Video games today are great for recreating scenes from old films (such as The Godfather) and plopping you into the action. But how faithful do a game’s sequences need to be? From the way Sierra Entertainment is advertising its new Ghostbusters video game, I guess you want the gaming to be as close to the direction of the original film as possible. Not only does the new trailer for the game include many scenes from the first Ghostbusters movie, it displays side-by-side comparisons of footage from the film and the game. Because what would the game be without a near-identical shot of library catalog cards shot into the air?

Interestingly enough, the game is not actually a total video game remake of Ghostbusters. Instead, it’s “an all new story you won’t see in theaters,” featuring a script by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, who also wrote both the original and the sequel, and the voices of Aykroyd, Ramis, Bill Murray, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts, William Atherton and Brian Doyle-Murray, all reprising their roles from the films (I understand Sigourney Weaver opting out, but why no Rick Moranis?). Of course, it does require you to battle old favorites, such as Slimer, Gozer, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man and Vigo (”master of evil”), but there will also be new villains, including the biggest paranormal problem the Ghostbusters have ever seen.

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• Variety says Hellboy 2 “did hellacious business in debuting to an estimated $35.9 million.” This seems to be a compliment. Meanwhile, Meet Dave bombed, and Journey to the Center of the Earth made a very respectable $20 mil on just 854 3D screens.
• Richard Linklater, Mike White and Jack Black will collaborate on a sequel to School of Rock, and it’s got what’s destined to rival Babe 2: Pig in the City for mockable sequel titles: School of Rock 2: America Rocks. Where’s the exclamation point?
  
• Terribly Happy, a Danish crime film, took the top prize at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival over the weekend. Man on Wire took the documentary prize, and there was also a “special mention” for Bigger, Stronger, Faster.

Until last year’s brilliantly directed Ratatouille, all of Pixar’s animated features could be summed up with one word (toys, bugs, monsters, fish, superheroes, cars). Then the more complex plot synopsis of “rat functions as a culinary Cyrano in a French restaurant’s kitchen” came along and ruined the studio’s tradition of simplistic scenarios. Fortunately, this year Pixar is back on track with Wall-E, a movie that can be summed up as being about, in a word, robots.

But in their pipeline they’ve got a couple sequels (Cars 2, Toy Story 3) and a couple multi-word synopses (2009’s Up and 2011’s The Bear and the Bow are, at the least, each described with two words: old man and fairy tale, respectively. Only 2011’s Newt could have been pitched using a single word: newts.

So, while Pixar seems like it currently has enough on their hands, I’d like to suggest a few more single-word pitches for animated films in order to get things back to basics:

1. Birds - They’ve given us a movie featuring a variety of bugs and a movie featuring a variety of sea creatures, so the obvious next place to go is a movie featuring a variety of birds. And since Pixar has already made a short about birds (For the Birds), they already have a starting point to jump off from.

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The sequel to Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle opens in theaters today, and you can read my SXSW review of the movie, titled Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay, over here. Though I enjoyed it, H&K2 disappointed me for taking on too much plot. But apparently some other reviews are favoring the second installment, and according to Craig Phillips at Green Cine, the matter has critics divided.

Phillips, who marginally prefers the sequel, uses the opportunity to revisit those sequels that improved upon the original. Obviously, the list includes The Empire Strikes Back, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and The Road Warrior. However, surprisingly, The Godfather Part II is not in the top ten, because he considers the first and second films tied, and he claims both Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Gremlins 2: The New Batch are only honorable mentions, because their definite superiority is up for debate (true, I’ve never been able to decide if I like them better than their respective counterparts).

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I probably shouldn’t even legitimize this with a post, but what the hell, it’s Friday: OK! Magazine, that bastion of fairness and accuracy in reporting (see their previous “scoop” from earlier this week) is reporting that Heath Ledger is about to sign on to star in a sequel to Brokeback Mountain:

“It will follow the nasty process of being openly gay in 1963 Wyoming, an insider tells OK!. “Ennis will finally come out of the closet.”

Defamer, noting that Ang Lee’s film followed Ledger’s Ennis DelMar through to 1983, calls bullshit:

Escape from Brokeback Mountain promises to mine all the nasty gay processes missed by the original, while setting the stage nicely for part three, Brokeback Revolutions, in which our hero finally reaches the fabled realm of Zion (which looks a lot like a leather-themed circuit party in Fort Lauderdale).

I’ve spent much of the morning noodling around on the website for Francis Ford Coppola’s upcoming film, Youth Without Youth***.Sony Classics bought distribution rights to Coppola’s first film in a decade last March; at the time, Anne Thompson offered this description:

Inspired by his daughter Sofia to make a low-budget personal film, Coppola opted not to take the festival route, preferring to fly under the radar. The indie-financed film, which Coppola shot last year in Romania, is set during World War II and stars Tim Roth as a 70-year-old professor who is struck by lightning, suddenly turns 40 and becomes brilliant. (He also sprouts a doppelganger.) His quest is to discover the origin of language and consciousness. By movie’s end he and his lady love (Alexandra Maria Lara) speak in tongues—sans subtitles…The movie has been compared to an arty Raiders of the Lost Ark.

