Movie News: 5 Oct 2009

Guillermo del Toro talks about the Cronos and Mimic Director’s Cut: http://bit.ly/rHvGc



Awesome New Pics From Clash of Titans: http://bit.ly/w2Dvd



Narnia Magician’s Nephew *Fan* Trailer: http://bit.ly/14eQx7



Stellan Skarsgard Cast in Thor: http://bit.ly/qiibo



Weekend Box Office: It's 'Zombieland' versus the 'Toy Stories' http://bit.ly/bfdsd



James Woods Wants Kristen Stewart For An American Girl http://bit.ly/9Zg1s



Carrie Fisher journeys through showbiz celebrity - http://bit.ly/xRmKy



Venezuela to outlaw violent video games, toys - http://bit.ly/KzFbB



Tom Felton is back filming Harry Potter as his caracter Malfoy!



It’s Time for Disney to Give Back the Miramax Name http://bit.ly/GFfBL



Help Wanted: Write For Cinema Blend http://bit.ly/EVVeL



Call Of Duty Movie Moving Forward? http://bit.ly/3OyGvE



Arrested Development Movie Actually Being Written http://bit.ly/1Ppfzz







Don't forget to add us on TWITTER: http://www.twitter.com/shakamovies

Del Toro to Direct Stop-Motion Version of 'The Witches'?!

Wow more great news about Guillermo Del Toro...

Bloody Disgusting brings us the news that Del Toro and buddy Alfonso Cuaron will be co-creating a stop-motion movie of Roald Dahl's book "The Witches".

It seems that Del Toro will direct and Cuaron will produce.

No Idea of the release date as yet, but seems quite promising!

Random News

Not sure whether you are all aware that author and potential movie director Neil Gaiman write his own blog, which certainly attracts fans like me.

Neil Gaiman is famous for Stardust, Mirrormask. and Beowulf. He's also been in talks to direct a movie with Del Toro entitled "Death" based upon one of his comics.

Today Gaiman tells us how to create the perfect cranberry jelly, and also brings us news of Henry Selick's interview on"Coraline", which will be Gaiman's next movie to be released this Febuary. link

More in news, Voyage of the Dawn Treader (sequel to Prince Caspian) has had a couple concept pictures come out, which you can see below. source

Also if you are in the UK you might be interested to know that Cineworld Cinemas has updated it's website. you can see it here.

2 More Movies on Del Toro's To-Do List

Bloody Disgusting brings us news that Guillermo Del Toro has yet another 2 movies in the works.

One will be an adaptation on Gris Grimly's Pinocchio, working closely with him on that. The movie will be using puppets which will be from the Jim Henson Company, so it looks like quite an elaborate movie... I have never read the book, but as I understand, it's much darker than the Disney Pinocchio, and when Pinocchio becomes real, he becomes bad instead of good. But the story also has a lot of room for the thinkers, as Del Toro will be discovering what it is actually to be a Real boy. This movie seems like the perfect movie for me as I am a true Del Toro fan, and I've also had a lifelong interest in the Jim Henson Company. More info on this film as it emerges.

The other movie is a feature length stop motion movie, that Del Toro is not at liberty at this time to expose to us. But if you have seen Hellboy 2, you will recall that the stop-motion sequence at the beginning was quite stunning.

Also in other Del Toro news, the second Hobbit movie has been confirmed, so there will definitely be 2 Hobbit movies, 1 based on the actual book, and 1 to breach the gap between the Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings.

Hellboy 3 looks more likely to happen after the success of Hellboy 2.

Most of you are probably not aware of this, but there's a new Del Toro movie launched on DVD in the UK and soon to the USA. The movie is called "While She Was Out" it's directed by Susan Monteford, and Del Toro is an executive producer. The movie is not as good as Del Toro's own directed movies, but Monteford certainly seems to be able to build up tension. Anyway go on and check out the movie, it's well worth the watch!

That's all the news for now, I'll hand on any other news that I find!

Bayona: Del Toro's second half!

