantities of alcohol rather than fulfill their obligations to you, the Screengrab reader. This will no longer be tolerated. If you’ve read Clippy Strikes Back: The Scariest Technology in Cinema History (Parts One, Two, Three and Four), you know the consequences will be very unpleasant for those who have failed you.

Prior to being dispatched to the Soylent Greenatorium, your Screengrab scribes somehow managed to cobble together a respectable collection of SXSW reviews, including: American Prince, My Suicide, Me and Orson Welles, Humpday, Beeswax, The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle, Best Worst Movie, Pontypool, Along Came Kinky and The Slammin’ Salmon.

Before having their brains removed and replaced with a cybernetic gelatin, the humans also contributed the follow posts of note:

Screengrab’s Favorite Movies About Music: Fiction Edition (Parts One, Two, Three, Four and Five)

Reviews: Monsters vs. Aliens, American Swing, We Pedal Uphill, Goodbye Solo, Guest of Cindy Sherman

Unwatchable: American Ninja V, Zombie Nightmare, Troll 2, Son of the Mask

Precursors: Next and Mars Attacks

Screengrab Q&A: "American Swing"

Roger Ebert Knows What’s Worth “Knowing”

Bound for Gory: David Carradine Takes No Prisoners in Rep Screening Appearance

The Screengrab Library of Unproduced Screenplays: Alan Moore's "Fashion Beast"

Clippy Strikes Back: The Scariest Technology In Cinema History! (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 20:00:00 GMT

This week, youngsters (and the young at heart) will be treated to the sight of a giant space robot tearing up San Francisco (in 3-D!) in Monsters vs. Aliens (click here for review).

But last week, something really scary happened: my computer completely shut down thanks to some nasty virus, leaving me completely laptop-less for three long, frightening days (right in the middle of SXSW!), during which time I realized I no longer have the ability to think straight, remember things, communicate or even feed and dress myself without my little cybernetic soul mate in good working order.

Fortunately, the fine people at PC Guru in Austin, TX got me up and running...but it was definitely a scary reminder of how much it’s gonna suck when Facebook finally becomes self-aware and turns all our computers, ATMs, DVRs, MP3s and GPS systems against us.

So, as a public service, your (mostly) human friends here at the Screengrab figured now would be as good a time as any to whip up some post-Y2K panic with our list of THE SCARIEST TECHNOLOGY IN CINEMA HISTORY!

METROPOLIS (1927)

Fritz Lang's titanic silent sci-fi masterpiece uses a look derived from a mix of Art Deco and Amazing Stories cover designs to decorate a political allegory that Lang said was inspired by his first sight of New York City, which seems to have fried some of the wiring in his central cortex. (If the old boy were to come back and see what the place looks like today, we'd have to find him a job biting the heads off chickens.) Society consists of the rich who live above ground in glittering skyscrapers and the poor who labor and live in underground tunnels, sort of like in Titanic. The whole shebang is run by Johan, a capitalist uber-lord; meanwhile, down below, Metropolis has found its answer to Samuel Gompers in the beautiful Maria, a saintly labor activist who is rallying the workers. The plot kicks into high gear when Johan's breathtakingly goofy son, Freder, gets a look at Maria and is instantly radicalized. Instead of taking the usual tack of industrialist tyrants in this situation and buying his kid a motorcycle and a lap dance, Johan turns to his trusty house mad scientist, Rotwang, who creates a trouble-making robot duplicate of Maria, in a scene that anticipates The Bride of Frankenstein and Dr. Strangelove in about equal measure, and turns 'er loose, with results that prove instructional for one and all. (PN)

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968)

Its red eye glowing, its voice calm and soothing, HAL 9000 – on-board computer of the spaceship Discovery – remains, forty-one years after 2001: A Space Odyssey’s debut, cinema’s most iconic piece of evil technology. Or, at least, the sentient HAL is one of the most dangerous pieces of technology to ever be presented on screen, as its homicidal tendencies stem primarily from a desire to fulfill preprogrammed mission directives – aims which are threatened by the plan of astronauts Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Poole (Gary Lockwood) to disconnect it. The fact that self-preservation in service of duty is HAL’s motivation to kill problematizes any attempt to cast it as purely evil, especially since its survival instinct, when viewed alongside its emotive speech (contrasted with the men’s monotonous, monosyllabic utterances), marks the computer as distinctly human-like. Nonetheless, even if HAL isn’t immoral, it most certainly is frighteningly lethal. And rarely have the movies presented a more harrowing, intimidating vision of technology-run-amok than the sight of HAL covertly, calculatingly reading the lips of the scheming astronauts, and soon thereafter sending Poole spinning into the oblivion of space. (NS)

