Warner Bros. has narrowed down the choices for the star of its Green Lanternmovie, and considering the three candidates have been publicly named, courtesy of The Hollywood Reporter,I’m thinking the studio should let the fans decide. Put the screen tests up online, allow us to ask a few questions of each of the eligible bachelors actors and then permit us to pick our favorite as though it were some kind of movie-casting version of The Dating Game.
In a way, we, the moviegoers, will end up entering a long relationship with the person put in the role of Hal Jordan, aka Green Lantern, and we don’t want this to be the old-fashioned arranged-courtship sort of ritual we typically get from Hollywood. It didn’t work for the last Superman movie, and many of us aren’t even that happy with the current Batman. Warner Bros. needs to learn from its mistakes and embrace democracy.
So, who should it be? The runners-up are: Bradley Cooper; Ryan Reynolds; and Justin Timberlake.
If you need help making up your mind, check out what the film bloggers have to say after the jump. I’m sitting this one out due to my unfamiliarity with the superhero, but I’d be curious to see how Timberlake would do in such a role.
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.
Apparently there was no lesson learned from Spider-Man 3. I guess all the criticisms of that movie’s having too many characters didn’t exactly balance negatively enough against its worldwide gross of nearly $900 million. So, prepare for the possibility that other comic book adaptations will make the same attempt for box office gold by saturating their plots with familiar and highly demanded heroes and villains. This week the geek circles have been all abuzz about the all-star casting for X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which has now been confirmed by the trades and so far includes Taylor Kitsch as Gambit, Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool, Black Eyed Peas’ will.i.am as John Wraith/Kestrel, Liev Schrieber as Victor Creed/Sabretooth (I can’t wait to see Schrieber with blond muttonchops), Danny Huston as Col. William Stryker and Lynn Collins as Silver Fox. Also, there’s rumor that the Blob will show up in the film, too.
Some of these characters will only be showing up for minor appearances, and it’s certainly appropriate to have an X-Men spin-off that features a whole slew of characters, but it still seems like an overload. Even the last X-Men movie felt too packed with supporting mutants. As a veteran reader of the comics, I should be as overjoyed as the rest of the fanboys, but I must point out that when I would pick up a copy of Wolverine’s solo title(s), I would do so with the expectation that the loner-by-nature hero would actually be on a solo mission — or maybe on occasion would have no more than a teen-girl sidekick. I understand that this is the origin story, and most of these casted characters figure into that plot (where’s Maverick?), but the additions of Deadpool, Gambit and the Blob, no matter how long they’re on screen, seems to be a desperate attempt at pleasing the fanbase. Doesn’t Fox realize that we’ll all be showing up even if its just Hugh Jackman and a single villain (my choice would have been Omega Red).
There are a few things I haven’t been into for awhile: Ryan Reynolds, who keeps popping up on my television with that terrible-looking movie with Abigail Breslin (the title, which I keep forgetting, is Definitely, Maybe), and movies about obsessive compulsives. But I have been a fan of both in the past. Reynolds was really terrific (and yes, really hot) in The Amityville Horror, despite the remake’s uselessness, and he seemed to show a lot of promise. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen him deliver since (I hear he’s good in The Nines, but I haven’t seen it). OCD, meanwhile, was an interesting and funny character trait in movies until Nic Cage played the most unbelievable and annoying obsessive-compulsive ever in the otherwise decent caper Matchstick Men.
But here we have a trailer for Chaos Theory, a movie starring Reynolds as an obsessive type, and it really hooked me in. Certainly it had to be the music, beginning with that wonderful Carter Burwell (arranged) composition from Raising Arizona, “Way Out There”, and continuing with Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King”, which is featured in tons of trailers but which always manages to excite me. The fact that Emily Mortimer, looking as adorable as always, appears is just an added bonus. Then, there’s the matter of Reynolds and the OCD. The former appears to be in perfect shape (and I don’t mean his abs, which are not on display here) and the latter, discarded by Reynolds’ character in favor of anarchic behavior, is pleasantly dealt with.
Whenever Warner Bros. decides to finally bring this out (it was shot two years ago and still has no release date), I’ll be there.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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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.
Apparently there was no lesson learned from 