We all want more movies from Del Toro, but he seems to be working himself really hard at the moment with directing Hollywood's most covetted movies: The Hobbit, along with co-authoring 3 vampire books...

It seems though that we have a second Del Toro to take on the movies that Del Toro is unable to direct because of not having enough time...

JA Bayona director of this year's blockbuster horror "The Orphanage" is helming his first english language movie: Hater, due to come out some time 2010.

If Bayona can successfully pull-off this movie like he did with The Orphanage, I don't see what's holding him back from taking on a few more of Del Toro's unfinished productions!

I will remind you that Del Toro had a few years without any movies to direct, in which he spent his time writing out some really gripping scripts (most of which haven't made their way to the big screen).

So it looks like we will soon be enjoying movies from another master director!

What do you think about this? comment below!

A few general movie updates!

Del Toro will be co-writing a trilogy of Vampire Novels

There will be a prequel to I am Legend, starring Will Smith

Johnny Depp will star as The Mad Hatter in Tim Burton's upcoming: Alice in Wonderland

Pirates of the Caribbean 4 is on it's way

Valkyrie's trailer will be premiering this evening, along with a short documantary about the movie

Seems like there's quite a bit of news recently, so I thought I'd break it to you all in one go! Enjoy!

The Boy In The Striped Pajamas

This film is a pure classic!

Alright, if there's one film that you have to go watch in the cinema, this will be the one... you will be thinking a totally different way when you come out!

The holocaust as seen through the eyes of an innocent 8 year-old German boy, as his father is given care over a concentration camp, he starts to learn the truth about this cruel world!

From the producer of Harry Potter: David Heyman. Starring David Thewlis

As good as you could have expected from a good friend of Guillermo Del Toro, this movie depicts childhood innocence in a much simular fashion as Del Toro did in Pan's Labyrinth, and I must say is so emotional at times, but yet relentlessly cruel...

But I can hardly do justice in writing about it! Two words: Watch IT!

Movie Rating: 9.5/10

Del Toro's future projects!

I read a really interesting post down at Bloody Disgusting today telling us about all the future movies that Del toro intends to do.

Bloody Disgusting tells us that Del Toro is officially booked up with projects to direct and produce right up until 2017.

Del toro will be spending the next 5 years working on the much awaited Hobbit movies!

Then after that it looks like he's going to be doing a lot of projects for Universal (who published his Hellboy 2 for him)

Here is a list of the projects Del Toro's got going on for him at Universal:

• Frankenstein: Del Toro has always been fascinated with the story of Frankensein, and I must say that I am too. Del Toro feels that the previous productions have not done justice to the Gothic Fantasy element, and thus wants to create somthing better
• Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: Another Classic that needs a very thorough adaptation by a director that understands the fantasy and horror genres.
• Slaughterhouse-Five: I really can't say too much about this movie but it's some kind of adaptation of the book bearing the same Name... If you read that article, I'm sure you'll agree with me that it is a little different to a lot of the preceding Del Toro films. Sounds very interesting!
• Drood: This one seems a bit strange to... Some kind of fictional biography about the last years of Charles Dickens' life... Del Toro filming Charles Dickens! (not quite)
• (perhaps) At The Mountains of madness: Del Toro adapted this HP Lovecraft book as a script a while back, and it seems as if Universal would like to finaly make this into a movie with him!
• (perhaps) Hellboy 3 too!: Del Toro is still hoping that Universal will again fund him for a final Hellboy movie, to round off the trilogy, and they have said it is a possibility!

Producing: Universal would also like to employ Det Toro as a producer over those few years, so he's certainly going to have enough work to do!

• Hater: "Universal also has on the horizon an adaptation of David Moody’s apocalyptic novel HATER that del Toro will produce with Mark Johnson but not direct" (Bloody Disgusting)
• Cimson Peak: "a gothic romance spec script by del Toro and his "Mimic" collaborator Matthew Robbins, which del Toro will produce but not direct." (Bloody Disgusting)

There were also a couple other movies that Del Toro was going to do:

• Saturn and The End of Days
• Neil Gaiman's Death: which Del Toro will produce with Neil Gaiman directing, if they can find funding for it!

