Morning Deal Report: Ice Planets and Food Weather

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Much like yourself, I was just sitting here drinking my coffee and thinking about how Hollywood needs to make more movies based on videogames. And lo and behold, here it is in Variety: Warner Bros. is going ahead with an adaptation of Lost Planet, a Japanese videogame that “revolves around an expedition to an ice planet that harbors an energy source with the potential to save mankind.” The game is by Capcon, which has already seen its Resident Evil turn into three movies with another on the way.

At the other end of the cinematic spectrum, a long-lost screenplay by Gabriel Garcia Marquez will finally go before the cameras if Mexican actor and producer Rodolfo de Anda has his way. According to the Guardian, “de Anda says he has just acquired the rights to the long-forgotten screenplay and plans to start filming next year. Titled Frontera, the film was written before the 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude turned García Márquez into an international literary star… ‘Nobody knew it existed, and the most surprising thing is that it is a Western. I don't think anybody knew he had written anything like that,’ De Anda told Mexican newspaper Reforma.” De Anda is pursing Gael Garcia Bernal for the lead role.

And finally, it warms my heart to inform you that Sony Animation’s first venture into digital 3-D will be entitled Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. “The story is about 'food weather,' and so food falling from the sky lends itself so well to 3-D,” Bob Osher, president of Sony Pictures Entertainment's Digital Production division, told the Hollywood Reporter. I have no argument with that.

Related:
Screengrab (Maybe) Confirms a Rumor About Gael Garcia Bernal
Conglomerated Baddies: The 22 Most Evil Corporations in Movie History

Trailer Roundup: The Signal

John Constantine — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 17:59:00 GMT

The apocalypse is a delicious narrative confection I find hard to resist even when it’s packaged in garbage. More often than not, garbage is what you get. Just look at Paul W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evil: Apocalypse. Woof. While the new trailer for The Signal, out in February, doesn’t look especially interesting this older trailer from last summer is brimming with tasty paranoia and panic in the face of sudden and inexplicable disaster. One to look forward to.

Conglomerated Baddies: The 22 Most Evil Corporations in Movie History, Part 4

Peter Smith — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 18:00:00 GMT

Hudsucker Industries, THE HUDSUCKER PROXY (1994)

The Coen brothers, being involved in the film industry, have gotten quite adept at portraying powerful and sinister men in high places. And they don’t get much more powerful (or higher — forty-four floors, or forty-five if you count the mezzanine) than Sidney Mussburger. Paul Newman’s cigar-chomping, calculating executive wants to assume control of Hudsucker Industries (best imagined as the Wham-O Corporation if it managed to take over the world), but he can’t do it unless the comically compliant board holds on to the majority of its shares. To ensure that happens, he needs a sap to take over the presidency of the company and run it into the ground, and finds one in the sincere-but-doltish Norville Barnes. Aside from the greediness of their board of directors, Hudsucker Industries’ evil nature is best portrayed in the ridiculously strict policies in their mailroom, their shady accounting practices (as seen in this clip), and the fact that they seem to employ Satan to repaint their office windows.

Initech, OFFICE SPACE (1999)

For the first brilliant hour of its runtime, before it gets sappy and turns into a fairly typical heist comedy, Mike Judge’s Office Space is perhaps the most perfect corporate satire ever made. It’s not that the data-processing outfit Initech is particularly iniquitous; they don’t despoil the environment, employ slave labor, exert unseemly influence over the government, or start wars. All they do is crush the souls of their employees on a daily basis. Office Space perfectly captures the thousand daily humiliations of cubicle life, from the pointless memos about adding a cover sheets to your TPS reports, to desperately trying to hang onto your dignity in the form of a red stapler. The beauty of Initech (and of Tchotchke’s its corporate dining partner) is that it scarcely needs to exaggerate anything, from the relentlessly ingratiating tone of manager Gary Cole to the inability of the efficiency experts to remember anyone’s name. Wherever you work, Judge says, this is your life — and short of totally rewiring your brain, there is no escape.

