Posts Tagged ‘New-Moon’
The Fine Brothers love to spoil everything, In past years, we’ve featured their popular videos 100 Movie Spoilers in 4 minutes and Spoiling Every Best Picture Winner in Oscar History. After seeing all of the big movies of 2009, the brothers are back once again. Their latest video spoils 50 movies released last year (including all ten best picture nominees) in one take, in under 4 minutes. Watch the video now, after the jump.
And if it isn’t completely obvious already, please be warned that the following video contains spoilers.
Movies spoiled: District 9, Up, Up in the Air, Inglorious Basterds, Precious, A Serious Man, An Education, The Blind Side, Avatar, The Hurt Locker, Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen, Hannah Montana The Movie, New Moon, The Hangover, Star Trek, A Perfect Getaway, Sorority Row, Whiteout, My Bloody Valentine, GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra, Sherlock Holmes, The Princess and the Frog, Coraline, Fantastic Mr. Fox, 9, Nine, Public Enemies, Invictus, Amelia, Julie and Julia, This Is It, Watchmen, Paranormal Activity, Confessions of a Shopaholic, Adventureland, Crazyheart, Whatever Works. He’s Just Not That Into You, (500) Days of Summer, Orphan, The Messenger, Brothers, Paul Blart: Mall Cop, The Lovely Bones, Thirst, Moon, Zombieland, Jennifer’s Body, The Taking of Pelham 123, and Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.
The /Filmcast crew is off this week, but in its place we have a special bonus episode! Dave Chen, Devindra Hardawar, and Adam Quigley chat with Tyler and David from the Battleship Pretension podcast about what you lose/gain in a home theater experience, the potential of Glee, guilty pleasures, and quality film transfers. Plus, your feedback about New Moon.
You can always e-mail us at slashfilmcast(AT)gmail(DOT)com, or call and leave a voicemail at 781-583-1993. Join us on Monday January 11th at 9 PM EST / 6 PM PST at Slashfilm’s live page as we review Daybreakers.
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This week, Dave Chen, Devindra Hardawar and Adam Quigley celebrate Fight Club’s 10th anniversary by diving into the film’s newly released Blu-Ray, praise Park Chan-Wook’s Thirst, express ambivalence about the upcoming Uncharted film, and dissect the Twilight phenomenon as best they can. Special guest Jen Yamato joins us these evening.
You can always e-mail us at slashfilmcast(AT)gmail(DOT)com, or call and leave a voicemail at 781-583-1993. Join us next Monday at 9 PM EST / 6 PM PST at Slashfilm’s live page as we review The Fantastic Mr. Fox.
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Shownotes
Introduction
- (00:30) Introducing Jen Yamato from Cinematical and Fearnet
- (02:40) Enter to win “Star Trek: The Art of the Film”! E-mail slashfilmcast(AT)gmail(DOT)com with “Star Trek Contest” in the headline. Tell us your favorite Star Trek movie or episode and why!
What We’ve Been Watching
- David Chen (04:24): Fight Club Blu-ray
- Jennifer Yamato (16:14): Planet 51, New Moon
- Devindra (39:20): V, Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!
- Adam (43:00): Thirst
News Discussion
- (49:21) Uncharted gets new screenwriters
- (55:35) Thor Casting: Idris Elba, the Warriors Three, Kat Dennings
- (1:02:20) Steven Spielberg Teams with Stephen King for Under the Dome
Featured Review
- (1:10:00) Precious
Credits
- The Scene Unseen Podcast is great! Check out their website and listen in!
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- Our music comes from Point 22 courtesy of the Podsafe Network, and Brad Sucks
- If you’d like advertise with us or sponsor us, please e-mail slashfilmcast@gmail.com.
- Contact us at our new voicemail number: 781-583-1993
- You can donate and support the /Filmcast by going to www.slashfilmcast.com and clicking on the left-hand side “Donate” links! Thanks to all our donors this week!
