Movie Posters: Transformers 2: Revenge Of The Fallen
Ξ August 18th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Movie/TV |
BREAKING NEWS: San Francisco has been invaded!
Ξ August 17th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Movie/TV |
This is just unbelievable… multiple space ships have been filmed in and around San Francisco. So far, the government has not issued a statement. Residents are rightfully in a panic, however thankfully the ‘visitors’ have not caused any harm…
Dark Knight Sequel Movie Poster
Ξ August 15th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Movie/TV |
tdkreturnsfanmadeposter.jpg (JPEG Image, 724×1024 pixels)
Is the Riddler returning?!?
No award, please, for Dark Knight’s Heath Ledger
Ξ August 13th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Movie/TV |
No award, please, for Dark Knight’s Heath Ledger — Newsday.com
It’s time to stop the canonization of Heath Ledger. He’s not a tragic hero. He’s not a beautiful martyr. He’s just a pretty good actor who did away with himself and broke the hearts of his family and friends, and he shouldn’t get an Academy Award to memorialize his death.Ledger’s brief career culminated in his portrayal of the Joker in “The Dark Knight,” a role that at first seems compelling (”mesmerizing,” critics have fawned) but ultimately devolves into a can-can dance of snuffling pseudo-psychopathia. It has all the subtlety of a hangover - exactly what I’d expect from someone who headed home every night to a pill party. Still, “The Dark Knight” has soared to unprecedented success, and Ledger’s name is mentioned incessantly for an Oscar.
The current mania joins Ledger to a long line of creative figures who committed the ultimate failure and are, unfortunately, all the more famous for it: Dylan Thomas, Hank Williams, Jackson Pollock, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, John Belushi, Janis Joplin. Some drank themselves to death, some overdosed, some ran their cars off the road.
As the saying goes in AA, the stories are the same, only the details are different.
“I want to live fast, love hard, die young and leave a beautiful memory,” Faron Young sang in a 1955 hit, unwittingly encapsulating this fatal phenomenon. People of every walk of life die from drugs and alcohol, but only a celebrity’s death gets so heated in a devil’s crucible of public sentiment that it is transformed into posthumous glory. And such adulation begets a mass social hysteria that continues the cycle.
The pre-eminent example is the deification of Hendrix. How many young men pick up a guitar to emulate him, and wind up under a bridge with a bottle of Colt 45 picking out a wobbly solo on a tinny set of strings? I see them every day in downtown Seattle.
Hendrix worship inspired billionaire Paul Allen to build a museum: Seattle’s Experience Music Project. An exhibit there explains how Hendrix created his unique sound but equivocates his death in an utterly irresponsible fashion: “Hendrix’s creative journey was cut short by an accidental overdose of sleeping pills.” (Nine sleeping pills, accompanied by barrels of wine; he choked to death on his own vomit.) The Hendrix monument at a cemetery south of Seattle says nothing at all about his death. It’s as if the angels just took him away to the big amplifier pile in the sky.
In all the posthumous swooning over Ledger, I read repeatedly how his death, too, was “accidental.” But the medical examiner’s toxicology report listed a bucket of addictive, mood-altering substances in his body, from antihistamines to Xanax. None of them got there by accident.
After Ledger died in January, one distraught fan posted on the Internet that he “will go down alongside James Dean and River Phoenix as great talents who were so cruelly taken away just as they started to show how damn good they were!” But these guys weren’t “taken away.” Phoenix OD’d on cocaine and heroin. Dean died in a car crash after a short, fast life of drugs and alcohol. They took themselves away. It’s a simple thing to find help for drug and alcohol abuse these days. Millions have done it, including me, and although not easy, it represents the only way to live with the integrity we owe ourselves, our families and the world around us.
Last year, I visited the hamlet in Wales through which poet Dylan Thomas caroused. At an inn from which he was evicted (for stealing beer), I learned that down the street lived an old lady who had known him. Go knock on her door, I was urged.
So I did.
Gladys didn’t hear so well, but when I finally conveyed the idea that I was curious about Dylan Thomas, she laughed and said, “Well, he was just a common drunk, wasn’t he?” I could say the same of Ledger.
Film critic Ty Burr, trying to untangle this heady mix of big box office and public mourning, wrote, “This is less about hype than about the gentle madness of crowds.”
