Well, this is intriguing.  An animated zombie movie that looks as though it was created with adults in mind.  Slashfilm has more.

“I don’t know what I’m allowed to say about Inception,” Leonardo DiCaprio recently told a journalist for the Philippine Inquirer.  “It’s Chris [Nolan] delving into dream psychoanalysis and, at the same time, making a high-octane, surreal film that came from his mind. He wrote the entire thing, and it all made sense to him. [But] it didn’t make sense to many of us when we were doing it. We had to do a lot of detective work to figure out what the movie was about.”

Now there are two ways to look at that quote: the first, is that Nolan has crafted a sci-fi film in the mold of his previous mindfuck movies like Memento or The Prestige. The second, is that this could be Nolan’s vanity clusterfuck we all suspect he has inside him somewhere.

As a Nolan fan since little seen first film, The Following, I’m hoping for the former.

Slate imagines what it would look like if Tarantino, Lynch, Anderson, Godard, and Herzog directed the Super Bowl.  [via]

The Super Bowl has morphed from a “must watch the commercials” standpoint, to a watch Hollywood’s summer movie push over the last few years.  Seems that there are always commercials worth talking about, but those tend to be extended movie trailers.

We’ll update as the big game goes on and more become available, but for now spots for, Robin Hood, The Last Airbender, and Shutter Island have all been leaked.

Robin Hood

Still looks too much like Gladiator to have me truly enthralled in this Robin Hood tale.

The Last Airbender

It’s a relief to M. Night stretching his film-making chops. Now, if this movie has an ending that flows naturally and isn’t some hackneyed twist, then I’ll be back on the M. Night train.

Shutter Island

Andy Baio is back with his annual report on how many Oscar nominated films have shown up online prior to the awards ceremony (ripped from screeners, DVDs, etc.).

Of the 34 nominated films, by my count 28 of the movies are available right now! — if you know where to look and have the desire to not pay for the movies.

According to Baio, fewer films have been leaked this year and they are taking longer to show up online. “Are studios doing a better job protecting screeners and intimidating Academy members? Or was this year’s crop of films too boring for pirates to bother with? I can’t tell if this is a scene-wide trend or localized to the Oscars only.”

I would conjecture that this year’s crop of films are mostly boring for pirates to deal with.  Of the six movies that aren’t available online, only two — Tom Ford’s A Single Man and Jeff Bridges’s likely Best Actor win for Crazy Heart — have any sort of interest in these parts.

Still, this is always one of the most fascinating stories every year, because it offers further proof that those running the studios still have no idea how to maximize technology to their benefit.

Well, not necessarily the Dark Sith Lord, but rather actor David Prowse, the man in Vader’s suit.  Force or not, anyone who beats Prostate Cancer at the age of 74 has some serious mojo working.

​From the UK Mirror:

The former body-builder – and TV’s Green Cross Code – stunned doctors by making a full recovery after intensive radiotherapy at London’s Royal Marsden Hospital.

Speaking from his home in Croydon, Surrey, David said: “I’ve won the fight and I’m feeling better than ever. Everyone was shocked by how well it all went.”

David admits he was lucky to be diagnosed early after a Prostate Cancer Support Association worker urged him to ask his GP for a blood test.

Now David, whose brother also beat the disease, advises men over 50 to get tested. He said: “I’ve had people saying I’ve saved their lives. I got the same with the Green Cross Code, it’s happening again.”

[via]

I always find it fascinating which actresses, or actors, get tabbed by magazine publications for the “up and coming” designation.  Surely, there is too much politicking going on behind the scenes to designate a worthy crop of entertainers. 

Vanity Fair’s annual “Hollywood Issue,” which hits newsstands nationally on Feb. 9 is an excellent case in point.  Represented are some fine actresses no doubt, but also some head scratchers.  I would argue that Kristin Stewart and Evan Rachel Wood are already established Hollywood royalty and should not be here.  But they sell magazines. 

As for the others, well, solid choices all around, especially for Emma Stone, Carey Mulligan, Anna Kendrick (who’s best performance to date was in the little seen Rocket Science as an overly competitive high school debator), and Amanda Seyfriend, who has somehow pulled a ScarJo and gone from frumpy best friend to sex bomb seemingly overnight.  It doesn’t hurt that she’s a nimble comedic actress. 

