Captain America Lands Titanic Casting Rumor

On the heels of Iron Man’s massive box office success, few moviegoers will admit now if they had their doubts upon hearing of Robert Downey Jr. landing the title role. To steal a line from the film, he didn’t seem like the “superhero type.” Captain America fans might have the same reaction if current rumors about Marvel’s first choice for the lead are true.

ComicBookMovie.com is reporting that Leonardo DiCaprio is in line to play America’s supersoldier.  He’d have to bulk up to don the shield, but the toughness he showed in The Departed makes Cap less of a leap for him.

 

The DiCaprio news comes close on the heels of reports that Brad Pitt tops the list to star in Marvel’s Thor franchise.

 

Batmanime! Gotham Knight Mashes Bruce Lee, Memento

The Dark Knight is coming soon, but the straight-to-DVD anime Batman: Gotham Knight is thankfully coming sooner. Feeding Bruce Wayne’s superego through the animated filter of Pacific Rim cinema so far looks very sweet indeed, and new pics and news confirm that comics nerds and late adopters alike are probably going to be impressed.

 

On the nerd front, animated Batphiles should be pleased to know that Kevin Conroy is returning to voice Wayne, as he has for the last couple of decades in various iterations of the mythology. Adam West would probably not be pleased to know that it is Conroy’s pipes that have ruled Batman’s tech-noir corner of television, proving that an animated Batman is truly a resonant one. For his part, Conroy says he believes the multiple-narrative Gotham Knight movie will resonate more than any other when it hits store shelves July 8.

 

“It’s a really rich experience,” promised Conroy. “The artwork in this film is so beautiful. It’s like getting six movies in one.”

 

And perhaps as many personas, especially now that anime and Batman have merged after being on a collision course for decades. Bruce Wayne may be voiced by Conroy, but he’s also carried the weight of everyone from Michael Keaton to Christian Bale, with probably too many big names in between. But lately in the series The Batman and the new Bale iterations, Bruce Wayne has been more like Bruce Lee. He looks the part in one segment.

But Batman: Gotham Knight is freaking memes in more ways than one. For his Rashomon-like segment “Have I Got a Story For You,” History of Violence screenwriter and Batman fanboy Josh Olson sampled Memento’s narrative slipstreaming in honor of Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan’s crossover film.

 

“I thought it would be fun telling the story backwards,” explained Olson. “You’ll notice that each time the villain appears, he seems to be gaining weapons instead of losing them. That was an intentional nod to Chris Nolan’s film.”

 

Regardless of its source material, Batman: Gotham Knight is planning for the future and giving the Dark Knight’s expanding mythos some interesting twists. From a tasteful decapitation to bare-knuckle brawls and into the BatBot, this East-West détente  has enough material to keep fandom occupied for awhile. Gotham Knight screenwriter and Batman regular Greg Rucka just wants them to keep their cool, especially when they bump into something that may make them nervous.

 

“The great thing about comics fandom,” Rucka explains, “is that it’s immediate. I write a novel and it’ll be a year before people tell me what they think of it. Comics fans react that day.”

 

Plus, in the age of the internet, they have more power and influence than ever. That’s a trade-off that the economically sensitive producers have to deal with, one way or another.

“Comics are in many ways like soap operas, in that the fan base rests mostly in the characters,” Rucka says. “Consequently, the fans can be prone to hysteria. With the prevalence of the internet, there’s been this movement where everyone wants to be an insider, everyone has an opinion, and everyone wants to spread the information as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, a lot of times, the information is wrong or horribly incomplete. But these things don’t exist without that fan base. They are devoted, and vocal.” (From Wired.com)

The Coolest Roller Coasters From Around the Globe

Film director Alfred Hitchcock often said people go to scary movies for the same reason we ride on roller coasters. We enjoy being scared … more or less safely. And we enjoy anticipating the fright and how we’ll respond to it.

So, on the anniversary of the opening of the first gravity-driven amusement-park roller coaster, we offer a small selection of some of the world’s finest — and scariest – rides found here.

Time Magazine Reviews Pixar’s WALL•E

The dusty cityscape shows remnants of a civilization: an empty bank, a cratered warehouse mall, tattered billboards for colas and travel agencies, all bearing the logo of Buy-N-Large. TOO MUCH TRASH–EARTH COVERED reads an old headline, and we note that some of the skyscrapers are made of compacted trash cubes. The planet has become one huge junkyard, as if all humanity were a rock band that had made a shambles of a hotel room, then just strolled out. The only remaining sign of organic life on Earth is that unkillable little bugger, a cockroach.

