Christopher Nolan's Next Film Filled With Magic and Mystery!

Christopher Nolan (Memento, Batman Begins) starts filming his next film,The Prestige, in January. The screenplay, adapted by Nolan's brother, is based on a novel by Christopher Priest which tells the tale of two rival magicians in Victorian England.

If you read the moviehole article linked above (click on the "The Prestige" link) you will notice that the film has some major comic book movie connections. Both Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale will star in the film.

Comic book geeks though should be careful not to confuse comic book writer Christopher J. Priest with British Science Fiction Giant Christopher Priest.

Roy Horn, "The Magic is Back!"

Roy Horn, Roy of "Siegfried and Roy," is walking short distances two years after being attacked on stage.

I have always been a big Siegfried and Roy fan and I was saddened by the incident, but this is good news.

By the way, if you ever get a chance to watch "Father of the Pride," the Dreamworks sit-com about S&R's animals, do so. The "family sitcom" part of the show is pretty standard fare, but the B storylines (which always involve S&R) are hilarious

Paris Marriage...

Is off. I'm not all that shocked... she wasn't really toning down her act all that much.

Was it all publicity, then? Only the Parises and confidantes know...

To Decrease Attendance, Attendant's Spoil Story

Airline employees are in a mild uproar regarding Flightplan, Jodie Foster's recent re-envisioning of the classic Hitchcock film The Lady Vanishes. Mirroring the classic Jodie Foster steps away from her seat on an airplane (in the original it was a train) only to find her daughter missing (in Lady it was a kindly old lady). There is a desperate search for the daughter and a mystery is solved. Just who has kidnapped her daughter and why?

Airline attendents were disappointed with the answer to those questions and have been asking people not to see the film, while at the same time revealing major plot points in their criticism. The media have covered the story from different angles with E! Online and The New York Daily News provide a spoiler warning, but Reuters reveals the mystery in the first paragraph offering no warning to potential viewers. They are obviously siding with the Airline employees in their attempt to spoil the plot of the movie and reduce viewership. ;-)

++++SPOILER ALERT BASED ON NEWS ARTICLES++++

Good news for Sean Bean fans, it appears that he is not the villain! A rare event indeed in American cinema.

If you want to read the spoiler left click and drag your cursor over it to make it more legible.

Banned Book of the Day September 28th

Freaky Friday by Mary Rodgers

You have got to be kidding me!

The Value of Handcrafted Animation

As a young boy I was immensely fond of the special effects work of Ray Harryhausen the master of Stop Motion animation. (I have also been a fan of hand drawn animation, but that is a subject for another post.) Will the increased sophistication of computer graphics technology I had feared that I would soon hear a deathknell for stop motion. But it appears that the marketplace, as it so often does, is willing to expand and include rather than replace. We have seen this phenomenon before with Movies not destroying theatre, radio not destroying books. There are changes, sure, but for some forms of entertainment the market seems flexible.

According to this article byUSA Today this may be the case with Stop Motion animation as well. The success of Chicken Run, Wallace and Gromit, and the recent Corpse Bride hint that audiences like the "look" of stop motion animation. Naturally, it doesn't hurt that the stories in all these cases are well written, which seems to be the most important market force in animation (regardless of what Keane thinks with his shifting Disney to all CG). One thing struck me in the story though, with CG vs. hand drawn animation the costs are pretty much identical. It appears that costs in CG vs. stop motion, this isn't the case:

It's also cheaper. A stop-motion film typically costs $30 million to $50 million, while a big-studio CGI movie costs closer to $80 million. Bride cost about $40 million; Gromit was $30 million.

This bodes well indeed for well done stop motion.

Looks Like Two Shows I Like Will Be Picked Up

My wife and I have really enjoyed both Bones and Supernatural and according to Marc Berman at Mediaweek it looks like both will be picked up for a full season. Particularly impressive to me was that Bones was #2 in the 18-49 age bracket.

We have been particularly impressed with Supernatural, which is just a great fun ride. The show is well shot, very pretty, and though the actors are still getting into their characters (Jared Padalecki is a little awkward, Jensen Ackles is excellent) the writing has been spot on. Eric Kripke, who really impressed me with Boogeyman, knows how to balance what scared us when we were young with what entertains us when we are older. The show has also set up some interesting non-supernatural conflicts for future episodes. The "ghost hunting" brothers usually pose as some kind of Federal Agent when gathering information. Neither really looks the part and so the pair are usually outed and this can only lead to trouble. Second, they tend to pay their bills through credit card fraud, not exactly the best behavior if you don't want to draw law enforcement attention.

In next week's episode the brothers will perform an exorcism on an airplane during a possible plane crash. Can you ask for any more tension?

[Mad props to Shouting into the Wind for introducing me to Berman's comments which will now be a daily visit.]