Onelargeprawn
We all like a good tale as old as time, and Disney has remade Beauty and the Beast as a live-action film starring Emma Watson in the titular role as Belle. Can live actors live up to the animated version? Will Belle find her true love? Can gaping plot holes with the original film be filled in with more song? Let’s find out.
Marvel’s continually expanding its cinematic universe (MCU for short), and we now have the teaser trailer for the next film: Doctor Strange starring Sherlock’s Benedict Cumberbatch. We’ve covered previous Marvel films here before, so we anticipate this one with …err… anticipation. If you’ve no idea who Doctor Strange is, or why this is an exciting trailer, let me help you. But first watch the trailer.
Look, we get it. Sometimes, a cat is so damn cute that you have to steal it and defend it with all the honour and swordsman skills you can muster. We totally understand the compulsion, so we’re glad that there’s a movie that shares the inner conflict we feel.
https://youtu.be/a7k112vDJgk
[Via: WTF Japan Seriously]
There are only 15 days to go until the end of this year. If I could remember anything, I would say 2011 was a year like no other. There was good, there was bad, and everything else in between. In his retrospective montage, Filmography 2011, YouTube user genrocks celebrates the year in movies.
This mashup is composed of clips from 230 films that were produced or released this year. For more info on the film and music selection, visit the Filmography 2011 tumblelog.
[via Live For Films]
The famous physicist Albert Einstein once said, “I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.” Another scientist of sorts, Dr. Emmett Brown, told a pair of teenagers that the future is not written yet, and their is “whatever you make it”.
If you’ve ever wondered what the future would be like if we left it up to the movies, then you’re not alone. London-based designer Michael Hobson has created an infographic timeline that shows the pivotal events in our future, according to films. Unsurprisingly it is a bleak outlook where the sun starts to die off in 2057, we try to ruthlessly pillage unobtanium on Pandora in 2154, and all glory goes to the Hypnotoad in the year 3000. Have a look at Hobson’s lengthy infographic after the jump, but beware, some of Hobson’s plot summaries may contains spoilers.
In his series of videos entitled Everything is a Remix, Vimeo user Kirby Ferguson takes an interesting look at what a remix is, when it started, how it has pervaded every form or art, and where it’s headed. It’s due to be a four-part series with the first exploring the nature of covers, knock-offs, and sampling in music. His second short film was released last week and explores the use of existing material in the production of films. It’s very enlightening, see the two videos below.
See more information about Ferguson’s project including the references and samples used in the series at Everything is a Remix and follow him on Twitter.
[via PSFK]
Hello Dear Reader! Are we all happy little campers because it’s Friday at last? I know I am. It’s only been a three day week for me, but somehow the shorter weeks are even worse than the normal ones. Guess it’s because all the sh*t is condensed. Anyway I’m a bit hung over and slightly on edge (don’t ask, it’s a woman thing) so I thought this week’s Smackdown might as well be contentious.
I’ve decided that a whole District 9 versus Avatar thing is in order.
So here goes nothing or everything or something…
This movie SUCKS
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1_JBMrrYw8
This movie ROCKS
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjihaK7HfGs
I know I’m not going to get away with just saying that Avatar sucks with you lot, so I’ll explain myself a little. I’ll admit that the CGI and 3Dness of Avatar was awesome, and for the first 40 minutes of the movie I was like a hillbilly at a gun show – all excited and drooling into my popcorn. However my powers of higher reasoning kicked in pretty soon and I realised that the very beautiful pictures didn’t make up for the ailing story line. It has been put much more succinctly by others before me, but Avatar is just Pocahontas in space. Big bad colonisers invade and destroy, the forbidden love that overcomes all, the resolution that allows for the natives to live on peacefully in the end. I also don’t really buy Cameron’s whole “we’re doing it to save the planet” thing – I wonder how big Avatar’s carbon foot print is? How many air miles the cast travelled to promote the film? What the cost is to the environment of producing and shipping millions of DVDs and Blu-Rays? Wouldn’t it have been a more powerful message if Cameron had spent that half billion dollars making a movie that really was all about saving our Earth, not some imaginary planet that exists in the future? I know someone is going to smack me down with the whole art for art’s sake argument in relation to Avatar, and it may be true in other forms, but I’ve always felt that cinema owes us more than just pretty pictures.
District 9 may not have matched Avatar’s CGI awesomeness, but then it only had a fraction of the budget. The beauty of D9 was all in the story, the story and the fact that it was set in South Africa! Yay hooray for SA! The gritty oily depressing plight of a race of prawns stranded indefinitely in grim and dusty Johannesburg meant the story lead your emotions on an insane roller coaster ride the entire length of the film. The character development was excellent and Wikus will always be one of my favourite movie heros. And then there’s the sub-text, D9 can be viewed on many levels ranging from straight up alien skop skiet en donner to the underlying filth of apartheid and xenophobia depending on how you’re feeling.
Well that’s my opinion anyway. What do you think?