 

Among this urban detritus, something else is moving. It looks like another trash cube–but with binocular eyes, forklift plates for arms and Caterpillar tracks to navigate the rough terrain. The thing is called a Waste Allocation Load Lifter, Earth-Class–WALL•E–and its job is to clean up the mess of consumerism run amok. It’s also apparently the last of its kind still functioning.

 

Apparently, because for its first 30 min., the new Pixar astonishment WALL•E has virtually no dialogue. Nor does it offer a Star Wars–like print crawl to inform viewers that this is Earth 800 years from now. The mechanical critter who is the film’s hero can speak only in electronic grunts and sighs, or in one-word bursts, like a chattier R2-D2. The movie’s other main creature, a robot named EVE, also can speak only a few words. Yet it’s Pixar’s big, bold belief that the mass audience will be astute enough to follow the visual clues and game enough to play along. So confident is the studio in its ability to charm audiences, it has made a futurist movie that’s a lot like an old silent picture.

 

When writer-director Andrew Stanton–whose last film was Pixar’s all-time box-office champ, Finding Nemo–showed the first reels of WALL•E to the studio’s brain trust three years ago, fellow auteur Brad Bird (The Incredibles) told him, “Man, you didn’t make it easy for yourself.” A movie that shows but doesn’t tell, and whose leading characters are essentially mimes, could put an end to the eight-film box-office winning streak that began with Toy Story in 1995 and continued unbroken through last year’s Ratatouille. To sell the project, Stanton had only his faith in the idea, and the collaboration of sound-design guru Ben Burtt, who would create WALL•E’s “voice” and most of the film’s other noises. But as Stanton recalls, “No one questioned this. They all knew it would work.”

 

It works; this is Pixar’s most enthralling entertainment since Nemo. A science-fiction epic that starts off as a smart twist on the last-man-on-Earth plot and veers into a fable about humans’ overreliance on technology, the movie should connect with audiences of all ages because it stars the most adorable little trash-bot ever. He’s less a trash collector than a trash connoisseur, adding new items to the treasures he keeps on shelves in the shack he has built for himself. Hmmm, what about this green thing, a plant sprout, that he found in his foraging? That goes into an old shoe.

 

Yet, as we spot the fret lines above his eyes and see the carcasses of other robots on the junk heaps, we realize that WALL•E is a lonely guy. There’s an instant poignancy to his puttering around the late, great planet Earth like a solitary child on an abandoned playground, or an oldster among his souvenirs. WALL•E’s special ache is his nostalgia for a life he never lived, for the intimate connection only humans enjoy. On his home VCR (a Betamax!), he plays and replays two numbers from the 1969 movie musical Hello, Dolly!: the brassy Put on Your Sunday Clothes and the ballad It Only Takes a Moment, which moves him with a closeup of a boy’s hand holding a girl’s.

 

It’s only fitting that the last robot on Earth, like the first man, should find his EVE (for Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator). She has been sent as a probe from the gigantic spaceship on which all humans were evacuated 700 years before, and where their descendants live in pampered placidity. EVE is as advanced–smooth, sleek, white, egg-shaped, with glowing blue eyes–as WALL•E is clunky. When he sits next to her on a bench at sunset (he must also have seen Woody Allen’s Manhattan) and tries to hold her sort-of hand, EVE rejects him. It’s nothing personal; it’s just that she has been programmed to find plant life on Earth. And in a shoe at home, lucky WALL•E has what she’s looking for. Ta-da!

The plant gets the two of them a trip to the Axiom, a kind of permanent cruise ship on which an army of droids tends to the exiled humans’ every need–every need but exercise, for either body or mind. “Because the ship is totally automated,” Stanton says, “the inhabitants have lost their need to know anything.” The Axiom is Stanton’s futurist nightmare vision of the modern home computer that is our work, shop and play station. After centuries of digital reliance, he says, “We’d turn into big babies that haven’t grown up, that have lost the need to mature physically and socially.” The movie’s plot pirouettes on the ability of the humans to show as much grit and heart as WALL•E has back on his trash planet.

 

Brilliant Boys and Their Cool Toys

 

If there’s any anxiety at Pixar about doing an I Am Legend for the junior set, you won’t hear it from John Lasseter, Pixar’s creative director and the inventive mind behind Toy Story, A Bug’s Life and Cars. He’s his usual beaming, cartoon-round, Hawaiian-shirt-wearing self as he waxes rhapsodic about WALL•E and, in passing, confides the secret of the studio’s success: “The people who work here are doing what they’ve wanted to do their whole lives.”