In keeping with Coppola’s apparent desire to keep the project personal, the web site functions as a kind of scrapbook documenting his inspirations for making the film. There are snapshots of his actors rehearsing, black and white photos of Bucharest, a bio of Mircea Eliade (the author of the novella on which the film is based) and, perhaps most significantly, three “diary entries” through which Coppola works through both his need to return to personal filmmaking, and his desire to reclaim a youthful exuberance for life and work. The diary entries are dated September 2005, so if they’re genuine (in this day and age, no one is above suspicion when it comes to doctored bloggery), they were generated 4-6 weeks before Youth went into production.

In one entry, Coppola explains how he was begrudgingly goaded into inflating one Godfather film into three:

Originally, I didn’t intend to make more than one Godfather film; yet economic forces at the studio were insistent: “Francis, you have the formula for Coca-Cola; are you not going to make more?” But the first film expended most of the arrows in my quiver or, more aptly, the slugs in my revolver. So, the second film had to stretch into new and more ambitious territory to show a few more; otherwise, it would have been weaker than the first. By the time the third arrived, the basic ideas that made the first fresh and excited were all but used up.

The diary is basically a manifesto. Coppola describes his predicament as typical for any aging artist–the temptation to keep draining the well that brought past success is too great, economic safety is too attractive to risk doing anything new. He decides that the only way to break that vicious cycle “is to become young again, to forget everything I know and try to have the mind of a student. To re-invent myself by forgetting I ever had any film career at all, and instead to dream about having one.”I’m not sure I buy the idea of the bright-eyed student risking it all to make a picture about an old man reclaiming his youth, but for the time being, I’ll give Frank the benefit of the doubt. Considering the fact that he could very easily while away his final years living off his wine fortune, you’ve got to throw him a bone for refusing to go down without a fight. Youth Without Youth is currently scheduled to play at the Rome Film Festival in October, before opening here on December 14.

***Not to be confused with The Best of Youth, the six-hour Italian TV miniseries that, when released theatrically in the States in 2005, became the best reviewed film of that year (it swept me up, too, although for the first couple of hours, it was hard to fight the nagging suspicion that I was watching the Italian Forrest Gump.)

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has rejected Oliver Stone’s request to make a film about him. In a statement, a media advisor to Ahmadinejad said, “It is right that [Stone] is considered part of the opposition in the U.S., but opposition in the U.S. is a part of the Great Satan.” For his part, Stone took advantage of the rejection to send a dig to a different president: “I have been called a lot of things, but never a great Satan. I wish the Iranian people well and only hope their experience with an inept, rigid ideologue president goes better than ours.”

The New York Civil Liberties Union is protesting a proposed change to local film permit regulations, which would require a permit for two or more people who plan on shooting with a handheld camera for more than thirty minutes. According to the NYCLU, the new regulations, which may go into effect by the end of the summer, “makes no sense, violates the First Amendment right to photograph in public places and opens the door to selective and discriminatory enforcement.”

You and I may be suffering from sequel overload, but franchises are having the intended effect overseas. International box office is up 13% so far this year, and one-third of that increase can be attributed to trilogies.

Word just came down the wire that Marc Forster has been hired to direct the next James Bond movie. According to Variety, the FInding Neverland director will “start work shortly” on a script polish with Paul Haggis, who wrote the (I think) very good Casino Royale and directed the (I think) very bad Crash.

It’s an interesting choice, considering Forster’s films a) tend have a lot of showy/Oscar bait-y roles for actors. and b) he has not previously directed anything resembling a franchise or mega-budget action film. But what does it mean? Reports surfaced earlier this year that Bond 22 (according to IMDb, it’s still untitled) will be a “direct sequel” to Casino Royale. The hiring of Forster could be an indication that the film take Casino’s “Bond is only human” angle even further, thus requiring a director who knows how to focus on an ordinary interpersonal drama set within an extraordinary circumstance (ie: Stranger Than Fiction). Still, the film’s primary IMDB “plot” keyword is “weaponry“, so I can’t imagine we’re talking about *too* much character drama.

If you’re a Bond fan (and, really, I think anyone who claims they get zero pleasure from these films is a dirty liar), you should check the Bond & Beyond group here at Spout. Or, if Forster’s casting has you super psyched (or super skeptical) about the sequel, you can start a new group devoted to Bond 22. Either would be a good place to talk about one of my favorite mashup videos, embedded above.