Archive for March, 2010
Even as “Avatar” director James Cameron counts an adaptation of the manga series “Battle Angel Alita” as one of his upcoming projects, the celebrated 3-D filmmaker is just one of many directors looking to bring comic books from the page to three-dimensional life on the big screen. And rightly so — with 3-D well on its way to becoming the rule rather than the exception when it comes to upcoming films, why should science-fiction and fantasy have all the fun?
As part of our ongoing 3-D Week here at MTV News, here’s a preview of some of the upcoming comics-inspired films planned for 3-D release in theaters. From a space-traveling cosmic policeman and his ring to a globe-trotting reporter and his dog, comic book characters will play a big role in our 3-D future, so here’s what you can look forward to when they arrive in theaters.
“Green Lantern” (June 17, 2011): Ryan Reynolds stars as Hal Jordan, a test pilot given a powerful ring by a dying alien and tasked with protecting Earth and its surrounding space sector from cosmic (and terrestrial) threats. Driected by “Casino Royale” filmmaker Martin Campbell, “Green Lantern” could make good use of the 3-D environment when it comes time for its hero to make use of the ring’s ability to create just about any shape its wielder can imagine. While Campbell won’t get specific about the “constructs” Hal will create, we’re pulling for someone to get clocked by a big, green, three-dimensional boxing glove at some point in the film.
“The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn” (December 23, 2011): Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson team up for this film based on the adventures of one of the world’s most popular comic book heroes, Tintin. Sure, the Belgian boy reporter isn’t as well known in the U.S., but ask comic fans just about anywhere else in the world and you’ll find out that Tintin and his dog Snowy are on the same level as Spider-Man and Superman in some countries. While Spielberg wrapped principal photography on the film almost a year ago, Jackson has been hard at work on the unique motion-capture technology used to put Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and the rest of the film’s cast into character. With two of the most celebrated, visually inclined filmmakers of the last few generations backing this one, the sky’s the limit when it comes to the role 3-D will play in the film.
“Priest” (January 14, 2011): Based on the manga series by Min-Woo Hyung and directed by “Legion” filmmaker Scott Stewart, “Priest” is a post-apocalyptic tale of a warrior priest and a sheriff (Paul Bettany and Cam Gigandet) on the trail of a gang of vampires led by the evil Black Hat (Karl Urban). “True Blood” actor Stephen Moyer also plays a role in the film, which, combined with Gigandet’s “Twilight” connection, offers a potent combination for vampire-friendly audiences. Stewart specializes in dark visuals, big scares, and intense action, so be prepared for a crazy 3-D experience when this “vampire western” hits theaters.
“Megamind” (November 5, 2010): While not based on an actual comic book, Dreamworks’ animated feature “Megamind” is a satire of classic superhero stories. Will Ferrell voices super-villain Megamind, who gets bored after killing his heroic rival, Metro Man (Brad Pitt). When his new, manufactured nemesis (Jonah Hill) takes a dark turn, Megamind is forced to play a role he’s not accustomed to playing: hero. Considering the possibilities of a 3-D “Incredibles” or other computer-animated features, this one seems like a no-brainer for family-style 3-D fun.
“Stretch Armstrong” (2012): Not much is known about this film other than it stars “Twilight” alum Taylor Lautner and is based on the stretchy Hasbro toy of the same name. Last year, Hasbro CEO Brian Goldner told us the script by Steve Oedekerk (”Kung Pow: Enter the Fist”) would feature a reluctant hero who suddenly finds himself with super-stretchy powers. Expect a lot of 3-D limbs flying out of the screen with this one, folks.
“Spider-Man” (2012): After scrapping plans for “Spider-Man 4,” Sony is going back to basics with your friendly neighborhood webslinger. The new film directed by Marc Webb (”500 Days of Summer”) takes Peter Parker back to high school and reboots the phenomenally successful franchise featuring one of comics’ best-known heroes. No one has been cast in the lead role yet (though we’ve suggested a few names), but with one of the most colorful rogues galleries in comics, there’s bound to be some great 3-D effects in Spidey’s return to the big screen. Whether it’s tail swipes or pumpkin bombs, Spider-Man seems like the perfect hero to make 3-D his home.
What comic book heroes would you like to see in 3-D? Let us know in the comments!
Do not adjust your glasses! It’s 3-D week at MTV News. All week long, we’re looking at the biggest and boldest upcoming movies set to reach out and grab you with the wonders of 3-D technology. We’ve got exclusive sneak peeks at “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” “Tron Legacy,” “Clash of the Titans” and many more.
For breaking comic book movie news, columns and more — updated around the clock — visit SplashPage.MTV.com.
Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.
LOOK! UP IN THE SKY! IT’S A BIRD! IT’S A PLANE! IT’S…
The Associated Press
NEW YORK – The record price for a comic book, already broken twice this year, has fallen again.