 

That would sound like cult-leader talk from anyone else. But a visitor to Pixar HQ in Emeryville, Calif. (where the upscale cafeteria serves iced tea, not Kool-Aid), finds a workforce that is able to channel a child’s sense of play and wild imagination into the business of CGI moviemaking. The trick: never grow up. Lasseter’s office shelves groan with hundreds of gewgaws from Pixar films. “I love toys,” he says unabashedly. “A lot of animators love toys.” Toy love–the child’s belief that a piece of cloth or a machine can have life, feelings, personality–is at the heart of many Pixar movies, beginning with Lasseter’s ’80s shorts Luxo, Jr. (whose lamp became the i in the company’s logo), Red’s Dream and Tin Toy, all made to demonstrate the possibilities of the infant CGI medium but with the savvy and sentiment of a natural storyteller. Stanton says he has seen Luxo, Jr. dozens of times, yet, “Miraculously, I get caught up every time” in the wordless story of father-and-son lamps. Take that 2-min. experiment from 1986, and WALL•E is the logical romantic extension: toy meets girl.

And, on a technical level, sight meets sound. WALL•E’s animation, especially in scenes on Earth, has a photorealistic quality; it looks like a gorgeously arid, live-action waste dump. The appointments of the Axiom, exterior and interior, are as finely detailed as those in any Star Wars or Alien film. Even if the exploits of WALL•E and EVE don’t take and break your heart, you’ll be impressed by the graphic design. Add to that the amazing dimension Burtt brought to the film. Signing with Pixar after 28 years at Lucasfilm Ltd., he got this plum of a project: he’d be creating most of WALL•E’s sounds, from the hero’s voice (Burtt’s own, which he stretched, distorted and metallicized on his computer keyboard) to the wind of WALL•E’s world (“That’s just Niagara Falls”) and the sound of the bot driving around (“It’s taken from a tank, but it’s made to sound tiny”). Burtt is an audio Audubon. Much of his recording is done “on location”–in zoos, his driveway or (lots of this in WALL•E) a junkyard. The chirps needed for WALL•E’s cockroach companion were provided by “a raccoon, speeded up,” and the insect’s clicks came from the sound of locking handcuffs. “I was recording a policeman’s Taser,” Burtt recalls, “and I said, ‘Let me hear your handcuffs.’”

Having spent so much time with George Lucas on the Star Wars series, Burtt is used to demanding directors. But even he was sometimes perplexed by Stanton’s requests. “Andrew would say, ‘That sound of the motor–could we have one with more pathos?’ I wonder about that for a minute. And then I see it as just another challenge and say, ‘O.K., I’ll get ya one!’”

 

Pixar, at its best, invents its own challenges. The typical director worries that most people will see his movie at home, their fingers on the fast-forward and stop buttons, so he makes every element instantly understandable. That’s why most movies seem as if they were made for the passengers of the Axiom. But WALL•E plays without safety nets or spoon-feeding; it reinvents the delicate, potent behavioral language of silent-film comedy, of the Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin films. “We don’t want to contribute to the dreck,” Stanton says of the Pixar team. “We want to sustain the love of going to movies. After Finding Nemo, I thought, Now is the time to push open the door–to broaden the palette, increase the possibility of what a good movie is in the audience’s mind.” Will they have to open their receptors? Fine. “If they discover it on their own, they’ll enjoy it so much more.”

Pixar has taken its biggest gamble, but it’s moviegoers who’ll be the winners.

 

WALL•E will be in theaters on June 27, 2008.

 

The Wooden Mirror by Daniel Rozin

Interactive artist Daniel Rozin works in a very particular artistic milieu, making mirrors from unreflective surfaces. One of his creations, ‘the wooden mirror’ is a testament to his skill in this area. The mirror uses 830 square pieces of wood which are hooked up to an equal number of small motors which move the wooden blocks according to a built in camera. The camera picks up movement in light and transfers the signal to the wood. The result is an eerie representation of reality depicted in tiny wooden pixels. Since building the wooden mirror Rozin has experimented with a number of other materials.

 

Frank Darabount’s Lost Indiana Jones 4 Script

Geeks are geeking out with geekish gratitude over the online leak of Frank Darabont’s famously rejected Indy 4 script — a document that’s become like one of the mystical lost artifacts of Indiana Jones lore; presumed buried forever, then dramatically unearthed and now blinding the Web with its fearsome power.

