Walden Media and Fox had two special retro Pullman cars set up chock full of gear and footage from the upcoming film City Of Ember, and packed some lucky press sardines inside to get a peek on the way down to Comic-Con. While the Amtrak train I took wasn’t quite as cool, I was able to catch up with director Gil Kenan and talk to him about the movie, his passion for sci-fi “without laser beams”, and what he’s added to the source material to aesthetically flesh out the novel’s “steampunk” world.

…Read more

• Former New Line heads Bob Shaye and MIchael Lynne have announced their first project under their new deal at WB. They’ll adapt Foundation from Isaac Asimov trilogy about “a society that has figured out how to predict the future based on a method called psychohistory and sets up a foundation devoted to scientific research to protect itself and ensure its survival.”
• Jennifer Lopez will attempt to return to the thematic site of past glories, playing a preternaturally sophisticated servant who falls for her boss in The Governess, a new film for her Maid in Manhattan director Kevin Wade.
• New films from Darren Aronofsky, Jonathan Demme and Kathryn Bigelow will join the Coen Brothers’ Burn After Reading at the Venice Film Festival. And these are just the Americans––Barbet Schroeder, Hayao Miyazaki and Takeshi Kitano are among the international auteurs to show work in the competition.
• Meanwhile, due to “unforeseen events and personal reasons,” Anjelica Huston has backed out of a planned appearance at the Locaro Film Festival, where her film Choke will screen and where she was to accept a special award.
  

• In the weekend battle of Sundance doc winners, Man on Wire easily outgrossed American Teen, with the former’s $24,250 on each of its two screens to the latter’s $8,565 on each of its five.
• Meanwhile, Batman eats money.
• Ridley Scott’s Nottingham has been delayed. Universal is apparently worried about an impending SAG strike (reminder: actors have been working without a new contract for like two weeks) and the fact that “the film’s forest locations need to be green.”
• Fouad Mikati will direct Ving Rhames, Ellen Barkin, Rob Corddry, Bob Odenkirk, Jeffrey Tambor and Maggie Q in Rogue’s Gallery for Richard Kelly’s Darko Entertainment.

When the trailer for Watchmen hit the web a few weeks ago, I was as pumped as anyone. I’ve always been a fan of comics, but when I finished reading Alan Moore’s opus for the first time, I closed the back cover, starred into space, and solemnly said, “This changes everything.” Seriously, it’s that good. And the trailer looks good, it appears to be a faithful adaptation of the source material.

The key word here is appears. The visuals are stunning, some sites even took the time to do shot by shot comparisons with the book. But I’m not worried at all about that, I’m more concerned with how the film will be edited. Like most comics/graphic novels, Watchmen is practically a story board waiting to be transformed into a film. But what made the book so revolutionary was not the art, it was the story, and the way the story was told. Watchmen is a dense web of complicated interconnected stories. Multiple generations of characters deal with epic personal, philosophical, and political struggles, all woven into one masterwork.

Watchmen, the book, excels at the graphic novel version of cross-cutting. Several pages contain nine panels that are set up like a checkerboard, alternating between two separate stories that intimately inform one another, albeit across expanses of space and time. On the one hand, this seems like source material for a final-scene-of-The Godfather level of powerhouse editing. But on the other hand, it could just be a huge mess.

After the jump, Snyder says why he feels up to the challenge…

…Read more

Geek Prom. That’s what we used to call Comic-Con in the late 90s –– self-mockingly, because we (or, at least, I) weren’t actually cool enough to go to real prom. That was before there was an actual Geek Prom every year in Duluth, and before Comic-Con itself became less a comic convention than an 100 hour press conference, where Hollywood studios are (for the most part) able to bypass the pesky press and sell next year’s product line directly to their most desired demographic.

As you’re reading this, I’m en route to San Diego for my fourth Comic-Con, my first in a couple of years. Kevin and Kevin will be joining me, and starting with tomorrow night’s preview, we’ll be live blogging all the major panels, and some of the not-so-major panels (Lloyd Kaufman, I love you), so plan to refresh the page roughly every 30 seconds from Wednesday night through late Sunday.