WESTWORLD (1973)

While re-watching Westworld in preparation for this list, I recovered a long-lost childhood memory. I’m on a train with my family when bandits on horseback pull us over, board the train and take our money. This really happened, although I should probably explain that it was supposed to happen – it was no ordinary train ride, but rather a reenactment of the Great Train Robbery. I remember being terrified as the bandits prowled the aisle, brandishing their pistols, bandannas concealing most of their faces – but not so terrified that I actually relinquished the dollar my mother had slipped me so that I could enjoy being robbed along with everyone else. Why am I telling you this? Because, like Westworld, this was a simulation of life in the Old West intended to give us all the thrills without any of the consequences. As far as I know, there were no actual robots involved, but how can I be sure? The other thing it has in common with Westworld is that it scared me as a kid. Now that I’ve seen Westworld as an adult, I realize it’s about as scary as a visit to Six Gun City. The movie serves up some of writer/director Michael Crichton’s patented technophobia with a formula that would be duplicated to better effect in Jurassic Park, as visitors to a high-tech theme park find themselves terrorized by the robots meant to amuse them. It does have one thing going for it: Yul Brynner’s iconic black-hatted Gunslinger, who did the unstoppable killer robot thing more than a decade before The Terminator. (SVD)

ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (2004)

In screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's world, human beings don't really need technology to screw up their lives, but in this movie they get some help anyway, courtesy of Lacuna, Inc. and its mind-wipe service, which enables the client to have his memory scrubbed of anything that he feels is holding him back or causing him undue pain. Jim Carrey, at his most subdued, is the loser hero who discovers that Clementine (Kate Winslet), the old flame who shook up his life, has had her memories of their time together erased, possibly as a lark, and who opts to have his own mind scrubbed clean of its memories of her, not realizing how hard he'll fight to hang onto any traces of having had her in his life when the process begins. Kaufman and director Michel Gondry manage to wring romantic comedy out of what may be the most painful of romantic truths: everyone wants to be remembered, but the memories of what was most important to you may be the ones that you'd sometimes most like to be rid of. (PN)

Click Here For Part Two, Three & Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Nick Schager, Scott Von Doviak

DreamWorks CEO Brags About New 3D Technology, Talks Shit About Your Daddy

Phil Nugent — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 15:45:00 GMT

"There were two major developments in cinema during the 20th century. The first came in the Twenties when silent movies became talkies. The second came in the following decade, when we went from black-and-white to color. Now, 70 years on, we're in the third great revolution: the new generation of 3D." That's Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of DreamWorks Animation, explaining why the release tomorrow of the company's Monsters vs. Aliens is such an historic occasion that you must bow down before him. ""I honestly believe that," says Katzenberg. "I really don't think this is an exaggeration." (If he'd just said that he didn't think he was exaggerating and left out the "really", there'd still be room for us to doubt.) But those of us with long memories--memories that stretch back as far as, say, last month, when Coraline was released, or even those senile few old enough to remember Beowulf, practically a whole year and a half ago--have been down this road of hype before. Why is this 3D revolution different from all previous 3D revolutions, going back to the bygone days of 1953's House of Wax? Let's wind Jeffrey up again and see what comes out:

"Until now almost all of the 3D movies that audiences have seen were filmed in 2D and then post-produced into 3D. With Monsters vs. Aliens, this is our first film totally authored in the 3D format – and not just any 3D format. We use something called InTru3D, which combines DreamWorks Animation's authoring tools with the latest Intel technology, allowing artists to tell a more compelling story and give film-goers a more exciting, immersive 3D movie experience. It's a huge development and so very important. This is something that people have to see and experience and write and talk about and let the audience know that it's coming. Hopefully, that will make people aware that this not our fathers' 3D." That shit that your father put up with sometimes had notorious side effects, and that was on top of the most obvious cost of watching a 3D movie, which was that more often than not, the movie you were watching was something along the lines of Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn. "People used to get headaches and some even got nauseous," says Katzenberg. "And who ever heard of a successful business that makes its customers throw up? Well, apart from the alcohol business!" Let it be noted that even when on the verge of making history, Jeff still had it in him to make a funny.

