Many would think that when it comes to comparison, JJ Abrams would shine against Brett Ratner. The former has created hit TV shows like Alias and Lost and directed blockbusters Mission Impossible 3 and Star Trek, the latter was executive producer on the awful Prison Break and directed the Rush Hour movies. However, a little war between the two over a documentary at Sundance saw Ratner as the victor.

Catfish is a documentary by newcomers by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman. It follows a New York photographer who forms a relationship with a family though Myspace, when their youngest daughter contacts him to make a painting of one of his photos. The photographer begins to bond with the oldest sister, but soon things are not as they seem, and he travels to meet the family. The full story is being kept under wraps, but it still sounds like a fascinating exposé on how we create alternative identities through social networking.

The film has been receiving great reviews during Sundance, and JJ Abrams was so enthused that he attempted to twist Paramount’s arm to purchase distribution rights. Paramount expressed interest, but wanted to screen it in front of an audience first. However, Brett Ratner also loved the film, and got Relativity Media on board. They approached the directors and bought the film, leaving Paramount to eat the dust of their ticket sales. It’s another indication of the conservative nature of Paramount, whose indecision seems to be leading to problems. Last year Paramount only planned to release Paranormal Activity in a few cinemas around the US, until online campaigning convinced them to release it wide. The film earned over $100 million in the US alone. It’s doubtful Catfish will do the same, but considering the amount of buzz coming from Sundance, it’s bound to make a few million dollars, enough to consider it a huge success.

Considering that Alan Moore, the original writer of the Watchmen graphic novel, did not want his name on the credits of the adaptation, he must be very ticked-off that DC-comics is considering a sequel to the film.

Yes, you heard it right. Even though the Watchmen graphic novel had a very open-ending, neither Alan Moore nor DC Comics worked on a sequel. This is no longer the case as DC’s senior vice president, Dan Didio, has visions of comic series and prequels, and even further movies.

What? Did you see the numbers on the first movie? It tanked on its second week!

This is really a lesson on how publishers and studios are interested in making money off franchises rather than attempt an original idea. They will even invest in franchises that have an only somewhat successful history, such as the Watchmen movie. Do they really think that they can do a story that its original creator never intended and create better results?

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Yeah, sure, we’ve heard this all before, haven’t we?

Apparently, hot on the heels of the rumor hitting ground that Patrick Stewart was looking to head to Aussieland to work with George Miller, and since George Miller only had three projects at the time, most people (us included!) were deducing that Stewart was involved in Fury Road, the new Mad Max installment.

Well, naturally, Patrick Stewart’s publicists got frantically on the horn (when MTV called them to follow up)  and announced that there was NO WAY Patrick Stewart was EVER going to be involved in such a project. Nope.  Uh-uh.  No way.  Not a chance.  Never.

And we’ve heard this kind of denial before, haven’t we?  Sure we have.  So hold out a bit of hope, folks–just not too much.  After all, many times in Hollywood, no does in fact mean no…but there are plenty of times where no has turned out to be yes.

Oh wow…movie geeks out there, brace yourselves, because I’m gonna make your WHOLE day.

A recent interview with The Man Himself, Patrick Stewart, indicated that he was possibly looking to head out to Australia to work on a movie with George Miller.  Now, there’s one of three possibilities as to what that movie could be.  There’s The Odyssey, which is really just a rumor at this point, followed up by Happy Feet 2, which Stewart specifically denied involvement in, and lastly, there’s the sequel to Mad Max, Fury Road.

And the mere thought of Patrick Stewart somehow involved in a Mad Max movie makes me tingle with glee.  I mean, COME ON.  Patrick Stewart is a genius.  The bulk of his work is unbelievable.  Even some of the more throwaway voice work is still fantastic stuff.

That and I’ll never rag on a guy who’s also a Transmetropolitan fan.  Seriously, the guy wrote the foreword for Lonely City.  Check it out sometime.

So hopefully this will turn out to be the case and give me one more reason to catch Fury Road, although admittedly I have enough as it is.

Ah, space.  You hold so many mysteries.  Trillions of stars in a nigh-infinite field–and for all we know, possibly infinite outright.  Is it any wonder we constantly send up vessels of exploration, and that our writers are relentlessly enamored with you?

Thus, we set up Plaguers, a movie that will take us back into the depths of space to make it a little scarier.

Plaguers revolves around a group of starfarers who are on their way home to a fuel starved Earth, carrying precious cargo–a load of the superfuel known for some reason as Thanatos.  But the ship carrying the Thanatos, the Pandora, gets a distress signal from the Diana, a seemingly derelict vessel with just a bit of life left on it.  But what’s waiting on the Diana is a whole lot more than the Pandora crew bargained for…and when a few errant drops of Thanatos gets involved, well, all bets are off.

For those of you who find all this just a little bit familiar–the Alien series, Event Horizon, Lifeforce, and so on–you’re not alone.  The question that remains is, is low budget knockoff specifically bad?