<!–
AC = 1234
–>
A copy of the 1938 edition of Action Comics No. 1 sold Monday for $1.5 million on the auction Web site ComicConnect.com.
The issue features Superman’s debut and is widely considered the Holy Grail of comic books.
The same issue sold in February for $1 million. That number was quickly bested when a 1939 comic book featuring Batman’s debut sold for $1 million and change.
The issue that sold Monday was bought from a private collector and then sold by Stephen Fishler and Vincent Zurzolo, the co-owners of ComicConnect.com.
Fishler declined to name the buyer but said he was “a hardcore comic book fan.”
All rights reserved. This copyrighted material may not be re-published without permission. Links are encouraged.
<!–
Build time:
HostName: NYWEB29
Time used: 1546 ms
Initializing : 78ms
Starting first parse
..Parsing macro events
..Completed macro events
..Build 9: 94 ms (Content:3)
..Build 9: 31 ms (Content:1)
.Build 0: 140 ms (Misc:2)
.Build 3: 860 ms (Article:3)
.Parsing macro footer_nav
..Build 0: 16 ms (Misc:1)
.Completed macro footer_nav
.Build 9: 328 ms (Content:10)
Runtime:
HostName: S260608AT1VW040
Time used: 609 ms Wait: 328 ms
Initializing : 93ms
Starting first parse
.Parsing macro SetVariables
…Build 0: 47 ms (Misc:1)
…Build 0: 0 ms (Misc:1)
…Build 0: 0 ms (Misc:1)
..Build 9: 0 ms (Content:1)
.Completed macro SetVariables
..Build 4: 62 ms (Portal:1)
.Build 9: 391 ms (Content:4)
–>
Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.
–>
The record price for a comic book, already broken twice this year, has fallen again.
A copy of the 1938 edition of Action Comics No. 1 sold Monday for $1.5 million on the auction Web site ComicConnect.com. The issue features Superman’s debut and is widely considered the Holy Grail of comic books.
The same issue sold in February for $1 million. That number was quickly bested when a 1939 comic book featuring Batman’s debut sold for $1 million and change.
The issue that sold Monday was bought from a private collector and then sold by Stephen Fishler and Vincent Zurzolo, the co-owners of ComicConnect.com.
Fishler declined to name the buyer but said he was “a hardcore comic book fan.”
Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.
A rare copy of the first Superman cartoon has set a record of $1.5 million (£1
million) for a comic book sale.
The 1938 issue of Action Comics No 1, which originally cost 10 cents, is
considered the ultimate prize for comic collectors because it features the
superhero’s debut. Only about 100 copies of the issue exist and only a
handful are in good condition.
“I can’t imagine another book coming on the market that exists that would top
this,” said Stephen Fishler, founder of ComicConnect.com, which sold the
Superman comic. “This may be the final say — at least for the next 10 or 20
years — for a record price of a comic book.”
The comic, with a cover picture of the red-caped hero lifting a green car,
survived because it was buried in a pile of 1930s film magazines for half a
century. It was discovered in the 1980s when the magazines were sold at an
antique auction in Pittsburgh.
The lucky buyer took it to a comic book convention and later sold it to a
collector. It passed through several hands before it was acquired by Mr
Fishler and his business partner, Vincent Zurzola.
“Because it was tucked inside a magazine it was well protected all those
years,” Mr Fishler said. “That’s why it’s in such a remarkable condition.”
The anonymous buyer was described as a “hard-core collector” who belongs to
the new generation of comic book collectors. “Some of today’s most
successful entrepreneurs were yesterday’s comic geeks,” Mr Zurzola said.
“They don’t want a Van Gogh or Picasso. They want collectibles that mean
something to them. Our society is built on pop culture. Superman,
Spider-Man, Batman … they’re the icons now.”
Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.
Bonebreaker buzzed up: China safety body says rules ignored in mine flood (AP)
23 seconds ago 2010-03-31T01:49:44-07:00
Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.
NEW YORK (AP) – AMC network says it’s bringing the popular “Walking Dead” comic book to TV as a live-action series set to debut in October.
Created by Robert Kirkman, “The Walking Dead” explores the aftermath of a world overrun by zombies. It follows a group of human survivors, led by police officer Rick Grimes, who journey in search of a safe home.
AMC announced Monday that the series will begin filming in Atlanta in June. It was initially scheduled for six episodes.
Only Jon Bernthal has been announced for the cast. Among those behind the camera is executive producer Gale Anne Hurd, whose feature credits include “The Terminator,” “Aliens” and “Armageddon.”
Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.
