AMC is getting us excited (and creeped out) with this trailer for its new series The Walking Dead, from producer/writer/director Frank Darabont and based on Robert Kirkman’s comic book about a zombie apocalypse. The series debuts, fittingly, on Halloween at 10pm as part of AMC’s Fearfest horror marathon. The premiere is 90 minutes; subsequent episodes will be an hour long.
Season Two looks to knock out the “gamer” stereotype … as well as zombies and ninjas.
By Emily Mitchell
N00b.
If that word is familiar to you, then you either:
a) are a gamer
b) have an extremely close relative or friend who is a gamer
c) have been called this before (most likely by a gamer)
d) never want it to be spoken again. (as does the author of this piece.)
Yes, video gaming (and its lingo), has become a massive pop culture and economic phenomenon, and SyFy Channel’s WCG Ultimate Gamer chronicles it all.
The show is a combination of the Real World/ Road Rules Challenge and videogames. Twelve contestants (6 men and 6 women) live in a house together while competing against one another in both physical and video gaming challenges to become ‘The WCG Ultimate Gamer’, a title that includes $100,000 in cash, an “ultimate” Samsung electronics package, Alienware High-Performance gaming desktop called “The Aurora’, and the chance to represent at the World Cyber Games (aka the WCG).
By Karl J. Paloucek
Movie remakes can be a craps
hoot. Not all are Psycho-clone disasters, but just announcing the do-over of a popular film can abrade the nerves of the original’s fans and set a wave of sentiment against the new project from the start. In such circumstances, the best thing a filmmaker can do is to make it his or her own and pursue the vision in a totally new way. That’s the good news about director Louis Leterrier’s Clash of the Titans — though telling essentially the same story, it bears little resemblance in tone, pace or color to its predecessor.
By Elaine Bergstrom
Cop Out is the story of two partners in the New York Police Department on the trail of a rare mint-condition baseball card stolen from one of them, just before he plans to sell it to pay for his daughter’s upcoming wedding. It’s the sort of buddy story that Bruce Willis, who plays Jimmy Moore, the card’s rightful owner, is perfectly at home with. His partner, Paul Hodges, is played by Tracy Morgan, whose comedic flair is perfect for a film blending comedy and action.
The story takes place in Queens and Brooklyn, where the police are dealing with increasing violence and robberies by a Mexican drug cartel. Shooting in the outlying boroughs meant that the familiar skyline of Manhattan could be shown in the distance, implying that the neighborhoods are far removed from the upscale glamour of New York. “We were so happy to make an outer boroughs movie,” says Smith. “Everybody romanticizes Manhattan, but how many people romanticize Queens?”
One reason for filming in the boroughs may be due to Manhattan’s crowded streets, director Kevin Smith noted in an interview with the New York Daily News. “I talked to film crews who had worked in Manhattan and asked what it was like and they said it sucks because everyone hates you when you shut down the streets in Manhattan,” says Smith. “We didn’t have that in Brooklyn. We’d shoot a sequence and people would line up on the streets to watch us shoot. They were so sweet to us, and we shot something we wouldn’t have been able to do in Manhattan. It was just so much easier.”
“Cop Out” is now showing on Video On Demand. Check your cable system for availability.
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© 2010 Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc. Credit: Abbot Genser
Jennifer Aniston & Gerard Butler in a sexy scene from "The Bounty Hunter"
By Elaine Bergstrom
As any fan knows, Jennifer Aniston has a knack for comedy. But in the romantic action comedy The Bounty Hunter, Aniston — playing a journalist who jumps bail because she has a lead on a murder coverup — also tries her hand at action.
Director/producer Paul Greengrass (United 93) began his career covering global conflict for British television. Green Zone, a look at a
weapons inspector who uncovers a web of deceit while looking for Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, offered him a perfect blend of politics, reality and action. Matt Damon stars as Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller, a career soldier who served in the 1990 Gulf War and has now returned to a very different Iraq to lead a group of WMD hunters known as MET D (Mobile Exploration Team Delta). For realism, Greengrass surrounded Damon (whom he had directed in The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum) with a group of veterans to play some of the soldiers on his team.