The others — Abbie Cornish, Rebecca Hall and Mia Wasikowska (rent season one of the HBO therapy show “In Treatment” and tell me she’s not one of the best actresses you’ve ever seen?) are all fine and good, but haven’t quite developed the cache to be “up and coming.”  Is there such a thing as the “up and coming” up and coming list? [via]

With the exception of The Blind Side getting nominated for Best Picture, and a few eyebrow-raising noms, this year’s Oscar nominations have very little surprises or snubs. 

Most people would look over the nominations for best picture and go, okay sure, that makes sense.  It seems as if this race is going to come down to ex-spouses James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow for their respective movies, Avatar and The Hurt Locker. 

Still, it’s nice to see genre fair like District 9, Inglourious Basterds and Up get nominated. For all the pomp about the Academy expanding the nomination fielf from five to ten, with the thought being the inclusion of more populist films, the movies nominated, well, I wonder how many of them people have actually seen?

What I mean is, that there seem to be a few many of us have seen (Avatar, Up, District 9, Inglourious Basterds) but the other six have been seen by so few. 

The other thing that struck me, was how solid the Animated category was this year.  Up, by it’s Best Picture Nominee, has this award on lock down, but in any other year Coraline, The Princess and the Frog and The Fantastic Mr. Fox (my choice to win this category) would be clear favorites. 

Full list of nominations after the jump.  MORE »

His 70-minute review of The Phantom Menace was one of the best things to hit the internet since cats, and now Mike Stoklasa is back with another takedown, only this time it’s box office champion Avatar.

I don’t know about you, but his droll style would be perfect as a weekly television show.  I would certainly watch if he made one of these per week on his Red Letter Media Channel.

Check out Part II here.  [via]

Granted, he didn’t design this himself, but jesus, Tim Burton has one fine website to play around in. You basically move the little guy around a Burton-esque 3D world with the directional arrows.

Sure, sure, this comic book adaptation looks like a quasi rip-off of The A-Team, about a CIA black ops team trying to uncover the plot to assassinate them, but sure as shit the cast is quite good! 

The reality is, there are probably less than a handful of movies released each year that illicit a grousing, “well, I’ve never seen that before.” So really, an enjoyable movie comes down to a likeable cast, snappy dialogue, and a director’s panache. 

With The Losers we’ve got three bonafides with Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Zoe Saldana, Chris Evans (better than he’s given credit for) and Idris Elba (Stringer Bell, ftw). 

Actually, randomly, I watched three different JDM movie’s this weekend (don’t ask but Watchmen, P.S. I Love You and Accidental Husband) and came away with the feeling that he might be the most underappreciated leading man in Hollywood.  He’s just that likeable! Charisma seeping from his pores, that guy.

There isn’t much else to add to the iPad debate, even though some people are still doing just that, and Steve Jobs is lobbing insult grenades at both Adobe and Google.  So for the final word (probably not) on the iPad in this neighborhood, we’ll turn it over to this hilarious overdub of the Goodwill Hunting bar scene.

The best part of this, aside from the strange voice acting talent and the laugh track, are the Beavis and Butthead laughs coming from Matt Damon.  Great stuff.  [via]

Based upon everything else Peter Biskind has written about Hollywood (Easy Riders, Raging Bulls; Down and Dirty Pictures), his biography of Warren Beatty is high on my list of on deck reads.

Still, when the book came out the only thing people wanted to talk about was the number 12, 775 — as in the number of women Beatty allegedly slept with.  Astronomical, and certainly fabricated to sell books.

Brian Palmer is currently reading the “entertainingly salacious” book and this is what makes me want to spend time with Biskind’s Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America:

So far my favorite section is where Biskind imbues Beatty with a sexual spidey sense. He is attuned to any and all sex around him, whether it be lurking at a hotel gift shop (Diane Keaton), sitting at a red light across from him (too numerous to mention), or Gary Cooper’s hand under Rita Hayworth’s skirt, as depicted in the following passage:“One night, when he was still new to Hollywood, he went to a party where he ran into Gary Cooper. Beatty always speaks admiringly about Cooper’s touch with women, saying, “He chased way more pussy than I did.” Cooper was standing next to Hayworth, his hand on her bottom, under her skirt. It seemed to Beatty that Cooper had his finger buried deep inside her butt. How Beatty divined this is not clear. He was becoming adept at interpreting looks and glances, reading people. Wizard of penetration that he was, perhaps he just parsed the language of the bodies, or maybe he was projecting his own fantasies.”

By the way, it goes without saying that if I had to choose a superhero power or a character in D&D, it would probably have something to do with being a wizard of penetration.