Kick-Ass writer Jane Goldman talks to Ben Child. Warning: this video contains very explicit language Link to this video
Superheroes have always represented something of a challenge for film-makers. It’s all very well for comic-book writers to create characters with laser vision and the ability to leap tall buildings at a single bound, but until advances in CGI, it was nigh on impossible to recreate them on the big screen. Even the original Superman always looked a bit like he was lying on his side on the floor of a big blue room, rather than flying through the skies, politely showing Lois Lane the view of Metropolis from up above.
It’s no surprise, then, that the current slew of comic-book movies has arrived just at the point when special effects have reached a level of excellence at which it is finally possible to make the fantastical appear real. Spider-Man can swing through the skyscrapers of Manhattan with ease, while the Incredible Hulk is no longer just an enormous bodybuilder covered in green paint. Technology has finally caught up with the dreams and visions of the 20th-century’s most famous comic-book writers, and superheroes have become ubiquitous on the big screen.
In the past decade, Fantastic Four, Iron Man, the Hulk, the X-Men, Watchmen and Hellboy have all made their debuts, while Ant-Man, Thor, Captain America and the Avengers are on their way. If the late 1930s and 40s were the golden age of comic books, the past decade and the one to come look set to be the golden age of comic-book movies.
There’s just one small problem, and it’s one that is at the heart of the creation of Kick-Ass, a comic-book character so postmodern that he makes all those who came before look like relics of a bygone age. The dreams and visions of comic-book readers and cinemagoers in the 1930s – or 50s and 60s in the case of many of Marvel’s characters – are not those of today’s audiences, no more than the 60s version of James Bond, with his misogyny, preposterous gadgets and cheeky one-liners, is suitable for a spy thriller in the new millennium. Something fresh and new is required.
“The film world is plundering these characters that have been around for an awfully long time,” says Jane Goldman, the screenwriter of Kick-Ass, who worked with comic-book creator Mark Millar and director Matthew Vaughan to bring the film to cinemas. “I think it’s just the way that the comic-book industry works. Mark was wondering where the next set of heroes for our generation was.”
Kick-Ass is defiantly unconventional when it comes to comic-book tropes. He has a normal American name, Dave Lizewski (so normal that it was borrowed from the real-life winner of a competition to christen the character), and real-life teenage problems. He doesn’t have a girlfriend, though desperately wants one, and hasn’t really got much of a clue about what he wants to do with his life. All he knows is that he loves comic books.
“He’s extremely different because he doesn’t have any superpowers,” says Goldman. “He’s an average guy – he’s not a cartoon nerd, he’s just a regular teenage boy who happens to love comic books and wonders why nobody’s ever tried to be a superhero. With that fabulous teenage lack of logic he decides to give it a try, which is obviously an appalling idea in real life.”
Rather than triumphantly dispatching his thug opponents during his first street battle, Dave has the living daylights beaten out of him and winds up in hospital, where he spends months recovering having extensive, expensive rehabilitation, which his night shift worker dad can ill-afford. When he finally does make an impact – after saving the victim of a mugging from his attackers – he is caught on phone camera and becomes an instant YouTube sensation.
“I always thought it would be good to do a realistic superhero book,” says Millar, a Scot with the cheeriest disposition this side of the highlands, who is chief writer for Marvel. “You always hear the word realism with superheroes but it never really is. Watchmen isn’t that realistic – there’s a big blue guy with his dick out, you know? It’s not like a guy just putting on a costume, going out with no superpowers and trying to make it happen.
“The trouble is that the superhero movies so far – and I don’t want to be unfair to them because I think generally they have been good – have been made two generations after they’ve been created, and in Superman’s case three generations after they’ve been created. So if the technology had existed to make a Fantastic Four movie in 1966 it would have been amazing, because you had Kennedy and the space race and all of that. But now, really, what is the Fantastic Four?
“With Kick-Ass, the book’s just out and now the movie’s out six weeks later. And I think that’s the way things are going to go now, because to go to Marvel’s B and C-list characters and try to get movies out them – what’s the point of that?”
Certainly the likes of Captain America look pretty hokey in comparison to Hit Girl, a foul-mouthed 11-year-old whom Kick-Ass encounters during his adventures. She’s a tiny yet deliberately supercool figure played in the film by Chloe Moretz, who slices up opponents with samurai skills and can wield a glock with finer precision than Dirty Harry or Death Wish’s Paul Kersey could ever dream of. There’s something Tarantinoesque about putting such a figure in a relatively mainstream movie, and to his credit Vaughan and Goldman have refused to tone down the character described in the comic book as “John Rambo meets Polly Pocket”, despite the predictable tabloid ire. She still crashes into our conciousnesses with the immortal line: “Okay, you cunts, let’s see what you can do,” and the extreme violence superbly illustrated by John Romita Jr in the comic has only been tempered a little for the cinema.
Kick-Ass is a remarkable vision to find its way to the big screen virtually unadulterated. No studio would touch the project when Vaughan hawked it around Hollywood, and the director had to finance the whole thing himself. But then the graphic novel was also a leap of faith: neither Millar nor Romita were paid upfront, and the latter spent two years working for nothing on the artwork, and later as a consultant on the film.
“I was so set on doing mainstream work, but my wife said: do something out of the ordinary, you’re so used to doing regular books,” says Romita, a buff yet gentle figure who has worked on some of Marvel’s most famous comics since the 1970s. “I knew that with the following Mark has and whatever following I have, people would at least pick it up. But I had no idea it would turn into this. There’s always someone who’s a page ahead of everybody else and sets a precedent. This time it’s Mark, and now everybody is going to follow on from this.”
Could Kick-Ass really usher in a new era of comic-book movies? Millar and Vaughan are so confident of the success of Kick-Ass that they have already begun plans for the sequel, and the comic-book writer is also in talks to start work on a separate comic book and movie double-header featuring a super-villain as the lead character, something he would not even have considered a few years ago.
“I think you need to be familiar before you can subvert,” he says. “Kick-Ass is very knowing towards Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man and the other films which came before it. What’s quite interesting now is that we’ve given people a broad education in superheroes and now we can start to play around with it a little bit. I’m trying to create a new wave here and get more radical with it – you certainly couldn’t have done a supervillain 10 years ago because people weren’t familiar enough with superheroes to turn that on its head and do the story from a supervillain’s point of view.”
But what of those film-makers trying to bring more antiquated characters to the big screen? What about the torrent of comic-book movies that studios have on their slates? “They’re fucked,” grins Millar. And suddenly there’s a little bit of Hit Girl in him. “It’s a weird situation because Mark Webb is redoing Spider-Man now and in Kick-Ass the characters make jokes about the conventions of that character: it’s all stuff about somebody’s mum getting killed and it is funny. You can’t have Clark Kent with his gentle humour in the Superman reboot now – it’s going to look like Humphrey Bogart or something.”
Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.
NEW YORK – The record price for a comic book, already broken twice this year, has been shattered again.
A copy of the 1938 edition of Action Comics No. 1 sold Monday for $1.5 million on the auction website ComicConnect.com. The issue, which features Superman’s debut and originally sold for 10 cents, is widely considered the Holy Grail of comic books.
The same issue sold in February for $1 million, though that copy wasn’t in as good condition as the issue that sold Monday. That number was bested just days later when a 1939 comic book featuring Batman’s debut sold for $75,000 more at an auction in Dallas.
There are about 100 copies of Action Comics No. 1 believed to be in existence but only a handful in good condition. The issue that sold Monday was rated slightly higher than the one that sold in February; it had been tucked inside an old movie magazine for years before being discovered.
The issue was bought from a private collector and then sold by Stephen Fishler and Vincent Zurzolo, the co-owners of ComicConnect.com. It was bought minutes after being posted Monday at the asking price of $1.5 million by “a hardcore comic book fan,” Fishler said.
“There’s been a lot of attempts to acquire this book over the last 15 years,” he said. “The recent activity, I guess, did the trick.”
Fishler speculated that the sudden burst of record-priced sales are due to “pent-up demand.” Issues of such prized comic books rarely become available for purchase. Rarer still are issues in such good condition.
“I can’t imagine another book coming on the market that exists that would top this,” Fishler said. “This may be the final say – at least for the next 10 or 20 years – for a record price of a comic book.”
-
On the Net: http://www.comicconnect.com/
Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.
Mahorn_upside_your_head buzzed up: Health premiums could rise 17 pct for young adults (AP)
41 seconds ago 2010-03-29T20:15:22-07:00
Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.
www.youtube.com Click this to watch ETC: Hungry Hambeasts and Non-Sexual Predators S01E12! ETC Extra: Josh Blaylock Interview – Devil’s Due, popcult, merchgirl (Comic Books and Manga) Khail invades meltdown Comics to talk with Josh Blaylock, the owner of much in the way of comics. – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - Follow Machinima on Twitter! Machinima twitter.com Inside Gaming twitter.com Machinima Respawn twitter.com Machinima Entertainment, Technology, Culture twitter.com FOR MORE MACHINIMA, GO TO: www.youtube.com FOR MORE GAMEPLAY, GO TO: www.youtube.com FOR MORE SPORTS GAMEPLAY, GO TO: www.youtube.com TAGS: yt:quality=high Devil’s Due popcult merchgirl Merch Girl meltdown Comics Melt Down Comic Book Josh Blaylock baylock Princess AI Umbrella Academy Jericho Rangers online cross marketing hackslash hack slash Alice in Chains and The Onion devilsdue mechgirl mech joshua baylock