Empire has posted the first look at The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn. The behind-the-scenes photo features Jamie Bell and Andy Serkis in their motion capture outfits with Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson right by them. Check it out the full photo after the jump.

Bell plays Tintin, Serkis plays Captain Haddock, and they’re joined by Daniel Craig, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Tony Curran, and more. They finished the initial 32 performance capture shoot in early March. Paramount and Sony are splitting the $135 milllion cost. After the heavy amount of post production the film is set for a 2011 release.

Are you looking forward to Tintin?

We just posted the trailer but here is a new poster for Duncan Jones’ (son of David Bowie) debut film, Moon. It stars Sam Rockwell (Frost/Nixon, Choke). Check it out below:

Plot: Astronaut Sam Bell has a quintessentially personal encounter toward the end of his three-year stint on the Moon, where he, working alongside his computer, GERTY, sends back to Earth parcels of a resource that has helped diminish our planet’s power problems.

Man, the trailer was awesome and the original score is by Clint Mansell! I can’t wait.

The film hits theaters June 12th, 2009.

What do you think of the poster? Looking forward to Moon?

Another trailer has arrived.  From IGN, this one is for Duncan Jones’ (son of David Bowie) debut film, Moon. It stars Sam Rockwell (Frost/Nixon, Choke). Check it out below in HD or on YouTube:

Plot: Astronaut Sam Bell has a quintessentially personal encounter toward the end of his three-year stint on the Moon, where he, working alongside his computer, GERTY, sends back to Earth parcels of a resource that has helped diminish our planet’s power problems.

The film hits theaters June 12th, 2009.

What do you think of the trailer?

Director Richard Kelly (Southland Tales, Donnie Darko) has just debuted a new poster for his upcoming thriller The Box over at his Myspace page. The Box opens up on October 30th, 2009.

It’s unfortunate this poster is horrible. They put a new spin on the “floating head” poster, but enough already. Yes, Cameron Diaz’s (What Happens in Vegas) face is obviously capable of selling a movie to some people, but not to me. I am still pretty excited for this though, this weak poster cant taint my excitement for this. I think the concept sounds great. Looking forward to see Frank Langella (Frost/Nixon), and even though Southland Tales was a total mess, I still like Richard Kelly. Check out a bunch of details about the film here.

What do you think of this poster?

By Dan Mecca

Not that Eurocentrism has ever really gone away, but at least high-profile filmmakers were trying to conceal it with “noble” films like Crash. Hell, Hollywood even buys and sells independent projects like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon every once and a while. When considering what it was like in the 1940s/1950s, in which films like Elia Kazan’s Gentlemen’s Agreement (which won Best Picture in 1948) and Delmer Daves’ Broken Arrow were regarded as milestones of equality and filters for truth (even though both revolve around white men infiltrating minorities they are not a part of, thereby rescuing them from themselves), we have taken several big steps forward.

Thanks to the productions of recent years, usually independent of Hollywood, one can find honest cultural studies like the impressive HBO miniseries Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee or realism-drenched Westerns like John Hillcoat’s The Proposition.

However, all of this progression seems to be fading fast. How else do you explain why the new Street Fighter movie starred Chris Klein and the people behind Dragonball Evolution decided to cast uber-white Justin Chatwick and Emmy Rossum as Goku and Bulma, merely falling back on Asia’s most Americanized actor, Chow-Yun Fat, for validation. And let us not forget Jake Gyllenhaal playing Prince Dastan in Mike “Goblet of Fire” Newell’s Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.

Jake Gyllenhaal? Really? What about Cliff Curtis? Cast Tony Shaloub for Christ’s sake. Not Gyllenhaal. After all, the prince is Persian.

But then there’s always been room in Hollywood for “white man saves the strange foreign man” films, like Edward Zwick‘s historic-epic The Last Samurai, in which Mr. Tom Cruise played the glorious white man (spoiler alert: THE LAST SAMURAI) against an incredible performance by veteran Japanese actor Ken Watanabe. Unfortunately, Watanabe, since his rise up to the Hollywood plateau, has struggled to maintain stardom thanks to mediocre roles, like his glorified cameo in Batman Begins or his extended romantic lead in the horrible Memoirs of a Geisha, in which the vast majority of the dialogue is spoken in English even though the film takes place in Japan. Oh, and Ziyi Zhang was cast as the lead geisha, even though she is of Chinese, not Japanese, dissent. C’mon! Talk about a multi-cultural slap in the face.