Connex, SYRIANA (2005)

It’s no great secret that greed fuels American interest in the Middle East, and that the same motivation helps shape U.S. government policy there (see "War, Iraq"). Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana helped us understand the domino-like cause-and-effect cycle that works over great distances in today’s international capitalist kleptocracy. In response to losing drilling rights to the Chinese, Connex, the film’s fictional oil conglomerate, uses bribes to enter into shady mergers with Kazakh oil barons and shows a general willingness to do anything that keeps a good face on their company and its significant financial holdings. When lawyer Bennett Holiday (Jeffrey Wright), is sent to investigate them, they present him a mountain of paperwork and a stone-faced façade. Holiday manages to trace wire transfers back to a Connex employee, who's quickly scapegoated as a greedy free agent. But when this isn’t enough to satisfy the Department of Justice, Holiday receives inside information that places blame on his own boss’ involvement, absolving Connex and serving his own chances for advancement in the process. So much for the good guys. . . In the midst of contract talks and board room meetings we see sabotage, torture, political assassination, debilitating poverty, accidental death and suicide bombings, all of which trace back in one way or another to the oil giants and the decisions they make in the interest of massive profit.

Brown and Williamson, THE INSIDER (1999)

When Michael Mann told the real-life story of Jeffrey Wigand, the man who exposed cigarette giant Brown and Williamson, he created enough tension to make exciting a film that revolves around the possibility of an interview. He successfully casted Russell Crowe as a four-eyed nine-to-fiver. And he got the last restrained and respectable performance out of Al Pacino. Maybe he was inspired; it would be difficult to find a more devious or devilish corporate entity than Big Tobacco. As the film shows, in between Jeffrey Wigand’s firing and the first airdate of his infamous 60 Minutes interview he experienced verbal threats, legal threats, email threats and the not-so-subtle hint of a bullet left in his mailbox. Brown and Williamson doesn’t stop there, getting a restraining to prevent Wigand from testifying against them, threatening CBS with a multi-billion-dollar lawsuit and launching a 500-page-dossier smear campaign against Wigand. Mann does an excellent job of building the stress levels to portray just how alone this man is against a giant corporation with a very clear agenda.

The Umbrella Corporation, RESIDENT EVIL (2002)

It wasn’t enough for the Umbrella corporation to sell you your laptop and your antibiotics and your appointment at the clinic. Everyone knows real money doesn’t lie in honey-lemon lozenges. Real money lies in creating viral weaponry for the military. The problem is, you really have to do it in secret — like six floors underground. It’s also handy if nobody questions why your labs are under the city and why 500 people are now living underground, but such is the 21st century. With that kind of population, it’s best to run the whole place with a giant (evil) computer. That way it can impersonally trap everyone inside to die agonizing deaths if a deadly viral agent happens to leak out. Is it really the Umbrella Corporation’s fault that the T-Virus turned all those dead schmoes into zombies? C’mon. With a cute logo like that? Accidents happen. While we here at Screengrab endorse any role wherein Milla Jovovich kills zombies in a slip dress, and we whole-heartedly support roles where Michelle Rodriguez acts surly and carries guns, we hereby nominate the fictitious Umbrella Corporation as one sick mutated puppy.

Allcom, PAYCHECK (2003)

In Terminator 2, Joe Morton played a well-meaning scientist whose invention turned the world into a robot-run wasteland. In Paycheck, Morton played a well-meaning FBI agent tracking down a scientist (Ben Affleck) whose mercenary invention has the potential to turn the world into a nuclear wasteland. How Morton played the role without a gigantic deja-vu smirk on his face is a minor miracle. As evil corporations go, Allcom doesn't seem to have many employees besides smarmy Aaron Eckhart, notorious B-movie villain Colm Feore, and obvious love interest Uma Thurman. Nor does it seem to have a solid business plan: nuclear war would, presumably, put an end to the profits generated by the build-up itself. Two years later, Eckhart was hawking tobacco in Thank You For Smoking, a fair-enough lateral leap.

— Paul Clark, Pazit Cahlon, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov, Bryan Whitefield

The Screengrab : resident evil

Morning Deal Report: Ice Planets and Food Weather

Trailer Roundup: The Signal

Conglomerated Baddies: The 22 Most Evil Corporations in Movie History, Part 4