But whilst spoilers on the dreaded Wolfman remake are one thing, I’m also interested in how the Con has changed in the ten years since I comfortably fit within its target demo, especially for the fans and kids who––I assume––still make pilgrimages to attend. I have all these half-baked theories about how nerd culture has essentially become the new frat culture; if you’ve ever been bullied on a fanboy blog comment thread, maybe you’ll agree, or maybe I’m just talking out of my ass. Regardless: with the former totems of high school rejects long since transformed into the bread and butter of the mainstream culture industry, will there be any real geeks left at the old Geek Prom?

Whether you’re a long-time Con attendee or if this will be your first time, let me know if you have any thoughts. And if you spot an old lady wandering around the Convention Center in granny glasses, fumbling for her arthritis medicine and her inhaler, come say hi!

The Daily Mail reports Christian Bale has been accused of assault by his mother and sister.

The alleged incident occurred on Sunday before the European premier of The Dark Knight, but police allowed Bale to attend the showing. One police source explained, “It was a very difficult situation…it would have been wrong to have wrecked the premiere over a complaint which we don’t yet know is founded in truth.” Bale is now in custody and will be questioned today.

Scotland Yard confirms they’ve received an allegation regarding a separate “incident” in central London.

I’ll be honest, my knee-jerk reaction was perhaps a bit like London police: sadness over this Batman buzz-kill. And then it hit me that it’s really uncool a guy might have assaulted his mom and sister.

We’ve been running into a really exciting company at festivals called SnagFilms (snagfilms.com). Today, they launched their beta site with a slate of over 270 free documentaries, many of them full-length. The next few weeks the library should increase to 400. They’ve also acquired the perennial news source for independent film, indieWIRE, which will be SnagFilms editorial voice for these unsung gems that would probably otherwise languish on the festival circuit.

Many of the docs available were featured at the SXSW Film Festival, like award winning audience favorite of SXSW 2006, Darkon. Watch it. It’s free. (It feels so good to write that.)

UPDATE: I just found Heavy Metal in Bagdad on SnagFilms! Probably the movie Karina was championing most last year. Oh boy. I know what I’ll be doing tonight.

• A little film called The Dark Knight opens tomorrow tonight, and it’s so highly anticipated and it has received so much positive buzz that one expert is predicting it could gross anywhere between $100-150 million. I’m going to to do him one better and broaden that gap further to $100-900 million. Good thing this isn’t The Price is Right.

• Will Ferrell will play a racist who develops a split personality in Two Face (no relation to the character in The Dark Knight), scripted by Vince Gilligan, the guy who gave us that recent drunk, swearing black superhero.
• And speaking of down-on-their-luck, alcoholics, Jeff Bridges will play one — a country singer, though, not a superhero — in the T Bone Burnett-scored musical Crazy Heart, which will also star Maggie Gyllenhaal and Robert Duvall.
• John Woo is known for announcing about 20 new directing gigs a year, so don’t get too upset if he doesn’t actually end up helming the comic book adaptation Caliber.
• That was quick: Screen Gems is already making a Colombian hostage rescue movie.
• Can we expect a whole new marketing strategy for Tom Cruise’s Valkyrie? United Artists has just hired a new chief of marketing and publicity, Michael Vollman from Paramount, to replace the resigned Dennis Rice.
• Documentary site SnagFilms has acquired indieWIRE. Congrats and good luck to our SpoutBlog friends at iW, including Eugene Hernandez, who has a new position and will oversee content on both sites.

Thanks to the Museum of Modern Art’s recent exhibit “Dali: Painting and Film” (through 9/15/08), which features over 130 of the artist’s paintings and drawings, scenes and films brilliantly juxtaposed side by side, I feel I now understand Salvador Dali for the very first time. Though erotic Freudian imagery, sexed up amoebas and disembodied cocks, may be what draws one into the Surrealist’s paintings, it’s his use of lighting and perspective that keeps you coming back for more. For Dali never was a painter at heart, but a man possessed by a cinematographer’s eye. Within the limits of the flattened canvas Dali’s mind was able to create – see into the future – that which modern day CGI allows for the screen. In fact, both showman and visionary, this master of the bizarre does not even make sense outside of filmmaking! A piece of the puzzle is missing when his paintings are seen alone and static, not in conversation with Bunuel or Hitchcock (or even Cocteau). Viewing Dali’s artwork without a cinematic context is like trying to talk about (his friend and sometime collaborator) Warhol without mentioning The Factory.

