I didn’t give a shit about the Clash of the Titans remake coming out next year. And then I saw Liam Neeson rocking the fuck out as Zeus in this picture. Can you you say god damn awesome? Liam Neeson is the man. He was the shining spot of the shit-bomb prequels. Qui-Gon Jin was radical, even if he had to put up with snotty little kids and barren women named Shmi. Shmi. Then he kicked the crap out of everyone in Taken.

Now he’s rocking the hell out of ornate armor as my God of choice. You can have your pathetic Jesus, I’ll take my lightning bolt throwing Zeus, god of sky and thunder.

Up in the Air is a movie comin’ out soon by Jason Reitman starring George Clooney. I hadn’t heard about it until it blew-up at the Toronto Film Festival. And since then I’ve been watching the trailer ad nauseam. People have been jerking it off calling it Clooney’s most charismatic role yet, that it’s some sort of zeitgeist for our times. Whatever. I’m stoked.

On a personal level, I’m obsessed with the idea of movement in our lives. The notion that we must continue moving, striving, accelerating. When Clooney hits the line in the trailer, “The slower we move, the faster we die” I was beyond sold. I’m perpetually fearful of the idea of stagnation. The idea that at some point we stop living and turn our eyes to the sky, resign from really dreaming, and die.

I’m a sucker for modern existential crisis movies. Fight Club, American Beauty. This movie seems to have the potential to riff on the same ideas. Who knows. Maybe it’ll suck. But thematically, it’s hitting all the right notes to keep me looking forward to its eventual release.

Slow Thursday morning. So let me pass along some sexy concept art from Duncan Jones next movie, Mute. Click the image for a larger rendition of it. I was unfortunate enough to miss Jones’ Moon this year which looked like a trippy riff on 2001 and other things. But this promo art along with all the good things I’ve heard about Moon have me pretty geeked out. It also doesn’t hurt that Jones intends on borrowing heavily from Blade Runner‘s vibe:

Via Slashfilm:

Mr. Jones has made it abundantly clear how much a fan of Ridley Scott and the seminal work of future noir he is and another one part unsurprising as he’s explicitly compared Mute to Blade Runner himself.

Awesome.

In case you missed all the crazy Warner Bros/DC restructuring last week, there’s this new entity called DC Entertainment. The head behind it is Diane Nelson. And apparently she has no plans to push through a Superman movie at the moment:

Via Slashfilm:

We’ve obviously done a lot of great things behind the property in our history, and it’s a key part of the family, but we don’t have current plans behind Superman.

So we have a Green Lantern movie in development staring fucking Van Wilder, but no one is working on a Superman movie? Something about this doesn’t compute. If I was Diane Nelson, I’d do two things. First, I’d get Mark Millar back into the DC Universe. I’d give him the keys to Superman. Because if anyone can make Clark Kent one-thousand percent awesome, it’s him. And then I’d make sure that there was a Superman movie put into production that doesn’t just use two-hours of film to slob on the knob of Christopher Reeves.

It’s simple: Make a film where Superman deals with the usual existential crisis, while getting to punch the crap out of something. Like Metallo, I don’t care. And someone please make Lex Luthor imposing. We have flying, relate-able internal strife, a machavelian villain, and a dude fighting a robot. Seriously, c’mon. Easy. It’ll make a zillion bucks. But uh, good luck with Green Lantern And the Emerald Dongs.

Yo! Check it out! Where the Wild Things Are: A New Hope! Where the banthas at?!

I feel a general sense of sympathy for anyone who isn’t excited for the Where the Wild Things Are movie. The visuals alone have me in a sort of frenzy. Slashfilm has a news story that links to a NY Times article that provides yet another look into the aesthetics of the film. I swear I can feel the sense of confused childhood wonder vomiting through the pictures. I don’t usually get that cheesy, and I’m as surprised as you are about how excited I am for this flick. I don’t know, it just seems like it’s going to be such a trippy romp through what was already an eerie kid’s book.

They’re making a Battleship movie. Like, the game.

Via /Film
Universal has officially signed filmmaker Peter Berg (who was in talks) to direct a big screen adaptation of Hasbro’s board game Battleship

At first I thought it was a horrible idea. But what if, like, they make it some eerie meta-narrative? Like, you have this brutal naval battle between two parties. And at some point, they cut to two people moving the pieces of a Battleship game board. And just when you thought it was some trite war movie based loosely off of another childhood relic, you realize it’s some psychedelic narrative on the freedom of choice and the manipulation of countries populations to wage war over natural resources. The guys on the ships realize that they’re nothing more than plastic pawns of two masters waging the war on some level imperceptible to them.