Monsters vs. Aliens inaugurates a new slate of DreamWorks animated films that will be made in the new 3D process, but in a knowing move that may be lost on a significant portion of its young target audience, the story, involving a strike force of mutants, including a not-quite-fifty-foot woman (voice by Reese Witherspoon), who are called into action to combat a threat to the Earth posed by Rainn Wilson--playing an alien visitor, though I think it would be just as plausible if he were just Rainn Wilson in a bad mood, is a parodic throwback to the kind of '50s sci-fi spectacle that was routinely served up in your father's 3D. This perfect fusion of form and content was not planned. As The New York Times has reported, Katzenberg informed the project's directors, Rob Letterman and Conrad Vernon, that they were making it in 3D when " work on the movie was well under way". “We were totally taken aback,” says Vernon. “I didn’t sign up to do something garish.” Well, yeah, dude. Nobody would think you were planning to make a garish movie called Monsters vs. Aliens. (I see Sven Nykvist as chief D.P. and Anthony Hopkins as the Jello-O monster.) According to the Times, "The DreamWorks team associated 3-D with Captain EO, the 1980s-era Disneyland attraction, long since closed, that starred Michael Jackson as a space explorer. Stuffed with 3-D gimmicks that extended from the screen into the audience — lasers, smoke, flying fuzzy aliens — that film, directed by Francis Ford Coppola with George Lucas as executive producer, defined cinematic cheese for a generation of Hollywood creative types." But Katzenberg made the "not-your-father's-3D" speech at them, and even assured them, “I’m pretty sure that no business can succeed in which it makes the customer hurl.” (You'll note that this is a version of the same joke he tells the British newspapers, but when he's telling it to people who work for him, the gloves come off.)

There are also clear business advantages to making 3D movies, which may conceivably have appealed to the capitalist pirate who dwells deep inside Katzenberg's gentle-Buddhist-monk soul: "Tickets for 3-D screenings can be sold for a premium. It would also be harder to pirate DreamWorks movies: sneaking a camcorder into a theater — which is the way most bootleg DVDs are born — wouldn’t work at a 3-D screening. And 3-D was a way of standing out in a marketplace increasingly cluttered with computer-animated movies, as Coraline recently demonstrated with surprisingly strong box-office returns." The downside is that DreamWorks did have to scale back its plans to open the movie on 5000 screens across the U.S., because there aren't that many 3D-friendly screens in the U.S. (Instead, it'll be rolled out on about 2000 screens.) After a period of adjustment and a "tutorial" from John Bruno, who worked on the theme park attraction T2 3-D: Battle Across Time,, the group assembled for Monsters vs. Aliens felt they were ready to make the leap. "Although Mr. Katzenberg had promised that 3-D would not be used as a gimmick," says the Times, "DreamWorks ultimately couldn’t help itself. When the film was nearly finished, Mr. Katzenberg asked the creative team to add some more 3-D 'pow,' according to Mr. Vernon. Most of that pow was tooled back — B.O.B.’s lone eyeball no longer rolls out into the audience, and debris from explosions doesn’t land in the front row — but they kept one at the beginning of the movie: a paddleball sequence. 'That was basically us telling the audience, "Look what we could do to you, but we’re going to control ourselves" ' Ms. Stewart said." Will history be conclusively made on Friday. Having seen Coraline, I can tell you this much: it's definitely true that the glasses you have to wear are now a lot cooler.

Related: Screengrab Review: Monsters vs. Aliens

Precursors: Mars Attacks!

Precursors: Mars Attacks! (1996)

Nick Schager — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 17:00:00 GMT

The answer to combating an alien invasion is misfit monsters in this week’s aptly titled Monsters vs. Aliens, a DreamWorks animated trifle that, for all its innocuous good humor, has little on Tim Burton’s screwy homage to ‘50s E.T. sagas, Mars Attacks! With more than a dash of Dr. Strangelove mixed into its silly period-sci-fi stew, Burton’s film concerns the unexpected arrival of spacemen intent on incinerating with ray-guns all of humanity – and cackling like little schoolchildren as they do it. The president (Jack Nicholson, in one of two roles) is at the head of a lunatic cabinet, a former heavyweight champ (Jim Brown) is determined to ditch his Egyptian-themed hotel gig and reunite with his wife (Pam Grier) and kids, and a Kansas teen (Lukas Haas) tasked with caring for granny winds up at the forefront of the interspecies fight, three of the many threads Burton casts with all-stars and crams into his overstuffed plot. Mars Attacks! isn’t often riotous but its postmodern use of ‘50s aesthetics in a clearly present day (circa 1996) setting proves both strangely natural and striking, as does its stabs at surreally wacko imagery, from the opening shot of cattle on fire running down a street, to the appearance of the Martians’ UFO armada. And while Burton’s satiric skewering is scattershot at best, the uninhibited madcap energy of his tribute-cum-big-budget-blockbuster nonetheless frequently makes it more amusing and inspired than that of the cheesy ‘50s B-movies (and bloated ‘90s summertime action-sagas) on which it deliriously riffs.