So with this in mind let’s revisit Dali and Bunuel’s classic study in sexual frustration, the erotically surreal L’Age d’Or (offered in its entirety at the end of this post). …Read more

A few bits of news have been trickling in this afternoon on some upcoming events:

• It’s Lebowski Fest this weekend in Louisville, Kentucky. Something I would never, ever go to myself, but sort of appreciate on the grounds that there should be more batshit insane social events structured around films which didn’t make a whole lot of money. More info here; it also looks like Whitney is live-Twittering.
• Frank V. Ross’ Present Company is premiering tomorrow night at my much-beloved Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago. I reviewed the film at SXSW, where we also interviewed Ross and his cast. The film also screens on Tuesday.
• On July 18, Matt Dentler will be moderating an indieWIRE-hosted conversation at the Apple Store between the Duplass Brothers and their Baghead stars, Greta Gerwig and Ross Partridge. Sony Classics will be opening the movie here in NYC the following Friday. We’ve covered that one a bunch, too.

So, you hear about this iPhone thing? It’s, like, a big deal! We knew there would be lines; we assumed there’d be, at the very least, a Twitter outage. But apparently today’s impatient early adopters are finding that they can pay their $199, but they can’t use their new gadget thanks to an Apple network error––the dreaded 9838.

But we already learned this week that some economic problems are apparently nothing but neuroses––and suggestions otherwise are apparently bait for nonsensical James Bond references as comeback. So it’s not inconceivable that maybe 9838 is a manifestation of the psychological torment and guilt shared, at least on a subconscious level, by the energy-conscious, generally politically correct consumer class who, in spite of anti-corporate, anti-waste lip service, can’t stop themselves from placing of hundreds of dollars on the feeder bar and pressing down hard every time Apple release a new slice of fake plastic happiness. Or, as Anil Dash puts it in the Twitter above, you can’t go around saying that Wall-E has the power to change the wicked ways of the world if you’re not willing to let that change begin with you.

Semi-related: If you do get your new iPhone to work (and/or have an old one), Paul Harrill has rounded up a list of relevant iPhone apps for filmmakers.

• At Portfolio, Fred Schruers profiles Austin Chick’s dot com crash period piece August, which the filmmaker and his stars will cheekily promote by ringing the bell at the NY Stock Exchange on Friday. “The film will need all the promotion it can get. In this summer of tent-pole behemoths…even an art-house film that won plaudits at the Sundance Film Festival faces a challenge.” Yup. So imagine how hard it’s going to be for virtually plaudit-less August!
• Focus Features sent Variety a ComicCon Survival Kit, complete with a copy of Douglas Wolk’s Reading Comics. Mike Jones recommends leaving it at home. “If the geeks see you reading this there, you’ll get the worst eye-roll ever. Their equivalent of a beat-down.”
• There’s a New York in the Movies blogathon happening at 12 Grand in Checking (blog named after a throwaway line on 30 Rock? Very good sign.) and a Self Involvement Blogathon at Culture Snob. I’m going to try to work up something tonight that fits both.
• In the meantime, watch a video that has no application to either: above, The Mind of Danny Tanner, a wrangling of sound and image from Full House into the poetic style of Bergman and the soundtrack of Donnie Darko. Via Mark Lisanti.

What’s going on with Steven Soderbergh’s Che? Heard anything recently? I haven’t seen any hard news published in any half-way reputable outlet since Cannes (aside from this report from IndianTelevision.com that Che will soon premiere on––wait for it––Indian television, but the film’s international release has never been in doubt). But that hasn’t put an end to the speculation.

On June 14, Jeff Wells did a post based on a conversation a friend of his had with some other guy who’s “familiar with the comings and goings of” Wild Bunch, the sales agency who funded Che and have been looking for a buyer for it since Berlin. The gist, as Wells passes it along through the various degrees of distance, is that Wild Bunch has given up trying to sell the current cut to a U.S. distributor, and Soderbergh’s too busy shooting his next movie to worry about refining his cut, and everyone’s just sort of shrugging their shoulders and cutting their losses.

I didn’t come across this story until today, when I finally decided to do some digging on a rumor I heard about the film last month when I was in Las Vegas. …Read more

Since the conversation about internet and day-and-date distribution really started to heat up in 2005, the alternatives to theatrical distribution have seemed to only multiply and evolve, while the general perception of public exhibition has remained about the same: filmmakers like it, but in terms of bottom line, it’s only useful as an extended commercial for ancillaries such as DVD. But is that perception changing? Two related quotes of note popped up in the feeds this morning.

…Read more