Nothing gentle about it: Each year more than 100,000 Americans die of alcohol or drug abuse. It would be madness to commemorate one such death with the greatest honor in cinema. Please give the Academy Award to someone who’s had the courage to stick around.
The Dark Knight and Bangladesh « Mukti
Ξ August 9th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Movie/TV |
The reader is almost certainly aware that The Dark Knight is the movie of 2008. It is breaking all box office records. The IMDB is calling it the best movie of all time. Pundits are calling it the first film of its type to be considered a genuine piece of art.
We watched it on Friday night. You know it’s a great movie when despite its length of 152 minutes, you never wonder about the time. I didn’t think it was as great as, say, Casablanca. But it is not that far behind. Action sequences rival anything I have ever seen. Heath Ledger’s Joker is right up there with Gabbar Singh. If you haven’t yet, please watch it in the big screen (but don’t take your kid - it shouldn’t be a PG movie).
In addition to being great entertainment, The Dark Knight (and to a lesser extent, Batman Begins, its prequel) is a study in politics. Its politics has been discussed enough in the blogosphere for the New York Times to notice. American bloggers discuss Batman’s relevance for the so-called war on terror, but the underlying political philosophy holds great relevance for contemporary Bangladesh.
Gotham City, the greatest megalopolis the world has ever seen, is on the verge of chaos. Violence, greed, and mayhem reign. Criminals own the justice system. Corridors of power reek with corruption. Gotham City can easily remind you of Bangladesh of recent years.
It’s this grim world where Bruce Wayne seeks to find a purpose. He meets Ra’s al Ghul and the League of Shadows. Ghul’s aim is to destroy Gotham, much like Rome was destroyed. ‘Gotham cannot be saved, it must be allowed to die’, he tells Bruce.
The Dark Knight and Bangladesh « Mukti.
Dark Knight and Terrorism « media lizzy & friends
Ξ August 8th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Movie/TV |
Batman – popcorn summer action hero or a spotlight on contemporary America? Having recently seen the movie, an obvious resonance comes to mind already discussed back and forth from the New York Times to Fox News. Batman/Bruce Wayne struggle to determine what the true path of righteousness really is when it comes to keeping Gotham safe from the Joker; we see visual and plot references to rendition, torture, and a smoking Ground Zero. Christopher Nolan presents us with a superhero all too human: susceptible to blind rage, vengeance and fear. As well as enjoying compelling stunts and special effects, we as viewers become participants in moral questioning – how would we keep Gotham safe?
Nolan makes this film more relevant to post 9-11 events by shooting Gotham as definitively New York, not some gothic fantasy city. It’s a complete jolt to the senses; expecting only coded references to the Big Apple, we see a cinematic version of New York at its’ most beautiful since ‘Manhattan’. When bombs start going off and the Joker unleashes hell, it is more terrifying for having this immediately recognisable glinting glass and steel panorama attacked; scenes of smouldering rubble remind all but the most blinded cinema goer of the Twin Towers destruction. The Joker’s terrorism (or anarchism as observed by some commentators) feels more real as a result; abstractions of a writers pen seem very far away as the city burns.
Dark Knight and Terrorism « media lizzy & friends.
Can ‘The Dark Knight’ sink ‘Titanic’?
Ξ August 7th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Movie/TV |
Pet Rock: The Pop Culture Blog
It’s a third straight No. 1 spot at the box office for “The Dark Knight” with a weekend haul of roughly $43.8 million, give or take a large popcorn.That brings the domestic box-office gross to approximately $395 million as of Sunday morning. Between the time I began this post Sunday night and the time I hit the published button, Batman and the Joker probably toppled the $400 million mark.
We mentioned last week that “The Dark Knight” is brilliantly done, an island of blockbuster movie-making genius in an ocean of celluloid diarrhea. Even the ending made sense, which is something that has been sorely lacking in cinema of late.
With Batman making big buckaroos, it’s time to start wondering if Gotham can sink the big James Cameron-Leonardo DiCaprio boat. “Titanic” produced more than $600 million in box-office revenue in 1997, by far the biggest movie in history.
Mark Harris wrote in the Aug. 8 issue of Entertainment Weekly (the one with our girl L.C. on the cover) that it wouldn’t happen.