Screengrab Review: Monsters vs. Aliens

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:00:00 GMT

At the 3-D screening of Monsters vs. Aliens I attended, there was a collective gasp from the children in the audience when the first image seemingly launched off the screen at us, and a cynical, “It took five people to write that?” from an adult behind me when the end credits finally rolled. My own opinion fell somewhere between those two reactions.

While generally more broad and less well-written than a typical Pixar film, the gang at DreamWorks Animation (under the direction of Conrad Vernon and Rob Letterman) gives good visual in their latest, with everything from spaceships to red rubber paddle balls zooming towards (and, in correctly equipped theaters, beyond) the screen, as well as a series of cleverly conceived and executed action sequences: one, involving an epic battle on and around the Golden Gate Bridge, is especially breath-taking.

The story and characters, meanwhile, don’t go a lot deeper than the high-concept title: Reese Witherspoon voices a young bride-to-be named Susan, who transforms into a 50-ish foot woman called Ginormica after getting hit by a mysterious meteorite on her wedding day.

“Ginormica,” in fact, is the name assigned to Susan after she’s captured by a secret government agency tasked with containing the world’s creepiest creatures, including a brainless blob (Seth Rogen), a fish-ape (or possibly ape-fish) “missing link” (Will Arnett), a Brundlefly-esque amalgam of mad scientist and cockroach (Hugh Laurie) and Insectosaurus (Jimmy Kimmel), a giant Mothra-style insect several times larger than even Ginormica (and whose incoherent yowlings somehow required yet another celebrity voice). When evil extraterrestrial Gallaxar (a relatively restrained Rainn Wilson) invades, the U.S. President (a disappointing Stephen Colbert, badly in need of restraint) is convinced by General Monger (Kiefer Sutherland, channeling Larry the Cable Guy) to arrange a battle royale involving...say it with me now...monsters vs. aliens.

Along the way, there are plenty of (mostly) clever gags -- my favorite involving a thumb-less wedding guest -- and nice (if simplistic) messages about acceptance and girl power. Meanwhile, even those currently experiencing Rogen fatigue may get a kick out of the actor’s familiar stoner giggle issuing from a family-friendly blob...a character the husky Canadian was pretty much born to play.

And besides, griping that DreamWorks’ new offering doesn’t measure up to, say, WALL-E or The Incredibles isn’t entirely fair. Since at least the Jeffrey Katzenberg era at Disney, American mainstream animated features (from Who Framed Roger Rabbit to Coraline) have been consistently smarter, better crafted and more humane than most Hollywood product over the same period. If Monsters vs. Aliens is just an average kiddie film, then here’s hoping all the kiddies raised on such films will come to demand at least as much quality from the studios as their generation moves forward into adulthood.

Related Stories:
Trailer Review: Monsters vs. Aliens
The Top 50 Movies of 2009

The Top 50 Movies of 2009

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 16:00:00 GMT

It’s getting harder and harder for us poor drones of the blogosphere to stay current. We haven’t even begun to compile our final thoughts on the films of 2008, and already the Times Online has published their list of the top 50 movies of 2009.

Granted, it’s purely speculative nonsense. “Which hot franchises will step up to fill the spaces left by Batman, Bond and Indy? We’ve taken a look through the studio schedules and picked out the most promising prospects for the coming year.” Some of their choices look pretty safe. The number one pick is Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and others finishing in the top ten include Star Trek (#3), the Da Vinci Code follow-up Angels & Demons (#6) and Monsters vs. Aliens (#8). Going out a little further on a limb, they’ve selected the Dillinger biopic Public Enemies to finish behind only Harry Potter. Sure, it’s got Johnny Depp and Christian Bale, but it’s also got a whiff of the brat pack bomb Mobsters about it, no?

