Camera Lucida - Is there hope for decent movies coming out soon?
Friday, August 18th, 2006Yes, I am totally ripping off good ol’ Joe Powell. If he likes, he can repay the favor by ripping off my style for a few posts, which, I guess, is being egotistical, loud, rambling, and insulting to his commenters. Yeah, that about pegs me.
Anyway, for the past few years, it seems like every time GAC and I have a spare $20 and a night without the kids, we dig around for a movie to see, but theres nothing there worth seeing. How can it be, that 
with dozens of screens in the Knoxville area, they’re all playing crap?
Well, heres hoping that’ll be changing before too long, at least briefly.
First thing I’m squealing about is a collaboration of sorts between Tarantino and Rodriguez, Grindhouse, which looks damn interesting as a return to ’70’s horror/exploitation films. The movie is going to consist of two separate films directed independantly, combined with faux trailers and weirdness in between to bring back the feel of those theaters that I wasn’t alive for myself, but would probably have enjoyed experiencing.
Tarantino’s film, Death Proof, is going to be a zombie movie, while Rodriguez’s part, Planet Terror, looks like its going to be a slasher movie, according to comingsoon.net. Woot. A Tarantino zombie movie. Egad.
GAC and I were going through trailers on apple.com/trailers the other day, and came across Renaissance. The film has some pretty stark black and white animation that just looks freakin’ amazing, and the plot has been likened to a Blade Runnerish theme, although it seemed to have a little bit of Gattica in it to me as well. Anyway, watch the trailer, and tell me what you think.
I’ve talked about Spiderman 3 looking awesome, so I don’t need to mention that. I hesitate to say, but there will be a sequel to… ahemfantasticfour… that will feature the Silver Surfer. In fact, the offical title of the movie, according to aintitcool.com, is “Fantastic Four - Rise of the Silver Surfer”, which is a pretty kickass name. I was one of those people who were big on the idea that Spiderman 2 would be called “The Amazing Spider-Man”, as sort of a homage to those grandiose Stan Lee comic names of the day. Unfortunately, Sony saw it differently, but it turned out to be great anyway.
I digress (and officially challenge somebody to tell me how many posts the words ‘I digress’ appear in)
Fantastic Four was a horrible, horrible movie, and I didn’t even see it. Theres little chance that a sequel, even with a good name, and the presence of the Surfer (yes, I’m a geek, Silver Surfer kicks ass), will be anything short of crap, which really, really disappoints me.
If Samuel L doesn’t say “I WANT THESE MOTHERFUCKIN SNAKES OFF THIS MOTHERFUCKIN PLANE” in the movie, then I’m going to burn something down. Granted, I’m not lining up to watch the movie, but things have to be done right. Maybe those of us interested can take up a collection to pay SLJ to utter those lines in case he doesn’t in the movie. Interested?
An adaptation of Frank Millers 300 is in the works, by Dawn of the Dead remake director Zach Snyder. Dawn of the Dead takes the AT cake as creepiest damn movie ever. I had PTS disorder for a few days after watching it, and went as far as taking steps to zombieproof the house. He has my vote to direct pretty much anything good, and while I’m not familar with Miller’s story about the Battle of Thermopylae, where 300 Spartan soldiers took on 1,000,000 Persians in 480 BC, I’m sure that he will bring the appropriate amount of gore and hacked body parts to justify the story, while still paying attention to social thingys. And I understand theres a canyon involved.
For those in the know of something cool, ol’ Zach Synder is attached to direct the inevitable Watchmen movie. How a gritty, violent, realistic movie about the flippance of comic book fiction is going to work has yet to be determined. Don’t know if anybody can pull that one off.
I could talk about more, like Jet Li’s Fearless, but I won’t. Joe, you can have your style back now.