I say it does, and not just because movies cost a buck or two more in 2008. “Titanic” had the staying power, Leo and Kate entrenched at No. 1 for months, not weeks. But “The Dark Knight” has the Internet, Facebook, MySpace and fan forums.
What does this mean? It means the more people start seeing the numbers and the more us media folk raise the question, the more Batman fans will start organizing campaigns to see it a third, fourth and fifth time. Call it artificial inflation if you wish, but call it a record, nonetheless. (Boxofficemojo.com has the top movies all-time adjusted for ticket inflation. It’s interesting.)
There are no rules against multiple ticket purchasers. We’re fairly certain more than one guy got roped into multiple theater viewings of “Titanic” with his girlfriend.
“The Dark Knight” is two-thirds of the way toward washing away the immortal Jack Dawson. They said the actual Titanic ship was unsinkable. Look what happened with that notion.
Gotta love that line at the end…
Is Dark Knight Too Violent?
Ξ August 4th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Movie/TV |
‘Record complaints’ over The Dark Knight - is it too violent for children?
By David Bentley on Aug 3, 08 03:22 PM in Movie newsjok.jpg
A RECORD number of complaints has been made about the 12A certificate of the new Batman movie, it was reported today.
The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) has apparently received 70 complaints about the certificate awarded to The Dark Knight. Its 12A rating means means children under 12 can see the film if accompanied by an adult.
In the face of rising concerns about knife crime, some viewers have taken issue with the violent content of the film, which stars the late Heath Ledger as a blade-wielding Joker causing death and destruction.
Holy Car Crashes Batman: Morgan Freeman involved in accident
Ξ August 4th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Movie/TV |
Morgan Freeman, “Dark Knight” Star, Involved in Car Accident
Morgan Freeman was injured in a car accident in Ruleville, MS late Sunday night, according to TMZ.com reports on Monday.Freeman, who stars in the blockbuster Batman hit “The Dark Knight,” was involved in a car accident around 11:30 pm in Ruleville, a small town in Mississippi. Freeman was driving eastbound on Highway 32 near Ruleville when his car left the road and flipped several times.
Freeman, 71, was airlifted from the scene to the Regional Medical Center in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was listed in serious condition. He was accompanied by an unidentified female passenger, whose condition is unknown.
Alcohol is not believed to be a factor in the accident.
TMZ.com is reporting that state troopers say “The Dark Knight” star was talking at the scene of the accident.
Freeman was born in Memphis and spent much of childhood in Mississippi. He currently lives in Charleston, MS, a town of just over 2,000 residents. Charleston is about 50 miles east on Ruleville, the site of the accident.
Freeman won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in 2005 for his role in “Million Dollar Baby” and was nominated for three others.
Megatron A Tank In Transformers 2
Ξ August 4th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Movie/TV |
Megatron A Tank In Transformers 2 | The Movie Blog
As great as Transformers was (everyone knows how much I dug the first film… flaws and all), one of the things that most people seem to universally agree on is how misused Megatron was. No, I’m not talking about his design (which I thought was really good actually), but how little he was used, how little we saw him fight, how little we saw him interact with Starscream and how unceremoniously he was killed.Now, while most of us all assumed that Megatron would be back for Transformers 2, we haven’t really heard anything official yet about it (since he know the main villain will be “The Fallen”). But now our friends over at CHUD are givin
g us some word on Megatron:
OK, I don’t think there’s a soul out there who will be surprised when Megatron returns in Transformers 2*. If the current incarnation of the script follows the beats of a previous incarnation (which did not feature The Fallen), Megatron may be getting brought back by the Autobots, who need him to conquer the new menace. But I’ve learned that this time he won’t be that weird alien jet. This time he’s a tank.
This seems to go along with previous stuff we’ve heard about the possibility of Autobots and Decepticons needing to team up to fight another force. I’m not huge on that notion myself… but I must admit it would be pretty cool to see Optimus Prime and Megatron fighting side by side… whoever they team up against is basically screwed.
Brining him back as a tank isn’t a bad idea, and it will please a lot of people who didn’t like the space jet look for him last time… plus it would give them an excuse to put a canon on his arm… which will make even more people happy.