“Besides working with Paul,” Damon says, “who I admire and whose movies I really like, the big thing for me was the chance to work with a bunch of veterans who had just come back from Iraq and Afghanistan. They were the ones who really made our cast. They helped create an environment that felt very authentic. To be around people who are alert and who have been in those situations before is invaluable as an actor. … These guys made it very easy for me because they know exactly what to do and they make it look like I’m delegating responsibility appropriately. In an ideal world you don’t want to have to explain things to people, you want them to be able to do it naturally. The whole point of these guys being here is that they show up and are who they really are. That’s not something that a group of actors, even with a long time to work, could pull off as well as a group of veterans. ”
Filmmakers Allen and Albert Hughes (Menace II Society, From Hell) always bring a distinct visual style to their films, and The Book of Eli is
no different. The story is set in a post-apocalyptic America, which is now a wasteland. A wandering warrior named Eli (Denzel Washington) seeks only peace, but if challenged will cut his attackers down quickly. He wants to fulfill his destiny and bring help to a ravaged humanity, but he faces a big challenge when he comes upon Carnegie (Gary Oldman), the self-appointed despot of a makeshift town of thieves and gunmen.
In creating the look of this world, producer David Valdes explains that, “The challenge was creating this primitive existence 30 years into the future. Usually, on a futuristic movie you’re thinking about concept cars and trying to figure out what a blender is going to look like decades from now. On Eli, the idea was that in the future only the most rudimentary mechanical things, relics from the past, would still work.”
By Elaine Bergstrom 
Some of my fondest childhood memories were watching the classic Universal Studios horror films of the ’40s and ’50s at the local theater and on Ghoulardi’s late-night horror film screenings. One of the films I saw was the Lon Chaney Jr. classic The Wolf Man, and it was one of my favorites.
Thankfully, the werewolf may have made some smoother and more elaborate transformations thanks to modern special effects, but the tone of the stories – a noble human doomed by a curse and an unfortunate bite – has stayed the same in films such as An American Werewolf in London, Wolf and Universal’s dark, moody and star-studded Wolf Man update, The Wolfman.
By Elaine Bergstrom
As a vampire aficionado, I spend a lot of time contemplating creatures of the night and lamenting the lack of any great ones on television now that the True Blood season has ended. Vampire Diaries‘ Damon has the potential to be wonderful, but he’s unfortunately stuck in a series aimed to appeal to Gossip Girl and Twilight fans rather than to those of us who recall the days of Spike, Angel and even the delightfully playful Henry Fitzroy from Blood Ties.
So I find vampires where I can and at present two of the best are found in Dexter. The Trinity Killer and Dexter are two sides of the same vampiric nature. They each need to kill to survive. So what if the killer is human and capable of surviving direct sunlight, he still has that need to kill to be whole. And so what if their nature isn’t supernatural; something made them the way they are, changed forever to be more or less than human. [Read more →]
It’s unfortunate that for the anniversary of September 11, none of the networks is airing United 93 or anything close to it to honor the events of that day. (We did a pretty thorough combing of the schedules, just to make sure, even checking for possible late updates.) Failing a more appropriate title, recommending Tropic Thunder or something similar just didn’t seem right, so we kept tonight’s recommendation a family event before moving on to the remainder of the week’s movie highlights. Let’s proceed. As always, all times listed are ET:
Sept. 11
Ratatouille (2007)
One of the most delightful of the CGI-based animated films produced in
recent years, Ratatouille is about … well, a rat. But not just any rat — Remy is a rat with a gourmet palate and a talent for cooking that just might help his new friend Linguini hold down the job of Remy’s dreams, and help Linguini get the girl — if only Linguini can manage to keep the secret under his hat. This is that rare family film that really is fun for all ages. Disney XD, 7:30pm ET [Read more →]
