The Disney marketing machine is geared up and in full throttle for next month’s debut of Pixar’s Brave. The focus this week appears to be on the music for the film.
Take a look at “Freedom Broch” – 19 Classic Bagpipe Hits in One Compilation!
[youtube]http://youtu.be/nIWZT8YAXjE[/youtube]
Then check out this press release regarding the soundtrack:
BURBANK, Calif. (May 21, 2012)– Disney•Pixar’s epic fantasy adventure Brave harnesses the magic of ancient Scotland, weaving the rich natural setting throughout the story and bringing it to life with sophisticated filmmaking and extraordinary performances. But it’s the music of Brave that ties it all together, elevating the authenticity with a fresh and contemporary approach to Oscar®-nominated composer Patrick Doyle’s score, as well as two original songs performed by lauded Scottish Gaelic singer Julie Fowlis. A third original song plays during the film’s epilogue and is performed by UK singing sensation Birdy with British folk rock band Mumford & Sons. Directed by Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman, and produced by Katherine Sarafian, Brave hits theatres on June 22, 2012. The film’s soundtrack from Walt Disney Records will be available June 19, 2012. (more…)
Baz Luhrman. F. Scott Fitzgerald. 3-D. Not a combination you would normally think of but the visual stylist is bringing the literary classic The Great Gatsby to the big screen. And in 3-D no less. Rather than the shock value found in too many ill-designed 3-D films, it should be interesting to see what he does with this.
The first trailer for the December Warner Bros. release just went live and based on this, I think we the audience will be in good hands.
[youtube]http://youtu.be/mgzhtUeER7o[/youtube]
This version stars star Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby, Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan, and Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway. Newcomers making their debut include Amitabh Bachchan as Meyer Wolfsheim and Brendan Maclean as Klipspringer. The last attempt at adapting the film was the turgid Robert Redford vehicle nearly 40 years ago.
One of the reasons World War II is called the last good war is that the stakes were clear and unambiguous. Those years spawned countless stories of heroism, sacrifice, and loss that never cease to fascinate subsequent generations. Some movies have gone to great lengths to recreate what the horrors of war must have been like while others go for a different approach, going for a stark contrast to exemplify the acts of one or a few. The pilots resulting from the Tuskegee training program deserve proper treatment in mass media of their experiences.
It was long known that this was a passion project for filmmaker George Lucas, who has been discussing making this story for over 20 years. Not surprisingly, the bean counters at the studios balked at an all-Black film fearing it wouldn’t play well domestically and fare even worse overseas. Thankfully, Star Wars made Lucas a wealthy man and allowed him to help finance and see his project to fruition. During the intervening years, he brought survivors of those years to his ranch and interviewed them, capturing their tales while the men were still around to provide first-hand accounts.
He assigned the scripting to John Ridley and the direction to Anthony Hemingway and the story was shot in 2009. Dissatisfied with the results, Lucas himself helmed reshoots using script material from Aaron McGruder. The resulting film was released earlier this year and will be out Tuesday from 20th Century Home Entertainment. Given the amount of time devoted to research and the passion from Lucas, one would have hoped for a more satisfying yarn. Once more his vaunted storytelling skills failed him as Lucas neglected to make the characters anything more than cardboard constructs, each filling an archetype but denying them a chance to shine via personality or dialogue. Instead, the 332d Fighter Group are as flat and wooden as the war movies made decades ago. (more…)
One would think that of all the major conglomerates in the world, The Walt Disney Company would have the greatest empathy and respect for creators who have made bad deals that resulted in their characters being torn from them. Disney, in fact owes its own success to its founder’s resolution resulting from having his creation hijacked by corporate greed. (more…)
In the early 1920s, former Army Lieutenant Walter Steale has returned to civilian life and settled down in Los Angeles amongst the glitz of the silent movie world.His one ambition is to put the horrors of World War One behind him and get on with a normal, peaceful life. Unfortunately his brother, Sam, the state’s Lieutenant Governor, coerces him into working as hired muscle for his crooked boss, Governor Davies.This leads Steale into brutal confrontations with crazy mob gangsters and a prostitution ring tied to several corrupt politicians.
When a gang boss is murdered in a bombing and then Steale himself is targeted in another, even in his wounded condition he is savvy enough to realize he’s been set up as a patsy by his own brother. To clear his name and stay out of jail, Steale must rely on the courage of Virginia “Ginny” Joy, a beautiful young movie actress whose star is on the rise. As unlucky a couple as can be imagined, Ginny has fallen hard for the veteran doughboy and is willing to jeopardize her own career to save his neck.
Author Stephen Jared is an accomplished film actor with a vast knowledge of early Hollywood history which he deftly employs here by creating a truly authentic background for his wonderfully crafted mystery.Refusing to mimic classical noir settings, Jared presents a truly straight forward and original narrative that moves at its own leisurely pace.Then when the reader least expects it, he delivers scenes of gut wrenching violence in such a cold, calculating style, this reviewer was reminded of the late Mickey Spillane’s work.
TEN-A-WEEK STEALE was a nice surprise in many ways, exceeding my own expectations and in the end delivers a better than average tale in a field overrun with cheap knock-offs.Wally Steale and Ginny Joy make a nice team, let’s hope we get to see them again real soon.
As many recall, Peter David, Michael Jan Friedman and I have been writing bible material for 2013’s After Earth film starring Will and Jaden Smith. Directed by M. Night Shyamalan, its set in the future and we’ve had a ball filling in gaps and expanding on concepts found in the script.
Early last week, Peter said we three were invited to the set in Philadelphia to watch one of the final days of shooting before production wrapped and headed out for location filming. How could we say no? I arranged a day off from student teaching and on Friday, we took a road trip south.
As you might imagine, studios are combing their libraries to find related items to reissue to tie in with the frenzy surrounding the May 3 opening of The Avengers. Coming Tuesday are two more discs that come closest to the feature film, a sextet of Marvel Animation films in two sets. Making their Blu-ray debut, the first set is Ultimate Avengers Movie Collection which contains the two animated films based on the successful Ultimates comic, along with the bonus film Next Avengers: Heroes of Tomorrow. The other Blu-ray set is merely dubbed Marvel Animated Features and contains Planet Hulk, Invincible Iron Man, and Doctor Strange.
Both Ultimate films pretty closely follow the initial Ultimates arcs from Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch although the script is better at aping Millar than the animation is following Hitch’s naturalistic style. A significant change is that Tony Stark’s identity remains a secret and his tried and true heart issues remain an element as opposed to the Ultimate Universe’s brain tumor affliction – an odd choice but one that doesn’t spoil the fun. He reluctantly joins the team in the first film while he dons the War Machine armor in the second.
The heart and soul of the films remains Captain America (Justin Gross), the solider recently freed from a decades-long nap and slowly adjusting to a world that staggers his imagination daily.
It should be noted that the Joss Whedon film features the Chitauri, who are from this first storyline so the timing is especially apt. They threaten Earth in both films with the latter also being the vehicle to introduce us to the Ultimate version of T’Challa, the Black Panther (Jeffrey D. Sams). (more…)
The Art of Daniel Clowes Edited by Alvin Buenaventura 224 pages, $40, AbramsComicarts
The world appears to have caught up with Daniel Clowes, the artist who looks at the ordinary and conveys that feeling of loneliness and cluelessness so many of us feel on a daily basis. When he grew up, just three years behind me, he saw the pop art era in a vastly different way, an artist’s way I suppose. He had an unremarkable childhood and was trained at the Pratt Institute, graduating in 1984. He desperately wanted to find a commercial art job.
“I was trying to get work as an illustrator in the ’80s, but no art directors actually ever called, which is what led me to throw up my hands in despair and slink back to comics. Originally, I was hoping to find a writer to collaborate with, since I was much more interested in the drawing part of the equation, but that didn’t work out. And so I began writing my own stories. I didn’t really intend to write ‘personal narratives,’ but somehow that’s what happened,” he told The Atlantic.
And thank goodness for that. The artist’s work is being celebrated this month, first with the release of the monograph The Art of Daniel Clowes. On April 12, the Oakland Museum of California opened “Modern Cartoonist: The Art of Daniel Clowes” which was organized by Susan Miller and René de Guzman. As a result, he has been interviewed and profiled from the mainstream press with regularity.
Clowes amused himself in 1984 with Lloyd Llewellyn, which he managed to sell to Fantagraphics. The title didn’t see print for two years and while he sought a fulltime position he freelanced, notably illustrating “The Uggly Family” for Cracked. As time passed, though, it was clear his idiosyncratic and hard to pin style wasn’t going to get him hired. Instead, he found himself making a living as a comic book artist, telling his stories, his way. This resulted in the anthology Eightball which has won every major industry award and gave us numerous features that have been collected. One such serial became Ghost World, which Clowes adapted with director Terry Zwigoff as an indie film in 2000 (giving us a young Thora Birch and Scarlet Johansson).
Since then, Clowes became one of the faces of the independent comics movement as he continued to explore society in Pussey!, Orgy Bound, David Boring, and Ice Haven among other books. Additionally, he went on to do more film work including Art School Confidential and screenplays for films yet to be born.
Not that he’s sold out to The Man, but Clowes has also done artwork for twenty CDs and commercial work for Coca-Cola’s failed OK soda. He’s produced a one-sheet for Todd Solondz’s Happiness and DVD covers for a trio of Samuel Fuller films.
Still, it’s his inventive and captivating work in graphic storytelling that led to the book and exhibit. In 2007, he launched a twenty-part serial for The New York Times, Miser Wonderful, which was his idea of a romantic story which has since been collected and lauded. While his father lay dying, Clowes filled a sketchbook with notes that became his mostly work, Wilson, which was published in 2010 and is now being adapted for film by Alexander Payne. That story, about the lost adult, is drawn in a wide variety of styles, aping the comic strips he read as a kid to experimenting with his own work. There’s a command to his page construction and line work that keeps his pages fresh and always interesting.
Alvin Buenaventura, the book’s editor, opens the volume with a lengthy interview that gets the artist to open up on topics he’s barely discussed in the past including the two years he lost to heat disease. Only after a seven hour operation, a year after his son Charlie was born, was Clowes finally feeling energetic to return to the drawing board.
The 9.25” x 12” book is copiously illustrated from across the man’s career and is nicely designed by Jonathan Bennett. Accompanying the art and interview are critical essays by Miller, Ken Parille, Ray Pride, Chris Ware, and the ubiquitous Chip Kidd. Overall, I gained a new appreciation for Clowes’ versatility and vitality as a storyteller and observer of our mundane lives. Familiar with his work or not, you can learn a lot about the breadth of graphic storytelling by studying his illustrations and reading the analysis that enriches the work.
Gorgeous Paula Patton caught everyone’s attention in [[[Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol]]], which propelled the actress towards the A List. With the film out this week on Blu-ray she reflected back on the produuction in this interview, courtesy of Paramount Home Entertainment.
Q: Hey Paula. Let’s start with the obvious question. What is it like working with Tom Cruise?
A: Amazing. Honestly, it was a dream come true. I always thought he was an amazing actor from the first time I saw Risky Business. The movie that had a huge impact on me was Born on the Fourth of July. I was blown away how he played the all-American charming guy, goes away to Vietnam, is crippled and what he goes through. It blew me away. I remember very distinctly the moment I was told I would have a screen test with Tom. It was very old Hollywood the way they did it. It was at the Paramount lot, I had my own trailer and hair, make-up and costume. I have never had that before for a screen test. They put me in a golf cart and took me to the sound stage and I said to myself ‘OK, don’t freak out’. It was a great thing. We met each other and I was immediately at ease. We had great chemistry and a connection. It is because he is very human in that way. He is so kind to everyone whether it is a personal assistant, grip or gaffer. He just has great humanity about him and that’s why he’s so special.
Q: Who do you play in Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol?
A: I play Jane Carter, an IMF agent. I have had a mission that went awry. Myself and Simon Pegg’s character have to break Ethan Hunt out of jail. There’s a bombing at the Kremlin and it gets pinned on us even know we did not do it. We get disavowed from the IMF and that’s where Ghost Protocol comes into it. We are still working, but the government won’t save us. It is a scary place to be. Also, because we are all thrown together as a team and Jeremy Renner’s character joins us we don’t know the other’s motivations. We don’t know who to trust. Jane is great character to play. She is very strong and lives in a man’s world. She’s vulnerable because she has experienced failure and loss and has to prove herself again. She is in a place of turmoil and also she is living on the edge because she has one chance to make what is wrong, right. (more…)
This weekend, THE LUCKY ONE opens in theaters bringing a best selling love story to the Big Screen. We talk to Zac Effron, Taylor Schilling and Blythe Danner on how each one took on their roles in the film. Plus there’s more on the final season of EUREKA with Colin Ferguson and news on DC’s revival of a familiar comic title.
