Good morning and happy Friday, everyone. It’s time once again for the News Bites. This week, there’s some casting news of both the confirmed and tentative varieties, the usual hubbub about Transformers and Turtles, a little bit about Disney, a little bit of Marvel, and the continued inability of terrorists to kill John McClane.
So if you want to know what’s going on, keep reading! Continue reading
This week’s assortment of news bites largely consists of superhero movie news and other adaptations. There are a few denials of things, a few rumors, and a few confirmations. There’s also a distressing amount of Michael Bay news. Such is life.
Read on to find out what’s going on. Continue reading
It’s Friday morning, and that means it’s time for another weekly pile of news, with just a bit of snarky commentary from myself. This week there’s still more television news — this is the time of year when the big networks start planning their next years’ pilots — and a few more standard film franchise rumors. As well as a few other items of interest. As is becoming the rule, there’s a bit too much for the front page of the blog, so click through to see what’s going on! Continue reading
Thanks to last week’s delayed post, this Friday’s edition of the Weekly Weblinks is perhaps just a bit lighter than usual (or maybe it just seems that way to me), but there are still several good blog posts and news articles to read. Some fun semi-obscure films are reviewed, and some movie franchises have new information being released. So read on for this week’s batch of the Weekly Weblinks. Continue reading
It’s the last day of August, the summer movie season is essentially over, and the new releases are gradually shifting over from action-packed blockbusters to dramatic fare and the occasional horror movie, such as The Oogieloves. It’s also Friday, and that means it’s time for the Weekly Weblinks.
There’s a lot of looking back in the blog posts this week, with some reviews of films from earlier this year or last, and some posts that look a few decades back. The news, of course, mostly looks forward, as news is wont to do. There’s quite a bit on the news front, although much of it is in the rumor stage, but what it all has in common is that with very few exceptions, it’s downright bizarre. But if your brain is broken apart by the news, hopefully the blog posts will help you put it back together. So click on through for the Weekly Weblinks! Continue reading
I’m out hitting a 52-mile stretch of garage sales today, and a community garage sale tomorrow, so I may not be right here on the site for a bit. But that doesn’t stop the Weekly Weblinks from going up right on schedule! This week’s blog posts include a review of a film coming out today, a couple films debuting at a film festival, and some retro classics.
In the news there’s some info on Michael Bay’s fourth Transformers picture, the latest on the Bay-produced Ninja Turtles, and some more puppets coming to the big screen that, as far as I know, have nothing at all to do with Michael Bay. This week’s selection of posts and news is also surprisingly heavy on Disney, but there’s more to the Weekly Weblinks than Bay or Disney, so whatever you’re interested in, read on! Continue reading
It’s occasionally said that Hollywood is out of ideas. The truth of the matter is that Hollywood has been cheerfully purloining ideas from other media for as long as Hollywood has been around. Novels, cartoons, live-action television shows, comic books, video games, and even the occasional board game have yielded their characters, concepts, and storylines to films. Some of these have been successful, commercially and critically; there’s a reason why the Academy Awards have an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. Some of them, however, are successful on no meaningful level. And sometimes even when the adaptation is successful among some of the general public, the fans of the original remain displeased.
There are several reasons why this can happen, with the most basic and obvious being “they just didn’t make a good movie”. But when making an adaptation — especially of a well-loved property — there are additional pitfalls to be avoided beyond the normal concerns of making a good movie. (Of course, if the source material is terrible to begin with, or just has no story whatsoever, your battleship may be sunk from the get-go.) In my eyes, there is a certain basic rule that all adaptations should try to follow: Respect the source material. There are several different factors that go into that, but they’re all important, and while a film can sometimes get away with bending one or two, if it goes too far astray, it will probably get a severe backlash from the fans.
So what does it mean to respect the source material? Continue reading
This morning I’m starting a new feature here on Morgan on Media, the Weekly Weblinks. I’ve been seeing a few other bloggers start up various “Follow Friday” features, or other ways to share readers around the net, and I felt like this would be a good way to do my part. Each Weekly Weblinks feature will include several links to specific blog posts that I have enjoyed reading, and think are worth sharing. It will also include various news tidbits that I felt like saying a few words on, but which didn’t warrant a full post on their own (news pieces where I do have more to say will remain as their own posts under Media News). And it’ll often have another item just for the fun of it.
Because these are articles that I’m finding as I go along the week, the exact nature and number of the links will vary from week to week. Bloggers who I follow are likely to have a greater representation — I wouldn’t be following them if I didn’t like what they write, after all — but other posts I come across can and will show up as well. If any of the posts sound interesting to you, check them out; that’s what it’s all about. Continue reading
Terrence Faulkner on The Focused Filmographer mentioned this on his blog a few days ago (thanks, T!), but I’m still sufficiently irked that I feel the need to weigh in on it a bit more than I did there (at the time I was mostly in the sputtering with amazement stage.) Michael Bay, who has helmed the live-action Transformers films, is now tackling another beloved 1980s action cartoon franchise. This time, it’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Only there’s a teensy little change in the origin story: “These turtles are from an alien race, and they’re going to be tough, edgy, funny, and completely lovable.” Continue reading
Michael Bay is confirmed to be back in the director’s chair for the fourth live-action Transformers film, as part of a deal between him and Paramount to secure him for the next entry in the franchise by agreeing to fund his upcoming film Pain & Gain (which will feature Mark Wahlberg and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson).
No cast or characters have been selected for the film yet, though obviously Optimus Prime and Bumblebee are expected to be major characters. Producer Lorenzo DiBonaventura says he expects it will be “an evolution” of the franchise, not a re-doing of it. Which really doesn’t explain a whole lot… if they’re not doing a reboot, there are only a few places they can go with the story; to wit, Galvatron and/or Unicron or a new story featuring either villains nobody’s heard of or that were so minor before that nobody will care (since they already kind of blew it with Shockwave.)
Of course, no characters or cast have been selected because the story hasn’t been selected yet; they’re still waiting on a script. The film already has a release date set, at June 29, 2014. This means they have almost exactly the same amount of lead time that gave us Revenge of the Fallen and Dark of the Moon (possibly less, as they might very well have started on the scripts for those before the preceding movie was released in each case.) That… isn’t encouraging, especially for those of us who were hoping for a Bay-free franchise reboot.