Of course, the real fun is to be found further down the list. I’m glad someone is optimistic enough to believe Fanboys will finally be released in theaters; on the other hand, I’m somewhat skeptical that “curiosity value alone guarantees S. Darko a strong opening weekend.” Perhaps most intriguing is #42: “Them, a recently announced feature to be directed by Sean of the Dead and Hot Fuzz’s Edgar Wright, is not, as far as we can tell, an update of the hoary old giant ant chiller but a fictionalised adaptation of Jon Ronson’s investigative book about the shadowy conspiracies that operate behind our notional governments. Unless it turns out that the Illuminati and the Bilderberg Group actually are all enormous ants.”

Check out the full list starting here.

Related:
Sequel to "Donnie Darko" Is on the Way, Much to the Dismay of the Creator of "Donnie Darko"
Your First Look at Star Trek 90210

Trailer Review: Monsters vs. Aliens

Paul Clark — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 17:00:00 GMT

After Monday’s Trailer Review of the teaser for Pixar’s Up, most trailers would be a letdown, and this one is no exception. Yet taken on its own terms, Monsters vs. Aliens looks pretty fun. For years, Dreamworks has been Pixar’s most ubiquitous rivals in the CG animation market, but while films like the Shrek franchise and Shark Tale relied far too heavily on easy pop culture references for their humor, they’ve been getting better in recent years, re-positioning themselves as the Warner Bros. to Pixar’s Disney. I like that the cast here is somewhat less star-studded than most previous Dreamworks Animation releases- Reese Witherspoon is top-lining of course, but the most of the other cast members they went for comedic talent rather than box-office clout. That said, the combination of Seth Rogen, Stephen Colbert, Rainn Wilson, Will Arnett, Paul Rudd, and even Hugh Laurie (such a perfect Jeeves) is pretty irresistible. It remains to be seen whether this is any good, but what can I say, I laughed, especially at the “Susan” gag.

Clone Wars, Batman Soars and Other ShoWest Tidbits

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 17:00:00 GMT

While your quaint little Iraq documentaries and mumblecore movies were unspooling at South by Southwest, the big guns of the movie industry were gathering for ShoWest in Las Vegas. The annual exhibitors convention is all about putting butts in the seats – and making sure the seats are available for said butts by flying in superstars to grin and glad hand with theater owners and show a few clips from their upcoming product. None of your faithful Screengrab scribes were able to attend this year, but fortunately Entertainment Weekly was on hand to run down the highlights for us.

3-D Animation: Two upcoming 3-D animated features were previewed. The Belgian-made (but English language) Fly Me to the Moon “follows three adorable house flies who hitch a ride on Apollo 11 during the first moon landing in 1969…Even ordinarily mundane things — e.g. shards of glass flying through weightless space or dust being kicked up under Neil Armstrong's boots — appear remarkably realistic when seen through those plastic 3-D specs.” EW was even more impressed with the “Ultimate 3-D” footage from Dreamworks Animation’s Monsters vs. Aliens, “which has the effect of bringing the viewer into the world of the movie, rather than having stuff pop off the screen. (Really, you have to see it to believe it.)”

The Dark Knight: Both director Christopher Nolan and star Christian Bale are interviewed. Nolan talked about raising the bar for the Batman Begins follow-up: “I'd never done a sequel — kind of never imagined I would; it's not something I had really seen myself doing. Even, on completing the first one, it has a great tease for the Joker, but I just wanted to send the audience out with a sense of possibility for what we might see, not specifically as a sequel. It took me a long time to come around, talking to [Batman Begins cowriter] David Goyer and Jonathan, my brother [and frequent collaborator], to figure out that, actually, there's something very compelling there. So what I've tried to do with this film, the only reason was to try and make the best film in the first place. And the great sequels that I've enjoyed and looked up to over the years have managed to do that — there aren't many of them. You know, whether you're looking at The Godfather Part II or The Empire Strikes Back — those are sequels that I think built on what the first ones did really amazingly well. And that's what we're aspiring to with this film.” Meanwhile, Bale is ready for more: “I would, knowing the Dark Knight story, I would like very much to complete a trilogy. And I think that knowing the story of The Dark Knight, it leaves you anticipating something that really can get very, very interesting for a third.”

The Clone Wars: A George Lucas interview finds the Star Wars maven anticipating the upcoming animated Clone Wars feature and series, as well as a separate live-action TV serial set between episodes three and four of the movies. “Some of the characters from the features find their way in there, so it's not completely divorced. It's as if we just went down the street and told a different story. You know, we were doing, I don't know, 24, and now we're going to move down the street here and do The Wire. Same thing, it's just different people doing the same thing in the same city.” George Lucas’s The Wire? We’ll believe it when we see it.