Then the plastic battleships, upon this realization somehow fix themselves in the esophagus of the players, bringing down the man. Or the men if you will.

Naw, it’ll just be a shitty naval movie.

Bruce Campbell is fucking awesome. It’s a scientific fact. If you don’t like Bruce Campbell, I’d fancy beating your head in with a can of Spaghettio’s. And then I’d drag your useless corpse to your parents, and say, “You made this refuse, please recycle.” So when I hear that Bruce Campbell is going to have a ‘larger’ role in Spider-Man 4 I get sort of excited:

Via /Film

According to the info garnered by Access Hollywood, Campbell is expecting his role in the next film to be “a major part.” Of course, they translated this in their headline to there being a “villainous role in the works” for the actor, despite the absolute lack of evidence to support this supposition.

I don’t think anyone with a functioning frontal lobe (which sadly isn’t as many people as I’d like) can defend the asshole vomit that is Spider-Man 3. It was terrible. And the sequence in which Peter Parker dances in a jazz club was straight out of…I don’t know. I don’t even have a funny remark.

As bad as it was though, Sam Raimi is fucking rad. Everyone and their dog knows that Raimi had Venom shoved down his god damn throat, and he didn’t really dig the guy, et cetera. So let’s float the guy a mulligan, why not? Drag Me To Hell was the sleeper movie of the summer, and I enjoyed the crap out of the first two Spidey movies. Maybe if they let him rock out with his cock out like he wants to, and they don’t jam their conceived notion of what the film should be, it’ll be sweet.

Now they just need to find a way to make Peter Parker not look like a wimpy douchebag who needs to get over his Uncle’s death. And recast Kirsten Dunst. Who has the worst teeth this side of Anna Paquin.

Let’s get er done!

With Spike Jonze on the mind, this monologue from Brian Cox in Kaufman/Jonze’ Adaptation. For the god damn win.

If you’re like me, you’ve been following Spike Jonze’s next project Where the Wild Things Are off and on since well, it began, a million years ago. I came home today and was lovingly linked to this article in the NY Times about the movie by my friend Andrew. You’re the man now, dawg. I had heard that this project was in limbo, with Jonze and the Talking Heads and Powers That Be not really being on the same page regarding the project. Jonze has always been a hero of mine for his work on Adaptation alone, so this profile piece was really tight. Go check it out, but I’m going to leave you with a quote from the article that encapsulates why I love Jonze and his unfettered imagination:

If you compromise what you’re trying to do just a little bit, you’ll end up compromising a little more the next day or the next week, and when you lift your head you’re suddenly really far away from where you’re trying to go.

Last night, Pepsibones asked me if I had heard about Guy Ritchie. Yeah, I said, the dumb ass is directing the Lobo movie. Which is going to excite my fourteen year old self. Lobo was awesome back in the day, because he was a dumb swearing piece of shit who stabbed stuff. I was fourteen. Hopped up on testosterone and giggling at boobs. This dude understood me.

I convey to Pepsibones that I thought Lobo sucked now, when he hit me with:

Yeah, but did you know he was created as a commentary on Wolverine and other ridiculous anti-heroes?

I was aware of that, but it only was made vaguely known to me after I had evolved out of my primordial testosterone madness. Into my uh, post-mordial, testosterone semi-madness. And that said, I wasn’t the only boner-sporting adolescent who completely missed the message, according to the guy behind Lobo’s popularity, Keith Giffen:

Via Lobo’s Wiki:

I have no idea why Lobo took off,” Giffen once said in an interview. Referring to the 1990s incarnation of Lobo he created, he said, “I came up with him as an indictment of the Punisher, Wolverine, hero prototype and somehow he caught on as the high violence poster boy. Go figure”

No idea? I can help you dude. Because people always miss the point! Especially in mainstream culture. Maybe in indie comics or Focus Feature films the point is gotten, over-analyzed and then thrown to the wolves. But shit like Lobo? C’mon. It was marketed towards teenage boys who wanted to see gunshots and swears. It’s ironic, how the very medium you used to make your commentary turned against you! People always miss the point. The Dark Knight was just about Batmobiles, the Matrix was just about guns and kung-fu, and Fight Club was about people punching one another.

There isn’t much room for social commentary when dealing with us mouth-breathing teenage boys.