“Breathtaking animation makes '9' fun, frightening - Arizona Daily Star” plus 4 more

Breathtaking animation makes '9' fun, frightening - Arizona Daily Star
Venice screens 1st horror flick since Jekll/Hyde - The Sun News
Tolkien Estate, New Line Settle Lawsuit Over 'Lord of the Rings' Films - Law.com
Nicolas Cage Quits Green Hornet Movie - Wired
Site offers movie ratings with a twist - PhysOrg

Breathtaking animation makes '9' fun, frightening - Arizona Daily Star

Posted: 10 Sep 2009 12:04 AM PDT

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Breathtaking animation makes '9' fun, frightening

The dolls have numbers on their backs signifying who they are and the order in which they were created. They include 1 (Christopher Plummer), the priestly, rigid leader; 2 (Martin Landau), an aging but feisty inventor; 5 (John C. Reilly), who's loyal but afraid of everything; and 7 (Jennifer Connelly), a brave and butt-kicking warrior. Appropriately, Crispin Glover provides the voice of the group's misfit artist, 6. There are also 3 and 4, mute twins who are experts on history, and the brutish 8 (Fred Tatasciore), who looks like the Michelin Man and serves as 1's enforcer.

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Venice screens 1st horror flick since Jekll/Hyde - The Sun News

Posted: 09 Sep 2009 02:10 PM PDT

In the movie, Romero's flesh-eating zombies are set against the backdrop of a warring world in which two feuding families disagree on how to dispose of the dead: One clan opts to kill them off indiscriminately while the other chains them up to "keep them among us." A band of AWOL soldiers arrive on Plum Island, off the eastern U.S. coast, hoping to find paradise but find that life there is all too similar to the war they left behind.

"Zombie films are always a vehicle to talk about something that happens in the present time," Romero told reporters. While no specific war inspired it, a host of current conflicts - from Northern Ireland to the Middle East - were all influences, Romero said.

"Discrimination, racial discrimination, religious discrimination and tribalism of any kind," he said. "I wasn't looking at Iraq and saying 'Oh, let's make a movie about that,'" he said.

"It's more about what's underlying man's inability to forget enmity," he said. "They're enemies even long after they've forgotten what started the conflict in the first place."

Some of Romero's previous "Dead" movies explored the Vietnam War, racism, consumerism, militarism and class differences.

Romero's 1968's classic "Night of the Living Dead" launched the franchise; he followed up with, among others, the 1979 "Dawn of the Living Dead" and the star-filled 2005 box office flop, "Land of the Dead."

"I don't know how many more there will be," Romero said. "It's a practical reality. I think I would prefer it if they were farther apart." But he said his financial backers frequently want him to do another if the latest one does well financially.

"I think if I were trying to make serious films about some of these topics I wouldn't be able to," he said. "So it's great to be able to bring the zombies and talk about social issues and have fun at the same time."

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Tolkien Estate, New Line Settle Lawsuit Over 'Lord of the Rings' Films - Law.com

Posted: 09 Sep 2009 07:25 PM PDT

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Anthony McCartney
The Associated Press
September 10, 2009

The heirs of J.R.R. Tolkien and a movie studio that produced the blockbuster "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy have settled a lawsuit over the films' profits, it was announced Tuesday.

The out-of-court resolution clears the way for a two-film prequel based on Tolkien's novel "The Hobbit" and will benefit charities around the world, according to a joint press release announcing the settlement.

The lawsuit had sought to rescind New Line Cinema's rights to make films based on the book.

Tolkien's heirs sued New Line Cinema in February 2008, claiming the studio owed it millions in profits from the movies released between 2001 and 2003. The films earned an estimated $6 billion in sales of movie tickets, DVDs and merchandise.

No settlement paperwork has yet been filed with a Los Angeles court. The terms of the deal are being kept confidential.

"We deeply value the contributions of the Tolkien novels to the success of our films and are pleased to have put this litigation behind us," said Alan Horn, president and chief operating officer of Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

Warner Bros. acquired New Line in March 2008.

One of the main beneficiaries of the settlement is The Tolkien Trust, a British charity that supports causes around the world.

Christopher Tolkien, one of the author's trustees, said the lawsuit was regrettable, but the estate is "glad that this dispute has been settled on satisfactory terms that will allow The Tolkien Trust to properly pursue its charitable objectives."

Bonnie Eskenazi, an attorney who handled the lawsuit for the Tolkien estate, said the settlement vindicated the heirs and will touch more than just movie audiences.

The lawsuit claimed Tolkien's trust received only an upfront payment of $62,500 for the three movies before production began but was due 7.5 percent of the gross receipts.

Peter Jackson, who directed "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy, will serve as executive producer on "The Hobbit" films. The prequels have already endured a legal path as treacherous as the story's trek by hobbit Bilbo Baggins to the Lonely Mountain.

