Friday, October 28th, 2011
Laika, the stop-motion animation studio that produced Coraline, is back next year with ParaNorman.
In the film, a boy who can speak to the dead must save his town from a zombie uprising.
ParaNorman is aiming for a August 17, 2012, release. The voice cast features Kodi Smit-McPhee, Casey Affleck, Tempestt Bledsoe, Jeff Garlin, John Goodman, Bernard Hill, Anna Kendrick, Leslie Mann, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse.
Thursday, October 27th, 2011
Courtesy Yahoo! Movies comes the “exclusive” new trailer for Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, from director Brad Bird (Iron Giant, The Incredibles).
This new trailer gives you a little more about the story than the teaser trailer, but lacks the teaser’s punch, I think. Still, I trust Brad Bird not to make a bad movie, and there are enough glimpses of awesome between the two trailers that I’m still very much on board.
Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol hits theaters on December 16th.
Saturday, October 22nd, 2011
I don’t know why I should say that I’m surprised that this looks good, but I am, and it does. It looks really good, in fact.
Written and directed by Angelina Jolie, In the Land of Blood and Honey centers around “a love affair [that] blooms between a Bosnian woman and a Serbian man during war in the 1990s.” It stars Goran Kostić, Zana Marjanović, and Rade Å erbedžija — the film’s cast is entirely local actors (if you can call the six countries former comprising Yugoslavia “local”).
The film hits screens on December 23, 2011 — which is basically shorthand for, “We think this is an Oscar contender.” There are two versions of the film, which were filmed simultaneously: one in English, and another in the Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian language (or BHS). Undoubtedly, we’ll get the English one here.
Thursday, October 20th, 2011
Courtesy TV.Sohu.com (via Coming Soon) comes a trailer for Zhang Yimou’s The Flowers of War, which stars Christian Bale stars as “a Catholic priest who shelters a group of prostitutes and female students in his church during the brutal 1937 invasion and pillaging of the Chinese capitol by Japanese troops known as the ‘Rape of Nanking.’”
As a longtime fan of Zhang’s films (particularly Hero and his earlier, quieter dramas like Happy Times, Not One Less and Raise the Red Lantern), I’m definitely interested in this, although perhaps because I don’t knowing much about the historical events in question, I couldn’t make a ton of sense out of this trailer.
The film also stars Shigeo Kobayashi, presumably as a Japanese soldier, and I noticed Paul Schneider (All the Real Girls, Parks & Recreation) in the trailer, as well.
The Flowers of War will be the Chinese entry for the Best Foreign Language Film in the next Academy Awards (according to an old /Film article on the film, the film is about 60% Mandarin and 40% English), and so it will get a release before the end of the year somewhere, but possibly not a very big one.