It appears this all has been going on under our noses.

Or maybe not under anything. After all, Memoirs made 160 million worldwide, compared to the 68 million Letters from Iwo Jima made, despite its near-entire Japanese cast and complete embrace of English subtitles and Japanese dialogue. Or maybe it’s because of it. Now, of course, one could argue the vastly different ambitions of both marketing campaigns for both films, but then that also raises more questions. Why is Memoirs supposed to do better than Letters? Because of the subtitles.

The everyday viewer doesn’t like reading when he/she goes to watch something, so it won’t sell. And when there are subtitles, companies go out of their way, and out of their jurisdiction lately it appears, to simplify the dialogue to the point of creative bastardization. Take the recent scandal involving the subtitles in the American DVDs of the incredible Swedish film Let the Right One In. Eurocentrification by way of simplification.

And there are many ways to simplify. Bryan Singer and Christopher McQuarrie simplified Valkyrie by allowing all of their actors, who ranged from American to British to German, to speak in their native accents in the English language. A strange decision which Singer defended (to his credit) that makes the film feel like it should have been released 50 years ago in between From Here To Eternity and The Great Escape. I thought we were past Hollywood films full of Hollywood actors avoiding true imitation by way of historical alteration. Alas, I was wrong. Now, listen, I liked Valkyrie; I just wished they had had the balls to speak in German. But then, you don’t get a 75 million dollar budget (and Tom Cruise) if you speak German.

But this doesn’t necessarily fit with the Eurocentrism angle. Because, after all, Germany is very much in Europe. And here’s where the real dirt comes out. It’s Americanism via “the white man” that’s going on in these films that we continue to pay money to see. Whether it’s the abuse of generalities as an explanation for universal prejudice in Crash or an all-out onslaught of the English language in nearly every Hollywood film that is released no matter where the film is set (see the Belarus-set Defiance), we are being told that we live in a world of English-speaking whities. Or, at least, that that is all that’s important.

Now, I understand this means it’s not just White-Americanism then, but White-Americanism+Britain. Okay, let’s settle for that. If you’re Brit actor Michael Sheen, you can play David Frost in ’08 and a bad-ass werewolf in the third Underworld in ’09 while equally talented actors like Watanabe look for work struggle for a paycheck.

Ask yourselves why an incredible young black actor like Derek Luke takes a part in a Tyler Perry film or as Ryan Reynolds’ buddy in Definetely, Maybe. Luke should be winning Oscars and picking from a mile-deep bin of scripts – instead, he’s best known for Biker Boyz. Actors like Denzel Washington and Samuel L. Jackson are a dime a dozen because there are not that many roles out there for black actors. This is why this year’s Best Supporting Actress race needs to be celebrated-both Taraji P. Henson and Viola Davis being nominated for deserving performances.

Why can’t we have a film in which the black man saves the white man? And not because he’s magical or non-human, as in the terrible The Family Man or The Legend of Bagger Vance (or even The Green Mile).

I am sure there are normal black people out there who have saved plenty of white people before. Sounds like an interesting character piece.

This is why Spike Lee needs to keep making movies (yes, even bad ones like Miracle at St. Anna), and John Singleton, and the Hughes Brothers. This is why films like Apocalypto (yes, I see the Mel Gibson irony here) need to be made, in which native tongues, or something close to a native tongue, are used to convey the culture being observed.

Arguing whether these Americanized films are racist is a moot point. Racism has become an elusive term that can be defined by many different sets of guidelines. However, what these Americanized films do is ignore the presence of race and of racial differences, merely white-washing all of it. Whether one believe this is racist or not, it is undisputely ignorant.

We already have enough ignorance in this country. Jake Gyllenhaal running around like a Persian prince won’t help anything. Except box-office sales.

The Box, the next film from director Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko, Southland Tales), has moved up from a Thanksgiving release date to a Halloween release. The thriller starring James Marsden (Sex Drive, Enchanted), Cameron Diaz (What Happens In Vegas), and Frank Langella (Frost/Nixon) is now scheduled to open on October 30th opposite Saw VI.

