The Sly Oyster | culture & entertainment on the sly

It goes something like this, and take this with a grain of salt since The Sun isn’t exactly known for its journalism integrity, but The Dark Knight star, Christian Bale, aka Batman, was allowed by police to attend the London premiere of the greatest movie in the history of the universe (internet’s description not ours) even though he was wanted for questioning in connection to assaulting his mother and sister.

That’s how you spell it.  Now, this is coming from The Sun and here’s the basis for the story.  Bale’s mother and sister went to lodge a complaint at a Hampshire, UK police station yesterday.  Today, Bale will be brought in for questioning regarding the undisclosed matter.

A Met Police spokesman said: “We can confirm we have received allegation from another force in relation to an alleged incident in central London.”

Then the story is rounded out with quotes from an unnamed source, never a good thing, and some bullshit background about Ledger’s death.  Still, it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

The first teaser trailer for McG’s Terminator Salvation is choppy, hard to watch and a bit annoying. But, it’s nice to see a freshly sheared Christian Bale as John Connor. Hopefully, Connor will be able to save the humans from Skynet, though, in this teaser he thinks that might be impossible.

The early footage looks okay, but if this is supposed to be an apocalyptic war movie, with robots!, then why are producers going for the PG-13 rating? Why not just say screw it and go for the hard R.

Regardless, it looks like McG, who hasn’t really made a good movie yet, might step up and deliver a movie that we should have gotten instead of the useless Terminator 3. Also, it might be nice to see a movie without Arnold in it.

At Showest, the Las Vegas convention for theater owners, director Chris Nolan and actor Christian Bale were both on hand ot promote this summer’s highly anticipated The Dark Knight.  Luckily, the AP was on hand to film it and get their thoughts on Heath Ledger.

It’s strange how Ledger’s untimely death led the marketing department to shift gears from promoting The Joker to using Harvey Dent/Two Face in the marketing.  Not sure if that was the intent all along, or if the switch was because of Ledger’s death.  Regardless, things have quieted recently on The Dark Knight front, but our interest has not.

Devin over at Chud has confirmed with several of his sources and ironed out some wrinkles regarding the upcoming Terminator trilogy.  Producers are planning movies numbered 4, 5, 6 in the series made famous by James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

This time around director McG (Charlie’s Angels, We Are Marshall) is stepping in to helm the first movie in the planned second trilogy.  Everything seemed like a joke until producers landed a casting coup convincing Christian Bale to play the part of humanity’s savior John Connor.

And now we sort of know what happens in the film.  Despite producers claims that John Connor will have a large role in the fourth movie, tentatively titled Terminator Salvation: Fight the Future, that is not the case.  His role will be expanded for movies number 5 and 6.

John Connor is not the main character of Terminator 4; that character is someone named Marcus. Marcus was put ‘out of commission’ before the nuclear holocaust on Judgment Day and he wakes up about 15 years before the future we see in the original Terminator films, which puts the movie at about 2015 or so. Marcus is a bad ass - think along the lines of Riddick - and what he finds is a blasted world filled with horror. Radiation poisoning, starvation, rampant jaywalking - all the things you expect post-apocalypse. There’s also John Connor, who is trying to build a utopian society while running the human resistance.

Connor’s role is apparently bigger in the second film; whoever they hire for Marcus (my understanding is that the part is not yet cast) will be around for all three films. Terminator 4 is going to be the most male-centric of all the Terminator films, but there is a butt busting female character by the name of Blair, a pilot for the human resistance.

They’re going to need some buttkickers, because the scope of the action in Terminator 4 is HUGE. Lots of machine action in this film, including some battles with the T-600s. Yup, the rubber skin Terminators. And there’s another familiar character that shows up - Reese shows up in a scene with John Connor. I don’t know what his involvement in the next two films will be, though.

Sounds like maybe this new Terminator franchise won’t suck, but I won’t hold my breath.  Though it certainly won’t be difficult to top T3: Rise of the Machines.  That movie was just awful.

Hot on the heels of Empire’s first look at Heath Ledger as the Joker, come six new promo photos of Batman and his archnemisis. It’s nothing spoilerific, but they do offer a new glimpse of the subtle changes made to the batsuit and also to the Joker’s overall posture and costume.

We won’t show you all of them, as you can get the sense of the photos from just a few of them. There is a fine line between being psychotically humorous and comically. Looking back at Jack Nicholson’s Joker, well it’s clear they were going for pure cartoonish comics, whereas here, I think Nolan and Ledger both want the Joker to be seen as something of a nightmare. And in an odd way, I think that this Joker is reminiscent of the Joker from Batman: The Animated Series.

The photos come via AICN.

And just in case you missed The Today Show on Friday, and with Al Roker, Meredith Viera and that other dude who dresses real nice, the jolly one was on the set of The Dark Knight. But that’s after the jump. MORE »

Christian Bale has reportedly been offered a part in director McG’s upcoming take on the Terminator franchise, Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins. According to both AICN’s Harry Knowles and CHUD’s Devin Faraci, the stoic actor has signed onto the franchise, in all likelyhood to cash a movie star payday.

Both articles hint that Bale isn’t making the kind of money he’d like to be making, even in the wake of his success as Batman. What both articles don’t make clear is just what role Bale will be playing in the new movie. AICN insists that Bale is going to be none other than humanity’s salvation in John Connor.

We know Bale takes his shit seriously. And if you saw 3:10 TO YUMA… just imagine him coming out of his mountain and beginning the process of taking out SKYNET. With Bale as Connor - that means that we have a great chance that McG is pulling a chair up and will deliver. It all depends on that script… it is obvious we’re dealing now with an adult, GREAT MILITARY LEADER storyline … How he got the remnants of civilization together, trained them, armed them and began a guerilla war that eventually, we hope, brings down SKYNET.

While CHUD claims Bale will be putting on the endoskeletal and playing a terminator.

The interesting thing is that he got it a little different from what I got - my source had him AS The Terminator, while Harry has him as John Connor.

Either way, Bale’s latest string of roles makes him seem almost perfect for either role. His presence certainly ups the credibility of this movie and makes this project go from “straight to DVD” to something to keep an eye on. We’ll have to wait for official word from the studio or the trade papers, but this seems much more than mere rumor.