Since 2010, Legendary Pictures has been fostering the idea of taking a cinematic jaunt into the Warcraft video game universe– a fantasy world in the truest sense of the phrase, one inhabited by the usual genre suspects (humans, orcs, elves, dwarves, trolls, minotaurs) and characterized by multiple dimensional planes, demonic landscapes, and outer space. (Really.) Originally, the studio had Sam Raimi circling the director’s chair for the project, but we learned last year that Raimi had to bow out to work on Oz the Great and Powerful, leaving the film without a helmsman and, perhaps, a future. Until last night. Legendary scored a pretty serious win by acquiring the services…
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G-S-T Review…The Hobbit
Nine years, eleven Academy Awards, and two massive cinematic disappointments. Since wowing the world in 2001 with The Fellowship of the Ring, the first entry in his adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy series The Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson has amassed an impressive tally of goodwill and squandered the lion’s share; as a consequence, his return to Middle Earth, a similar treatment of Rings precursor The Hobbit, has been speculated over with alternating degrees of trepidation, iconoclasm, anticipation, and blatant excitement. Given Jackson’s previous artistic and commercial success playing in this particular fantasy sandbox, as well as his subsequent failures (2005’s King Kong, 2009’s The Lovely Bones), it’s difficult to imagine a scenario where…
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3 Films & 48 FPS: In Defense of 'The Hobbit'
For roughly half of my life, I have been a died-in-the-wool J.R.R. Tolkien fan and a frequent visitor to the fantasy realm of Middle Earth. I’ve read each of Tolkien’s significant works which take place in that fantasy world– The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings novels, and The Silmarillion— several dozen times in total, and I’ve seen each of the films based on the Rings books numerous times in theaters. (True story: I watched The Two Towers thirteen times in its theatrical run. I am capable of being that guy.) When China Miéville described Tolkien as, “the wen on the arse of fantasy literature”, I felt a sudden need…
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'Thor 2' Set Images Toe the Camp Line
…and I love ’em. Courtesy of an article published yesterday on Bleeding Cool, we now have our first glimpse of the dark elves of Thor: The Dark World, along with an individual figure who is 99% likely to be Chris Eccleston suited up in his role as Malekith the Accursed, the film’s heavy. (More accurately: one of the film’s numerous heavies. Tom Hiddleston isn’t done with Loki yet.) While I wasn’t particularly fond of the first Thor film (despite Chris Hemsworth’s abundant charisma), I do think that the characters boasts an enormous amount of stand-out potential in a world of cinematic superheroes who can identify their point of origin as…