For those who didn’t follow the marvelously entertaining Indy 4 development squabble: Frank Darabont (“The Mist”) spent a year writing a draft of Indy 4. Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford liked it. George Lucas did not. Script was rejected and Darabont – backed by an army of fans still irked about the disappointing “Star Wars” prequels – fumed.

After last month’s release of “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” — complete with cute CGI prairie dogs and cute CGI monkeys and cute possible-CGI Shia LaBeouf — interest in the Darabont draft intensified.

Then on Wednesday, the script (titled “Indiana Jones and the City of the Gods”) supposedly emerged. Sites such as AintItCool that claim knowledge of the original Darabont script are vouching for its legitimacy (though note somebody retyped the script to shed the identifying watermarks on the original). Some sites have posted the script, then quickly yanked it down. Who leaked the draft is a mystery, but its tough to imagine Lucas and Spielberg aren’t annoyed.

After all, a movie released in theaters is supposed to represent the best possible version and, in this case, the result of two industry titans’ best efforts. Occasionally in Hollywood a director will tip a studio’s apple cart by championing a director’s cut on DVD. But for somebody else -– the work of a movie’s uncredited writer no less –- to rile up fans with What Could Have Been disrupts the order of the summer blockbuster universe.

So is it a better movie than what ended up in the theaters? Here’s some reviews and our take:

The basic story, credited to Lucas, is the same [spoiler alert]: Area 51, Jones fired from his job, Peru jungle trek, a lost city. There’s still a nuclear blast and red ants and aliens.

But LaBouf’s Mutt Williams and Cate Blanchett’s evil Russianista are gone. There’s a lot more Marion Ravenwood, as well as cameos by Sallah and Indy’s father Henry Jones Jr. 

– “Indiana Jones and the City of the Gods is 100% a better script than the one that was shot for the film,” raved G4. “This would have been the right way to close out the series, and it would have been a return to form that no one could have expected, instead of a movie that everyone places just above the abysmal Temple of Doom in the Indy canon.”

– “Darabont’s script reads a little too much like fan fiction at times,” wrote one fan on AintItCool. “I agree with [“Crystal Skull” writer] David Koepp that characters shouldn’t be remembering their exact dialogue from decades earlier. Yet that’s precisely what Indy and Marion do throughout this script.”

Our take: The script feels like the early draft that it is. Long, loose , chatty and with too much connective tissue for a summer movie. But there are some fine moments that one wishes had been in “Crystal Skull.” Jones saying goodbye to his class after he was fired. A spectacular biplane chase that takes wing-walking to a new level.

There’s also scenes that would have had fans in an uproar had they been included in the movie – such as Jones being swallowed by a giant snake (keep in mind, just because this is supposedly Darabont’s draft doesn’t mean any given idea inside the script, for better or worse, is his – same goes for Koepp’s).  And though Blanchett’s character bothered some critics, “City of the Gods” features a vague roundtable of villains and one can see why they were consolidated to a single and more distinctive character.

As the previous reader noted, there are too many references to the earlier films. One play off a classic Jones line, however, works well: “It ain’t the mileage sweetheart,” he groans to Marion, “it’s the years.”

Another standout line is perhaps too referential for a Jones movie, but is funny for those who have followed the Jones saga. Asked whatever happened to Willie Scott from “Temple of Doom,” who was played by Kate Capshaw, Jones replies: “She moved to Hollywood to be a star. Last I heard, she fell in love and married some big shot director.”

What does seem to rightly please many online fans is that the relationship between Jones and Marion is front and center, and downright touching. Marion is inconveniently married in Darabont’s draft (to another archeologist who gives Jones a run for his money), which gives the characters much more of a hurdle to overcome.

Darabont also does a better job handling the alien mythology business, but only because he sort of cheats by keeping the thread obscure until the final scenes – whereas “Crystal Skull” blurted out exposition about psychic warfare and aliens from the very start. 

The ending of Darabont’s script also makes slightly more logical sense than Koepp’s — the aliens have a conversation with the Jones and Co where they offer each a gift with a deadly price — but, as a result, the scene plays even more silly.

If  “Crystal Skull” was a disappointment (and its tough to argue it wasn’t for many fans), the leaked script shows that the fault is not with Darabont or Koepp, but likely with Lucas. It’s the constants between the two versions — the spine of a story that tries to push Indiana Jones into a 1950s flying saucer movie — that both writers struggle to pull off. At the end of the day, neither draft as written is a return to the glory of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

If there’s a lesson to be learned here, it’s one that every writer already knows: If you write draft after draft and your story still isn’t working, try a different story.

 

You can download and read the script here and decide for yourself.