Every fifth or sixth word in my notes on The Twilight Saga: New Moon is ‘mope’. If there’s a more listless, disengaged piece of film this year I hope I don’t have to suffer it. (Actually, there is, and I did right after writing this. The guys’ flipside to New Moon: Ninja Assassin.) This second Twilight film is not a dreamy, thorny gothic romance; it is a stereotypical, unimaginative caricature of depressed teens expanded into 120 minutes. By comparison, Catherine Hardwicke’s creaky first film looks like a wise and knowing glimpse into youthful distraction and obsession.
There’s another thread that dominates my notes on New Moon, and which is really the crux of why the movie is so lousy: ‘heroine’ Bella (Kristen Stewart), who in this chapter is reduced to sub-character statues. She’s less substantial than tissue paper, but is featured in nearly every scene. Bella is listless and empty, devoid of any notable characteristic. She has no opinions and nothing interesting to say; her only characteristic is that she wants. But the object of her desire, the vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson, pale and grim), is equally as insubstantial. They’d make a perfect pair, if you were looking for a couple to fill out the deep background of a better film.
We open a short time after the events of the first film. Bella has been generally accepted into the ranks of the vampiric Cullen family. But her status as a human — that is, potential food — is underlined when an innocent paper cut leads to a violent family showdown. It’s one thing when your new girlfriend doesn’t fit in with the fam; quite another when she’d fit all too well on the dinner menu. There’s also the lingering spectre of rival vampire Victoria (the briefly-seen Rachelle Lefevre, to be replaced in the next movie by Bryce Dallas Howard) who, having been defeated in the last film, earnestly want to get her fangs into Bella.
So the Cullens, not to put too fine a point on it, fuck right off. Edward brushes off Bella in the way a confused teenage kid might (ironically making his action one of the few recognizable human moments in the story) and she’s left to mope around for months. Finally her eye lands on the newly beefed up Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner), who hits werewolf puberty just as he and Bella are about to really hook up. Their friendship develops as she uses him to take her mind off Edward; she’s playing him along, and he’s too smitten to see it.
It’s a classic romantic setup, but new director Chris Weitz doesn’t get it. He knows that Bella and Edward represent grand romance to a legion of teens, so he smashes them together in the frame. But there’s no spark. He knows that Bella is meant to be distracted and wooed by werewolf Jacob, so he shoots Jake and his wolfpack brothers with their shirts off and pecs glistening, seemingly unaware of how laughable the crew is. Nothing genuine passes between any of the characters; you could mistake the film for a feature-length parody of the Twilight phenomena if you didn’t already know better.
Melissa Rosenberg wrote the script. She’s already a Twilight vet, having scripted the first film, and has plenty of experience with obsession thanks to her day job on Dexter. I’m told that her script is very much a direct adaptation of the novel, so I’m left pinning the blame for this snoozefest on Weitz’s perfunctory direction. At most, perhaps Rosenberg has to answer a seemingly truncated climactic sequence where Edward tries to end his life at the hands of the Volturi, a clan of bloodsucker royalty. (He basically attempts the vampiric version of suicide by cop.)
The craft in Catherine Hardwicke’s effort was definitely more rickety than what’s on display here; from any technical perspective this is a far more competent film. (Which generally means: more traditional, which is not necessarily better by any means.) OK, the effects here are better, thanks perhaps to extra dollars in the budget that were spent on shirts for the entire cast in the last movie. But when it came to the feel, Hardwicke got it and Weitz doesn’t. In Twilight, scenes between Bella and her father were touching, and Bella’s alienation was easy to understand. It gave her a reason to be drawn to Edward Cullen. In New Moon, there’s no reason at all.
Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson both struggle against the content vacuum that sucks the life out of the movie, but neither is even vaguely strong enough to put up the necessary fight. As Jacob, Taylor Lautner is marginally better, but he also gets the best material; he’s the only active, non-depressed character of the core trio. Michael Sheen and Dakota Fanning offer a little juice as Volturi elders, Sheen even channeling a bit of Christoph Waltz energy, but it’s a futile effort. So too with Anna Kendrick, who genuinely earns a laugh or two. But after seeing her sparkle in Up in the Air this is like catching her sneaking in a bored weekend of community theatre.
