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
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
I have a confession to make, and it’s one that might not be very popular among readers and writers of movie blogs. But I’ve never shied away from making unpopular statements, and this is something I feel I should get off my chest, if for no other reason than intellectual honesty, and the integrity of the blog. You see, I hate anime. I’ve tried to be open-minded about it, tried to be tolerant. But I hate it. It’s like fingernails on a blackboard. It makes my skin crawl. I suppose it could partly be an age thing — I’m old enough to remember when anime was so uncommon in the United States that any instance of it stood out like a sore thumb. Now it’s everywhere, and still seems to be growing every day. And I, for one, can’t stand it. Try as I might to see things other peoples’ way, I just plain hate anime.
I don’t have anything against Japanese animation, mind you. Continue reading
It’s Friday morning, and you know what that means: it’s time for the Weekly Weblinks. There’s a hefty amount of both blog posts and news this week. There’s some talk about upcoming movies that haven’t yet hit their wide release, as well as a couple looks back at slightly older films.
On the news front, there are remakes, retitlings, planned sequels, and a meeting of William Shakespeare and Joss Whedon. Plus, a long-lost Stanley Kubrick film is coming to home video. To find out what it’s all about, keep reading! Continue reading
So there’s this meme going around called the “Liebster Award”; it’s basically a way to pass around questions and draw attention to other blogs. I’ve been tagged by three people (that I know of; if I’ve missed one, sorry!), so I figured I’d knock out a post to answer the questions. There are a few rules associated with it, but a: I’m not always good about following rules, and b: most of the rules relate to passing the award on. While there are many bloggers who I think are worthy of a spotlight — if I’m following you, and/or if I’ve featured you in my Weekly Weblinks, you’re almost certainly one of them — I suspect that anybody I could tag either doesn’t want to do it or has been tagged three or four times already. So like a few others I’ve seen, I won’t be passing it along — but if by chance you haven’t been tagged and want to have been, consider yourself tagged and steal 11 questions from the people who asked me questions. I’m sure they won’t mind.
The other rules are that I have to post eleven things about myself, and answer 11 questions from the people who tagged me. Since three people tagged me, that’s 33 questions. Plus 5 more from a fellow rule-breaker. So here we go. 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
Sequels. They’re ubiquitous. It seems like at least half of the movie news I see is regarding some sequel or prequel. Action movies of various stripes (fantasy, science-fiction, superhero, and more) are the genre most prone to receive sequels, but comedies and the occasional drama are known to receive them as well. There are over a dozen sequels being released in 2012, and it’s not even a big year for sequels. And there are, of course, more on the way. But this isn’t a new trend in Hollywood by any stretch; it’s been going on since The Fall of a Nation in 1916, which also started the trend of sequels that were directed by a different person.
And sequels aren’t an inherently bad thing. Hollywood wouldn’t keep churning them out if people didn’t go to see them, and people wouldn’t go to see them if they didn’t at least hope they would be entertained. Some have even achieved critical acclaim, with The Godfather: Part 2 winning an Oscar for Best Picture, and Toy Story 3 receiving a nomination for the same. But there’s also no question that there are a lot of bad, or just disappointing, sequels and prequels out there. So, under the same presumption that went into my Guidelines for Adaptations, I thought I would take a look at what can make or break a sequel. Again, none of these suggestions are absolute binding rules… but they’re pretty reliable guidelines.
So what goes into a quality sequel? 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