Well that gives you some insight as to what Del Toro will be doing in the years to come! He's come a long way from being the small time director looking anywhere he can for funding to make Hellboy, to becoming one of Hollywood's most sought-after fantasy/horror directors!

Puppetry

There are a number of practices we use in the filming industry, one is to simply shoot the whole movie with video cameras, which is the bulk of all movies; another is to create computer animations, such as 3D animations (Toy Story, Cars) or Anime (like the Japanese films); Then there's stop-motion animation, which uses some kind of mechanical puppets and take a sequence of photos to create a full moving picture; but what I'm really interested in today is another filming practice which we call Puppetry!

Puppetry is the one practice that I believe will never die... looking at Jim Henson's Labyrinth, I believe that still competes with the graphics and all that we use 20 years later... this movie is 20 years old... and to me it looks as relevant today as any other movie that you will see! Tell me if you think I'm wrong!

These are a couple points in which I believe puppetry excels in:

• You merely have to create the perfect puppet and film it... no messing around with CGI that may or may not look right.
• Puppets are real objects and thus interact correctly with their surroundings, which is very hard to do with CGI

OK, here are a few examples of good puppets:

• Obviously the Muppets immediately spring into mind, there's some pretty good designs amongst them
• Yoda from Star Wars: way better than the new CGI version found in the latter films!
• Treebeard from Lord of the Rings: when they couldn't use CGI for him, they had to go with puppetry, which worked far better!
• All around the original Star Wars trilogy you will find various

Well perhaps Jim Henson's original ideas evolved since then- We now have a variation called Animatronics, which seems very likely to start to take over CGI as first choice in creating creatures. There is an interesting post that will give detail into how animatronics works... read here!

Del Toro has announced that he intends to use animatronics over CGI while adapting The Hobbit, which was widely used in Pan's Labyrinth and caused a stunning effect!

So it seems that puppetry has had a big boost around the time of Star Wars and Labyrinth... and has laid dormant until Del Toro has recently picked it up, proving it's potential in a modern day audience with Pan's Labyrinth... looking forward to more development in the puppetry industry!

Puppetry will never die!

The Hobbit Reconstructed (Part 2)

Continued from here

Warning contains spoilers, do not read if you haven't already read the book!

The travelers leave Rivendell.

They will have to go through the mountains (right inside! I'll remind you that in all Del Toro's works there is a little bit where they are in a series of underground passages, so it will be avery Del Toroesque moment)

Down in the caves they are brought before the king of the goblins (or Orcs), popularly rumored to be played by Ron Perlman (Hellboy).

The Party is split accidentally and Bilbo finds himself in Gollum's gloomy home (Gollum will be again played by Andy Serkis) and they start to play a game - a game of riddles. Perhaps this may sound like a boring part of the movie, but Del Toro seems to believe that it's going to be one of the best parts of the movie, so I can only wait and see how he brings that part to life.

While Bilbo is down there, he finds a mysterious golden ring which seems to make people disappear if they wear it on their finger... I think we might have heard about this ring in another movie (Ha ha) ! Yes it's the Ring of Power.

They make it through the mountains, but not without difficulties.

Before they get to their destination they encounter a strange creature called Beorn (possibly to be acted by Doug Jones, who plays The Faun in Pan's Labyrinth and Abe Sapien in Hellboy).

They will also to pass through the evil forest of Mirkwood, where some great evil dwells. There they will come across some very big spiders (this is the part where we'll have to look away because it's going to be super scary!), and they will meet with a band of Elves, and we will get to see Orlando Bloom again for a little while as he reprises his role as Legolas.

Then finally they will come to their destination... to the den of Smaug the Dragon! (voiced by either Christopher Lee or Ron Perlman)

And to top it all, we've got a huge battle at the end: The Battle of the Five Armies. I'm sure we'll have some nice battle action from Legolas and Gandalf. What I do know is, this battle sequence is going to be superb... so look forward to it!