/Film Rating: 2 out of 10
Chris Weitz’s sure-to-be-a-blockbuster New Moon is about to hit theaters, but according to a recent conversation he had with MovieMaker (via In Contention), he might soon be ready to hang up his spurs. Meanwhile, we also learned that actor Jason Lee is finally stepping behind the camera to direct his first feature-length film. Hit the jump to find out more details on both.
The news about Weitz might seem odd. After all, the man has previously commanded budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and his star is about to burn a little bit brighter in the wake of the new Twilight film. According to MovieMaker, Weitz spoke of his next film, The Gardener, as potentially being his last:
It’s a script by Eric Essen called The Gardener…It’s sort of an homage to The Bicycle Thief. The intention is that we will shoot half in Spanish, half in English, in Los Angeles. On the one hand it’s a very small, intimate story, but its implications are very grand…I’m always looking for my last film, where I can put the brush down, and this is the one. It’s a beautiful story… I feel that I have now spent a decade of my life in training to know how to make films—how to accomplish every aspect of it—and I feel that if I were to do this one film, I’d feel okay just sitting back and reading. I’d really like to read some books.
Why might Weitz be thinking leaving the industry? It’s likely that his experience on The Golden Compass factors into his current attitude. Studio meddling combined with a relatively disastrous performance at the box office undoubtedly did a lot to ruin his spirits. “I wanted that to be my masterpiece,” Weitz said. “Unfortunately, the edit was taken from me and whatever chance I had at that was also taken from me, which is kind of sad.” Is Weitz serious? Many Hollywood directors have flirted with leaving the profession, but I’m betting that despite The Golden Compass and the stressful, accelerated timeline for putting New Moon together, Weitz still has more than one more movie in store for us; it just might take him a few more years before he gets to it.
While one director might be stepping down, another one may be just getting started. According to THR, Jason Lee’s directorial debut will be the indie film Get Back, “the story of two music-obsessed friends who time travel back to 1966 London, where one gets caught in a love triangle with John Lennon and Yoko Ono.” I have no idea what the result will be when you combine time travel, buddy comedy, a love triangle, the music of the Beatles, and Jason Lee’s directorial sensibilities, but I have a feeling it will be interesting at the very least.
Last night’s MTV Video Music Awards saw the debut of a brand new trailer for The Twilight Saga: New Moon to the delight of Twilight fans everywhere. Hit the jump to check out the trailer, and as always, leave your thoughts in the comments below.
This new trailer gives us a little bit more storyline than previous trailers, as we learn about Edward’s plan to take off, and Jacob’s subsequent attempt to pick up Bella on the rebound. We catch glimpses of Dakota Fanning as Jane, a Volturi guard, and Michael Sheen as Aro, the head of the Volturi, an Italian vampire coven that enforces the vampire laws. Both of them look good in their respective roles, and I hope they were paid well for their time here.
We also see the absolutely-terrifying ghost-Edward, and Bella deciding to become an adrenaline junkie by jumping off cliffs or something. The trailer closes with a fight scene that is strongly reminiscent of the boss battle at the end of Blade 2 [Note: For those of you wondering about the trailer music, it's from the movie trailer for Jumper]. But most importantly throughout, we get to see lots of boys with their shirts off! Taylor Lautner! Robert Pattinson! The Wolf Pack! Trailer mission = accomplished. Here’s Summit’s synopsis:
In NEW MOON, Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) is devastated by the abrupt departure of her vampire love, Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) but her spirit is rekindled by her growing friendship with the irresistible Jacob Black. Suddenly she finds herself drawn into the world of the werewolves, ancestral enemies of the vampires, and finds her loyalties tested.
I have to say that even though I didn’t enjoy Twilight very much, this trailer compares favorably to the first film’s in that stuff is actually happening. Perhaps Weitz’s direction combined with a stable of talented actors might get me to give this film a shot? Probably not, but it’s nice to think about sometimes….
I know that /Film’s audience isn’t exactly the target audience for the film, so to put things in perspective, here are videos of some fans reacting to the trailer. Arguably, they are more entertaining than the trailer itself:
