May 3, 2013 – NEW YORK – Today, Jay Penske—Founder, Chairman and CEO of Penske Media Corporation (PMC), which owns the Movieline brand—announced website Movieline.com’s reinvention: a bold launch into the online video space. Penske said, “We’re seeing the growing demand for online video and the appetite advertisers have to reach these focused audiences. Over the last year, we’ve had incredible success with our multi-platform video entertainment news network Entertainment News Television (ENTV) and are eager to expand our reach in the field.”
Starting immediately, Movieline will begin producing video content under its distinctive brand. These new segments will be three-fold: Movie Previews, Talent Previews, and News stories. All segments will be hosted by Tatiana Carrier and will run approximately 2 to 3 minutes in length.
PMC’s Chief of Video Strategy and GM of ENTV Michael Davis will executive produce and oversee the Movieline brand moving forward. The first segments to air will be movie previews – essentially a consumer’s “Movieline” for all the latest films slated for upcoming theater release. These videos will include the film’s storyline, scene footage, cast interviews, and red carpet moments. As an added bonus, these Movieline segments will also feature a unique and interesting tidbit about the film – to further pique a potential viewer’s interest in the film and also enhance the eventual movie-going experience.
Said Davis, “We wanted to create the perfect complement to movie trailers – a more dynamic and all-inclusive segment targeted to moviegoers’ interests, delivering them the information they need to make a decision on what to see at the theaters, while also creating a library of evergreen content that works for DVD, VOD, and all other release moments in the life of a movie.”
The next wave of Movieline segments will feature film talent—top actors, directors, and producers—previewing…
After the initial trailers for The Wolverine depicted our favorite stogie-smoking X-Man in a vulnerable state, his adamantium blades are singing once more. This CinemaCon clip features Hugh Jackman’s character battling a barrage of baddies, including the fierce-looking Silver Samurai, and taking on some heavy arrow damage. Not everyone wants him dead though. In between relieving his rivals of their extremities, the trailer also indicates Wolvie finds time for romance.
There’s even more footage of him and Jean Grey looking loved up around the 27-second mark, although the gauzy quality of scene suggests a flashback or dream sequence.
The Claws Are Out
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From Thailand, by way of the website Kotaku, comes this Sweded shot-for-shot remake of the Iron Man 3 trailer that , frankly would have made Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind a better movie. My favorite scenes are the one in which the Tony Stark stand-in gets a toilet plunger for an oxygen mask in the operating room, the falling Air Force One flight attendants and the shots of Stark’s iron army assembling in the night sky.I laugh every time the blue Iron Man hovers then makes a beeline for the camera.
Check it out below:
Iron…Man, That’s A Parody!
[Kotaku]
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It’s hard to reconcile, considering the degree to which adolescents now dominate popular culture, but the idea of the teenager is a uniquely 20th-century invention, born out of advances in psychological theory, changes in child-labor laws and a boom in leisure-time activities for the under-20 set. A feat of both editing and blurring-of-the-edges nonfiction technique, Matt Wolf’s mesmerizing, scrapbook-style Teenage conveys the transition in how the world perceived this emerging in-between stage via a series of first-person portraits of exceptional individuals set amid a whirlwind of vintage footage. Ironically, the demo in question seems least likely to appreciate the pic’s arty, innovative approach.
The conventional thinking goes that until roughly World War II, society and scientists alike thought of life as two distinct stages, divided between children and adults. The former were patronized and sheltered up to a certain point, then shuffled off to work in factories at a young age. In the introduction to his paradigm-shifting book, Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture, Jon Savage, who collaborated with Wolf on this film, reveals that his initial research into the subject began as background for a possible television series, suggesting that he always intended a multimedia approach to the topic.
Eschewing the traditional TV documentary style, Wolf innovates a radically different format for the material, blending archival artifacts with invented elements to create an intimate, far more personal history of the emerging demographic across the four decades between 1904 and 1945, when Elliot E. Cohen published his young person’s manifesto, “A Teen-Age Bill of Rights,” in the New York Times. Though much of the footage has a stock newsreel feel, Teenage is clearly intended to suggest a home movie record of its era. To that end, Wolf interweaves staged, retro-styled scenes of various characters to foster the illusion of…
The deaths keep coming in the red-band trailer for Eli Roth’s earthquake gorefest Aftershock. I count seven distinct deaths in this clip, which is just shy of two minutes, but with all the lootin’ and a stabbin’ going on in the background, I’m clearly being conservative. Roth gets to preside over his own frightfest, too. He’s front and center in this video as Gringo, a sensitive-sounding guy who just wants to meet a nice girl at an underground Chilean disco. Alas, as the old Nazareth song goes, “Love Hurts.”
Here’s my tally of the grisly deaths (and one amputation) that take place in the trailer. I left out the very last scene because, no matter how bad things look, it’s no fait accompli.
*Death by nightclub speaker
*Death by cement pillar
*Amputation by falling shelving unit
*Death by immolation
*Death by falling concrete slab
*Death by Ax
*Decapitation by speeding truck
Can anyone out there tell me whether that large crucifix that falls over in the movie has an actual human body nailed to it? I’ve paused it a few times, and I think it’s just a life-size facsimile of Jesus, but I’m not entirely sure. That would up the body count to eight.
If The Earthquake Doesn’t Kill You…
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The website for the Tribeca Film Festival has finally put up video from the Q&A session that followed its closing-night presentation of The King of Comedy, but, alas, it’s just an excerpt. I was hoping that the discussion — which included the film’s director Martin Scorsese and its stars, Robert De Niro, venerable comedian and filmmaker Jerry Lewis and (briefly, via pre-taped video) Sandra Bernhard — would run in its entirety, because, even after 30 years, the creative tensions that contributed to the film’s greatness were still evident.
At the center of that tension was the 87-year-old Lewis, who gives a brilliant, disciplined performance in the movie as the Johnny Carson-like talk-show host Jerry Langford. Given some of the recollections that were exhumed and catty comments that were made during the Q&A, Lewis was a handful on the set. When Bernhard appeared by video, she asked Lewis, “Hey, remember when you called me fish lips?” and then recalled that he stole back the handwritten apology he’d given her as a result. (This prompted Scorsese to start laughing into his chest.)
Sandra Bernhard vs. Jerry Lewis: The Feud
Three decades later, Lewis — who, in 2000, told a comedy festival audience, “I don’t like any female comedians — did not sound like time had softened his feelings for his female co-star. In response to Bernhard’s taped comments, he took his own shots, saying, “She’s the reason for birth control” and “She’s a wonderful guy, really. When you get to know him.”
That tension between Lewis and Bernhard, who’s also brilliant in the picture, is palpable onscreen, especially during a so-pure-it’s-hard-to-watch scene in which Bernhard’s character Masha strips down to her lingerie to express her obsession with the captive Langford…
Iron Man 3 screened in Times Square last night, and though it’s practically impossible to talk about the Mandarin without spoilers, I’ve got to say that he is the most daring creation of the Marvel Cinematic Universe so far. As Ben Kingsley, who portrays the villain, said again and again and again in the trailers, “You will never see me coming,” and that line resonates even more now that I’ve seen the movie.
Director Shane Black, who also co-wrote the movie with Drew Pearce, created a character that took me completely (and happily) by surprise. And, after all that blogosphere grousing — myself included — about casting the half-British, half-Indian Kingsley in the role of a character that, based on the Marvel comics universe, is a China-born descendant of Ghengis Khan, the Oscar-winning actor turns out be a genius bit of casting. There’s only one other actor I could imagine doing justice to the part, but I’m going to hold off on sharing his name for now for fear that his body of work would be too much of a clue. Maybe I’ll drop it in the comments section after the picture opens.
The Mandarin: A True 21st Century Villain
I have a feeling Black and Pearce’s construct for the Mandarin is going to piss off a lot of comic-book purists (while, at the same time, making die-hard fans of The X Files smile), but I applaud them and Marvel Studios for taking the chance. The Mandarin turns out to be a villain for the media-saturated, perception-is-reality 21st Century, and that’s a lot more memorable (and unsettling) than some dude with magic rings. I wish I could write more about this, but that’s about as far as I can go without spoiling a key chunk…
My palms get sweaty just watching this extended clip of what I hear is one of the most riveting sequences in Iron Man 3. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) has to suit up in a jiff and attempt to save 13 flailing, screaming people who’ve been sucked out of what looks like a crippled Air Force One. (If that’s the case, it will be the first of two times the Presidential airliner gets blowed up this summer season. The trailer for Roland Emmerich’s White House Down shows the plane’s wing being blown off.
But I digress. Although those two unlucky souls who hit the plane’s fuselage on the way out should probably be dead as a result of the impact, Shellhead’s valiant attempt to rescue everyone when Jarvis is telling him he can only handle four sure does make for some effective dramatic tension. How his first save, Heather, can hear Stark above her own (justified) screaming and the wind is beyond me, but I’m suspending disbelief. The “I’ll electrify your arm and you won’t be able to open your hand” is a nice expository touch, too. Check it out:
We can do this, Heather!
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My palms get sweaty just watching this extended clip of what I hear is one of the most riveting sequences in Iron Man 3. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) has to suit up in a jiff and attempt to save 13 flailing, screaming people who’ve been sucked out of what looks like a crippled Air Force One. (If that’s the case, it will be the first of two times the Presidential airliner gets blowed up this summer season. The trailer for Roland Emmerich’s White House Down shows the plane’s wing being blown off.
But I digress. Although those two unlucky souls who hit the plane’s fuselage on the way out should probably be dead as a result of the impact, Shellhead’s valiant attempt to rescue everyone when Jarvis is telling him he can only handle four sure does make for some effective dramatic tension. How his first save, Heather, can hear Stark above her own (justified) screaming and the wind is beyond me, but I’m suspending disbelief. The “I’ll electrify your arm and you won’t be able to open your hand” is a nice expository touch, too. Check it out:
We can do this, Heather!
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If you follow this site, you know I’ve expressed quite a bit of skepticism about Guillermo del Toro’s upcoming giant-robots-and-monsters movie, Pacific Rim. But that was before I saw this trailer that was unveiled at Wondercon in Las Vegas earlier this month.
This clip answers a lot of lot of FAQs about the plot and how the human pilots operate the Jaeger robots in tandem, although it does make me wonder how they ingest that yellow mind-meld fluid so quickly and keep from bugling it right back into their helmets.
Better yet, this clip finally torques up the dramatic tension to a level more befitting of a movie this ambitious and big. We get more of the human element, in the form of two Charlies — Hunnam & Day — a relatively civil Idris Elba, Rinko Kikuchi and a pimped-out Ron Perlman. And The Kaiju (monsters) finally look fierce and fast, and the scene of the Jaeger collapsing on the beach is a nice dramatic touch, as is the one where the Jaeger takes a tanker upside the head of one of the glowing creatures. “Go Big or Go Extinct” is also a lovely tag line.
Kicking Monster Ass
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