Well, now, here’s a fine how do you do: Zack Snyder made a good movie. Granted, he’s made good movies before, but it’s been so long since he released his hyper-muscular remake of Dawn of the Dead that seeing him output something that’s actually watchable from start to finish comes off as something of a shock. In the intervening years, he’s made films containing individual sequences worthy of the praise they rightfully receive but which lack a top-to-bottom sense of cohesion; Sucker Punch inadvertently celebrates the male gaze it tries to critique, and Watchmen is at its best in its first twenty minutes, after which the story begins and the…
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Chris Pratt Leaving Seal Team Six, Joining the Guardians of the Galaxy
We’ve been running around casting rumors about Guardians of the Galaxy for over a month now, and while we have an idea of who may (or, of course, may not) be filling out secondary roles, no progress has been made in casting the film’s lead— until now. Ladies and gentlemen, let’s give a warm welcome and a round of applause to Chris Pratt, our new Star Lord. Reading that sentence fills me with a sense of bemusement even more than the idea that Jim Carrey and/or Adam Sandler might be involved with a James Gunn-directed superhero picture. Andy Dwyer? Star Lord? If you asked Dwyer himself whether or not he’d want…
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Hugh Goes High-Res in 'Wolverine' Image
This is exactly what it sounds like: a high-resolution photograph of Hugh “Heard the People Sing” Jackman from Darren Aronofsky’s James Mangold’s upcoming The Wolverine, a sequel/reboot/rebootquel/one-off for the eponymous beloved superhero after 2008’s disastrous Wolverine: Origins. Naturally, there’s not a whole lot to say about the shot– Jackman looks like he’s ready to tear off some heads after serenading audiences in Les Misérables, and I suspect for many that seeing Jackman in fighting shape will represent a huge chunk of the picture’s fan allure. If anything, it should be refreshing to see Logan go toe-to-toe with samurai and ninjas instead of yet another super-mutant heavy designed to make us…
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Rice Paper and Bone Claws: 'The Wolverine' Teaser Poster
Sticking with my usual policy of honesty, I’m going to come right and say that there’s very little that could get me interested in Fox’s pending The Wolverine. Like many, I don’t much care for where the franchise has gone since the excellent second film (which is even to say that I didn’t enjoy First Class quite as much as others did, though I still liked it), and the only announcement that had my curiosity piqued came in 2011 when Darren Aronofsky flirted with the project before walking away. If you want to level an argument that my lack of familiarity with the source material, which has been described to me as…