Jackson and New Line feuded for a year over the trilogy's profits before reaching an agreement in 2007 that cleared the way for work on "The Hobbit."

The two prequels will be directed by Guillermo del Toro, who directed the two "Hellboy" movies and "Pan's Labyrinth."

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Nicolas Cage Quits Green Hornet Movie - Wired

Posted: 09 Sep 2009 11:26 AM PDT

The Green Hornet began shooting in Los Angles last week — without Nicolas Cage. The A-list actor had been slated to play the lead gangster opposite Seth Rogen's title superhero, but Cage has dropped out of the project.

Hornet producer Columbia Pictures and Cage, one of Hollywood's highest-paid actors, were unable to agree on a deal for the movie, which co-stars Cameron Diaz and Jay Chou, according to The Hollywood Reporter's Heat Vision blog. Cage's departure raises a new casting challenge for director Michel Gondry's movie, which already has replaced a Kato: Who should step in to play the heavy in Green Hornet?

We're thinking Bruce Greenwood, the tough Starfleet officer from J.J. Abrams' Star Trek movie, or Vince Vaughn, who would bring all kinds of antic energy to the role. Name your candidate in the comments section below.

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Site offers movie ratings with a twist - PhysOrg

Posted: 10 Sep 2009 01:37 AM PDT

Site offers movie ratings with a twist

September 10th, 2009 By Etan Horowitz

There's no shortage of Internet sites and services that rate movies. RottenTomatoes.com and Metacritic.com compile critics' reviews; while IMDB.com lets users pick the Top 250 movies of all time. If you want to know what your Facebook friends thought of a film, there's the Flixster Movies application for Facebook and the iPhone.

Despite such a crowded landscape, two Florida entrepreneurs think they've come up with a better way to figure out which movies really are the greatest of all time. On Wednesday, Nathan Chase of Winter Garden and Jeremy Thompson of Apopka launched Flickchart.com, a free site that ranks movies by giving users a decidedly simple choice: which film do you like better, movie A, or movie B?

"It forces you to be honest," said Chase, 30. "With the other sites, if you have two five-star movies like 'Titanic' and 'ET,' there is no way to determine which one is better than the other because they both have the same value."

Once you make enough of these choices, the site creates a personalized list of your favorite movies, and it combines everyone's lists to figure the best movies of all time. The service, which opened in private beta in May 2008, has so far only been used by about 25,000 tech-savvy, early adopters. So the list skews toward Sci-Fi and action, with "The Dark Knight" at No. 1 followed by "Star Wars, the Empire Strikes Back" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark."

The two are both graduates of Stetson University who ended up working at the same company. Mutual outrage over the fact that "Pulp Fiction" ranked higher than the "Empire Strikes Back" on the IMDB's list of top films inspired them to come up with a unique way to rank movies. Since September 2007, they've been spending nights and weekends working on the site, and they've only spent about $1,000 on the project.

I've been using Flickchart for about a month, and it's definitely addicting and fun. Some of the movie match-ups it creates are downright bizarre, such as "Schindler's List" vs. "Borat," which makes it pretty tough to decide which film you like better.

To help guide you in making these tough picks, the site suggests that you think about which movie you would rather watch right now, or, if you could only watch one movie the rest of your life, which of the two would it be? Each matchup has a discussion board so you can debate the movies with other users.

The most discussed matchup is "Ghost Busters" vs. "Back to the Future." Another neat feature is that the site often displays foreign posters for the films you are ranking.

But there still are a lot of issues to be worked out. The site can be slow and the search function is frustrating. Perhaps the biggest problem is that there are only about 10,000 films in the site's database, and it doesn't include all of the movies currently in theaters. The founders say they plan to address all of these issues.

To be sure, Flickchart is a lot of fun and is a good way to waste a few hours at work. But why should you use it?

The answer may lie in the detailed data created when you rank movies and the site's social-networking functions. Besides seeing which movies you like best, you can filter your list by decade or genre. You can also find out how much of your life you've spent watching movies (for me it's 37 days, 19 hours and 15 minutes). This information can help you decide what movies to watch again, or convince you it's time to leave the couch.

The most useful list displays the highest-ranked movies that you've never seen, which can help you decide what to watch. In the future, Chase and Thompson plan to add more features, like the ability to narrow down the list of movies you've never seen. For instance, you could generate a list of the highest-rated sports comedies from the 1990s that you've never seen.

You can add other users as friends to view their lists, and in the future, you will be able to generate a list of the highest-rated movies that you and your friends have not seen -- something that will make a group trip to the video store a lot more peaceful.

Chase and Thompson make money off the site through advertising and commissions they receive if someone purchases a movie by clicking on one of the links on the site. They also hope to sell some of the foreign-movie posters the site displays. If it's successful the duo plan to create similar ranking sites for things such as music or books.
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