Plot: Norma and Arthur Lewis, a suburban couple with a young child, receive a simple wooden box as a gift, which bears fatal and irrevocable consequences. A mysterious stranger, delivers the message that the box promises to bestow upon its owner $1 million with the press of a button. But, pressing this button will simultaneously cause the death of another human being somewhere in the world; someone they don’t know. With just 24 hours to have the box in their possession, Norma and Arthur find themselves in the cross-hairs of a startling moral dilemma and must face the true nature of their humanity.

I loved Donnie Darko, although it gets a little too much praise. I thought Southland Tales was worth watching if anything. With an interesting plot and an Arcade Fire score, this is one of my most anticipated films of the year. I’m hoping it can beat out the next Saw at the box office, but I can’t see that happening.

Do you like Kelly’s films? Are you excited for The Box?

By Dan Mecca

During a recession, a paranoid political thriller in which the bad guy is a debt-collecting international bank seems like an easy sell. Unfortunately, The International never takes the time to figure out what exactly it’s trying to say or how exactly it’s trying to say it. Although directed by the perennially-promising Tom Tykwer, the German director who gave us Run, Lola, Run over a decade ago, the film was doomed to fail, first and foremost, on the printed page. Written by first-timer Eric Warren Singer, the BIG messages rampant throughout the plot of this thing are as ambitious as they are convoluted, and it appears there was nothing Tykwer could do to distract viewers from this fact. There are no small lines in this film, just large lines comprised of altruisms that sound like the worst version of Robert Frost (“Sometimes a man meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it”).

Clive Owen stars as Louis Salinger, an Interpol agent bent on taking down IBBC, an evil multi-national bank with countless ties to terrorists, bombs and the like. The poorly cast, or simply under-utilized, Naomi Watts stars as Eleanor Whitman, a Manhattan D.A. also bent on taking down IBBC. There is literally nothing else about her character established – oh wait, she has a family, so I guess that was Singer’s sympathy angle.

Owen’s Louis is not much deeper, save a backstory involving IBBC that the film devotes around three minutes to, two of those minutes comprised of Watts relaying Clive Owen’s past mistakes  TO Clive Owen, as if he needed to be reminded of his exact actions. It just feels like lazy writing, but then that’s exactly what it is.

Tykwer certainly has an eye for the frame and a whole lot of visual ambition, but it feels misplaced and spotty here, suggesting a possible “creative clash” between him and the producers. That would also explain the horrid release date and uneven pacing of the film. About 80 minutes in, there’s a 15 minute shootout scene in the Guggenheim museum that likely spills as much blood as the entirety of the Friday the 13th remake. It’s both ridiculous and fun. The rest of the film is certainly ridiculous, but definitely not that fun.

By the time the end credits roll, The International feels like a wasted opportunity, especially when considering the filmmaker and leading man involved. There are moments of subtle brilliance in the film, most notably a tracking shot of a car driving along a coastal road in which a bank member sits, unaware that he is about to be executed by the driver. As the camera pulls further and further away from the beautiful European-set coast the car enter a dark tunnel and never emerges.

Unfortunately, subtly is overruled by patronizing soliloquies catching the viewer up on the plot most of the time. Was Singer’s screenplay really this uneven and ham-fisted? If so, how did it get optioned among the thousands of available screenplays most certainly populating the entertainment world?

The film, which reportedly cost 50 million to make and took in only about 10 million in its opening weekend, is the definition of a lost cause, reminiscent of last year’s Babylon A.D., a sci-fi clunker directed Mathieu Kassovitz, who, like Tykwer, burst on to the scene with a small, but mind-numbingly visceral, film (in Kassovitz’s case, the film was La Haine).

The only thing visceral in this one is the bad dialogue, which will most likely cause an adverse reaction to the film.  If the people who put up the money to make The International wanted to cut their losses this badly, viewers should do the same and wait for a better film about all-controlling evil banks to come out.

5 out of 10,

What did you think? Did you see The International? Did you like it?
]]> http://thefilmstage.com/2009/02/15/owen-twyker-fail-to-breathe-enough-life-or-purpose-into-the-international/feed/ 0 http://thefilmstage.com/2009/02/04/the-new-yorkers-david-denby-makes-case-against-best-picture-noms/ http://thefilmstage.com/2009/02/04/the-new-yorkers-david-denby-makes-case-against-best-picture-noms/#comments Wed, 04 Feb 2009 06:28:11 +0000 Dan Mecca http://thefilmstage.com/?p=1381