In this case, no, not really.  Of course, it’s not specifically good, but not specifically bad either.  Plaguers will turn out to be a silly, bloody romp that doesn’t exactly deliver on coherent plot but should at the very least entertain.  If you’re one of those types who can’t get enough monster movie mayhem, then put on some popcorn because this is JUST what you’ve been waiting for.

Meanwhile, most everyone else will shrug and give an audible meh to this low budget knockoff.

The Screenhead Ten Scale recognizes the appeal here, but still, can’t give it any too high a score.  But for being sheer fun, this one gets a six out of ten.

Every once in a while, I go on Hulu to see what movies that I can watch for free. Most of the time, the free movies were films that didn’t do well when they were first released, and it was no wonder why they were there. Of course, if you are watching a movie for free, the only thing that you can claim to waste is your time.

One time I was on Hulu and I saw a film called Ink. It was Science Fiction, and I had never heard of it. I assumed it was some Sci-Fi channel movie of the week, but have a tendency for being quite mediocre.

Of course from the first line in the film, which is the f-bomb three times, I realized that this was not a film that was made for TV, at least not American TV.

READ ON »

Oh WOW.

I’ve never seen a chunk of news that makes me convinced that the Penny Arcade guys were right about George Lucas being completely insane.

Directed by Kevin Munroe, who directed that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie that came out back in 2007, and written by David Berenbaum of Elf fame, THR announced recently that it’s working on, get this: “some sort of mysterious, top-secret computer animated musical”.

I can’t even begin to conceive what’s going on at this point.  Are we in for the weirdest thing Lucas has ever created?  Or will something rational emerge from Lucasfilm for the first time in a long time?

No one knows, really–they’re keeping this all very quiet, so any kind of conjecture at this point is about as valid as the other, including the worst case scenario, ninety minutes of singing Ewoks.

Unless, of course, the OTHER worst case scenario comes up…ninety minutes of singing GUNGANS.

There are so many ways this could go wrong, including both horribly and hilariously, so keep it here for all the latest.

Today is one freaky scary huge day for news, folks, so sit down and brace yourselves because this is going to take a while.

I find out that Michael Bay is actually considering taking the third installment of the Transformers series to the original Motor City, Detroit.  Other cities are also in the running, but Detroit has me most interested.

Being as I am FROM Michigan let me just pause for a moment here and express the complexity of emotions I feel at this moment.  One, I’m happy to see that somebody’s planning to do something with that burnt-out section of death Michigan lovingly calls Detroit–seriously, if you’d seen it lately, you’d know that it’s seen better days.  For crying out loud, Bay could take maybe five percent of his shooting budget for Transformers 3 and BUY large sections of Detroit outright.

Two, I’m a bit concerned.  Detroit is…well…dangerous these days.  Large sections of it are abandoned.  There was talk about bulldozing sections and converting it to farm ground.

Maybe that’s the plan.  A few hundred abandoned buildings would make great set pieces for Michael Bay to blow up, and this would probably accomplish something the city would want done anyway.

And considering that Bay’s already described Transformers 3 as being “very different from the other two”, who KNOWS what he’s going to do?

One thing’s for sure, though, he definitely got my interest.

Well folks, it probably had to be, I’m afraid.  Guy Ritchie has abandoned the Lobo adaptation in exchange for doing Sherlock Holmes 2.  This is a very sad development for those of us who were actually looking forward to a comic book adaptation that didn’t remind us of every OTHER comic book adaptation out there.

I’ve heard some folks say that Sherlock Holmes could be well served by taking a Harry Potter-style approach to the whole thing, and that’s  not a terrible idea.  But still, Hollywood’s conservative approach may well be for the best this time around–why mess with what works?  After all, the director really isn’t the driving force behind a movie anyway.  The SCRIPT is the driving force.  The director just executes the script, that’s all.  So go ahead and leave it in the hands of the clearly capable Guy Ritchie, even if it means no Lobo for now.

Though fans of the Main Man should take heart–word is they’re already looking for a replacement for Guy Ritchie, so the Lobo project isn’t so much dead as it is temporarily stalled out.

Oh, I was afraid of this.

Coming hot on the heels of the news that Avatar is now the highest grossing film ever released in the United States is the news that Avatar 2 will likely not leave Pandora.  Dig the word:

“We always planned on continuing the world and continuing the characters.  We’re going to spend a lot of money building this world and all these digital characters and digital plants and trees and mountains and so on, and then once we’ve got it, we’ve got it. It’s not like it’s a practical set that when you build it, you have to tear it down and you’re left with a big pile of lumber out behind the studio. We have all that stuff so we can go again.”

Of course, Cameron has a “rough script” ready but he’s got a serious eight ball of logic to work out from behind.  Like I said, any involvement on Pandora is going to involve a hugely torqued humanity who’s going to come back loaded for bear.  By Cameron’s own admission, HUMANITY WANTS UNOBTAINIUM, AND THEY WANT IT BAD.

And a properly armed humanity, with proper equipment and proper troop numbers, is going to turn the Na’vi into chopped salad.