There's my vision of what Del Toro and Jackson are to do with the movie, now lets have a few opinions on it! I'd love to hear what you think! The visuals are going to be superb, and I'm sure that there will be a lot of fantasy creatures for us to look at. It seems as this movie will be like Lord of the Rings crossed with Pan's Labyrinth, two of the most popular fantasy films ever, now this has got to be good!


These events are not necessarily going to be what happens in the film, but is what I believe to be likely from info that has been given and from studying of the talents Directing and producing the films!

The Hobbit Reconstructed (Part 1)

Warning: Contains lots of spoilers, don't bother reading if you haven't read the book!


I thought it might be quite interesting to see if I can construct the way in which I believe, at this moment in time, how the Hobbit movie is going to turn out.

My sources are taken from news, and understanding how Del Toro and Peter Jackson work, and also by what will really sell the movie, and obviously by reading the original source: the book.

So here it goes, I'd like to hear what you think... and I'm sure this movie will be 10 times better on screen than in writing.

A couple things to note before we start: The visuals will be very stunning, probably the best visuals to come out on screen, it'll be a beautiful film. The music will also be spectacular, as both Del Toro and Peter Jackson rate it as essential for the movie!

The movie will open with Ian Holm narrating about the way in which Illuvatar created middle earth, a pure world, but then in comes the rings, trying to take over, and he will again narrate the story of the great battle of the ring where Issildor defeated Sauron.

We see old Bilbo was telling the story to a few of the young hobbits at his 111th birthday party (as in the Lord of the Rings)

Ian Holm will not play the younger Bilbo though...

Gandalf (cofirmed to be played by Sir Ian McKellen) tells Bilbo that he's going to help them on an adventure.

In time Bilbo meets with the dwarves (it is my feeling that there will be a few less dwarves as too many dwarves would be hard to keep track of)

And the set off on their adventure.

By chance they are caught by Trolls, and if you have read the book you will know how they were rescued. (you can see an example of Del Toro's vision of a troll by looking in the Troll Market in Hellboy 2)

They come safe to Rivendell and we will again see cameo roles from Hugo Weaving and Liv Tyler, with perhaps a reference to Aragorn too.

Elrond presents them with weapons, this will be a good time the get all emotional and understand a bit about the characters, as these weapons will one day save their lives!


Continued here

Del Toro and Peter Jackson to script The Hobbit on their own.

People online are crazy about this "new" news... but it's been out for ages. If you look back at my previous post back in July, I gave a comprehensive list of all the people that were lined up to be working on The Hobbit movie... and there I specifically mentioned Del Toro and Peter Jackson as script writers... that list is still current, there has been no changes... My Blog Is Up-To-Date!

Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens will be lending their aid in script-writing too!

Halo: Fall of Reach

So a while back Del Toro and Peter Jackson were in talks to create a movie based on the Halo video games... that didn't happen.

But Stuart Beattie has decided that it's a good idea for a movie, and has written a spec script hoping to get it properly adopted!

read on here

What do you think? Is Halo a good idea for a movie?

Hellboy 2: The Golden Army

HELLBOY 2

I went to see Hellboy 2 last night, I left the cinema feeling as happy as anyone ever could be! I have been waiting all year for this film to come out, and it certainly didn't disappoint me!

We start the story with all our favorite characters from the first film... and lot's of great new characters! If you like characters, you won't be disappointed by Hellboy 2.

The story takes-off with a beautiful narration by John Hurt which truly sets the tone for the whole film.

The films sets out with a great start! wonderful fights and beautiful choreography, which will bring a sense of excitement over you, then there will be a turning point, where Del Toro will play on all your senses at once... then the story really starts!

Beautiful paintings of Love, Betrayal, and Hard Choices along with Sacrifice, as only Del Toro Knows how to do.

I can hardly do justice in reviewing this film, but I shall endeavor to bring parts out in future reviews.

Directed by Guillermo Del Toro. Starring Ron Perlman, John Hurt, Selma Blair, and Jeffrey Tambor.

There are some really funny bits, great expletives in Hellboy's own fashion, but yet we come to that great part where one has to make a choice between love or loyalty!

Wonderful score by Danny Elfman, some really funny songs too!

A worthy sequel to the first Hellboy!

For those of you not at all interested in the first film: this one takes on a totally different look on Hellboy and can work as a stand-alone film... that means you don't have to have watched the fist film to love the second!

Well that's enough for one review, but look out for more upcoming Hellboy reviews!

Movie Rating: 10/10

Hellboy

OK, tonight I go see Hellboy 2. So to get ready for it I watched the original Hellboy for about the 4th time... (It does deserve that many viewings)

I understand it didn't go down too well with the average cinema-goer, but they were all expecting for the usual Hollywood movie, with very little imagination. Take Hellboy for what it really is and you will learn to absolutely love this film!

Hellboy is a Cult Classic, and certainly does deserve the title "classic".

For you people that have already seen hellboy and don't like it, I will be writing a spoiler review in the coming days which will help you to better understand the values of Hellboy.

I will not accept negative comments until you have read this upcoming review!

Hellboy is a demon from the blackest darkness of ~Hell... but he wants to fit in and help humanity... join him as he facest the darkest of foes... wonderful fight scenes, and the emotional touch!

Directed by Guillermo Del Toro. Starring Ron Perlman, John Hurt, Selma Blair, and Jeffrey Tambor.

Movie Rating: 10/10


coming soon: Hellboy 2

The Orphanage

The Orphanage has recently come out on DVD in the UK and is currently available in the USA, so I once again want to draw my readers' attentions to this true masterpiece.

Rated by most reviews 5 stars ***** and by the rest 4 stars **** this film is the second Pan's Labyrinth (horror version) and should certainly not be missed!

Like Pan's Labyrinth, The Orphanage is very pictorally thought provoking, and has certainly hit the mark again!

Produced by Guillermo Del Toro and directed by JA Bayona. Starring Belen Rueda and Geraldine Chaplain.

Often rated as one of the most scary films ever, this is a great film for Horror fans, but at the same time it is really thought provoking!

Watch it!

Movie Rating: 10/10 (there's only about 7 films in my estimation that should ever get 10/10)

Wind in the Willows

Really interesting interview with Guillermo Del Toro (if you are interested):
here

One interesting thing I read was that Del Toro has writtten a script adaptation of Wind in the Willows, and intends to offer to another director, to start production in the coming year... sounds very interesting, I loved the story of Wind in the Willows when I was younger, and still look on it as a great work of art.

So best of luck for Del Toro in his upcoming projects!

Saturn and The End Of Days

This is a proposed film to be directed by Del Toro. The film has been mentioned to be complete in 2011, though that will be the time that he is working on The Hobbit, so most likely will be done 2013, unless he gives it to another director...

The story follows a young boy, as he walks home the end of the World starts, The Apocalypse. Expected to be an extremely experimental film, this will certainly satisfy the more adventurous of Del Toro's fans!

Hellboy 3 is also expected to be about the apocaplypse, so it looks like Del Toro is trying to prepare us for the day that the world is destroyed! Not very often done in films, so will be quite a unique experience. So don't miss out on all the news I will post about it in the future.

more to come.

Current Team and Cast expected Lineup for The Hobbit

Here is a list of the people expected on the production team of The Hobbit, and of the expected Actors. I thought it would be useful for everyone to see it all in an easy to read format!

Guillermo Del Toro - director, script
Peter Jackson - producer, script
Fran Walsh - script
Philippa Boyens - script
Howard Shore - music
John Howe - conceptual design
Alan Lee - conceptual design

Acting

Sir Ian McKellen - Gandalf
Viggo Mortensen - Aragorn
Cate Blanchett - Galadriel
Orlando Bloom - Legolas
Christopher Lee - Sauraman
Sir Ian Holm - Narration (?)
Liv Tyler - Arwen
Andy Serkis - Gollum

It is also to be expected that Doug Jones and Ron Perlman will act in this film, but who they will play is uncertain as yet.

Please tell me if I have missed someone.