Both lists in their entirety at the link.

(From A.V Club)

I’d like to be the wet blanket and point out at this time that Cloud Atlas will be the biggest flop of the year. First of all David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, while lovely, is not exactly one of those books that lends itself easily to adaptation. For those that don’t know, the book consists of six interlocking stories that interrupt, digress into and then regress back out of each other. I suppose the challenge is part of the fun in making one of these movies, but the Wachowski’s have a nasty habit of changing narratives to fit their particularly narrow world-view (see: their butchering of V: For Vendetta). Again, the Wachowski’s aren’t bad film makers, just lazy. And Cloud Atlas isn’t a bad book, it’s just simple and over-written to the point where the connections fall fast and easy by the time the last few chapters wrap up.

So why is that a bad thing? Well the two most common comments on this movie by the public at large may shed some light on my cynicism ([sic] and [lol] throughout):

• “Is this a trailer for a trilogy?”
• “WHUT”

SPOILERS AHEAD

So with that out of the way, let’s get started. Christopher Nolan has returned for the third and final time to his Batman universe. We’re deposited in Gotham eight years after Harvey Dent’s death to a city largely free of organized crime. The Batman, you cry! He surely must be behind all of this organized justice! Yet, sadly, it seems that the scuffles with the Joker and Two Face in The Dark Knight have taken a toll on Bruce Wayne. He’s been holed up in his newly rebuilt mansion for those eight years and Batman has been decommissioned. Meanwhile, the government has enacted “The Harvey Dent Act”, a McGuffin whose sole purpose is to tie this movie to its antecedent. We’re never really told what the act does or how it does it. In fact, after the first fifteen minutes it’s never mentioned again. We get some hints that it’s caused some discontent but the rich are living large without fear of villainous madmen blowing the city to Hell from under them so for now all is well. But it’s not until much later in the film that we get the sense that there are casualties in this “Cold War”. Either way, with the Dent Act in place, Gotham no longer has a need for Batman, so Bruce does the only logical thing for a man in his position: he sits at home and mopes.

And he’s worse off for it. Christian Bale has slimmed down considerably since he first started playing Batman back in 2005. Even compared to The Dark Knight, he look gaunt, almost skeletal. The look works, and lends some credence to the idea that Bruce  Wayne, nee Batman, has been festering behind the walls of Wayne manor for the better part of a decade. Which is where we run into our first big problem. According to Nolan’s own internal logic, Bruce Wayne has really only spent (at most) TWO years being The Batman, with the seven years previous “lost” or as an apprentice to Ra’s Al Ghul. So that means out of SEVENTEEN YEARS, Batman has only really been puttering around for two. If you’ve read the comics you know that more bad shit happens to Batman in the first two years than could possibly be expressed within the confines of two films. So it would seem that Nolan would have ample source material to adapt, warp and reinterpret for his final act. But strangely, he benches The Dark Knight before the whole thing gets started. I think within Nolan’s Batman continuity it works, but viscerally it’s far less exciting than the opening for The Dark Knight. The best takeaway is that the sacrifices Bruce, Gordon and Harvey made have paid off, and Gotham is better for it. Bruce has been wounded beyond repair (at least at first) so his not being Batman is moot. However, as the movie moves into it’s middle section, it becomes apparent that Nolan’s time-dilation was a miscalculation.

Bruce is slowly drawn back into the world as first Catwoman and then Bane smoke him out of retirement. Which, let me say, Anne Hathaway and Tom Hardy turn in absolutely stunning performances. Hathaway’s Selina Kyle is  in my mind the definitive version of the character and one that I’ve been waiting to see for a long time. She’s lithe, witty and surprisingly dangerous. Nolan often gives his female characters a short shrift, so it’s nice to see a strong female character take the stage. In fact, the scenes with Hathaway are probably the best moments of the film. Selina Kyle pulls off a double-reverse-cross early on that is amazing and Hathaway shows an incredible range as an actress that imbues the character with a menacing, conniving second layer that she is able to pull out or subvert at a moment’s notice.

Similarly, I have to commend Tomas Hardy as Bane. He had no easy task filling the shoes of Nolan’s Big Bad. His size alone makes him seem threatening but even behind the mask Hardy manages to telegraph brutal menace completely through his eyes. People have complained that putting a mask on Hardy was a bad choice (even though that’s the character’s main trait) for both aesthetic and narrative reasons. Hardy works around the mask in his body language and in his odd, almost comical vocal affect. There are some times in the film where it’s hard to hear what Bane’s on about, but that may have had more to do with the sound mix at the IMAX theatre I was in rather than the film itself.

I want to note here that this film is loud. It’s probably the most sound-track heavy of all three films. Some people might find this to be distracting. If you’ve found Nolan’s previous Batman films over-orchestrated there’s definitely more to dislike here.

All of that said, there are a few characters who seem tragically underused. While Nolan goes out of his way to get rid of a few key characters that would otherwise bog down his already bloated narrative, the characters that Nolan leaves on the table don’t get the screen time they deserve. Gordon is taken out of the picture early on, and for a large part of the film he’s bedridden. Similarly, Lucius Fox is marginalized to the point of being a tertiary character. To see these major characters get sidelined after they’ve played such a huge role in the creation of Batman is disappointing. Surely after all both of these men have given to aid and protect Batman/Bruce Wayne, they deserve to be front and center in the drama about the rise and fall and rise of Batman? Sadly, neither man really gets his due. Instead we have Joseph Gordon Levitt’s character John Blake take up most of the three hour screen time. Thankfully, Levitt does an incredible job with a character that is, from the outset, no one we’re familiar with either from the comics or previous films. His character arc is probably the only satisfying element of this whole film, if we’re being completely honest. Aside from his specious claim of “knowing” that Bruce Wayne is Batman, he feels well-rounded and believable in ways that even Bruce/Batman sometimes fails to.

The absolute worst character in the mix has to be Marie Cotillard’s Miranda Tate. I don’t think anyone who knows anything about Batman had a hard time guessing that she’s Ra’s Al Ghul’s illegitimate daughter. The movie does a good job of keeping this under wraps, but to no effect. It doesn’t seem to matter much at the end that Tate is really Al Ghul. In fact, the reveal in its handling, only serves to undermine the plot and character of Bane as established in the first two and a half hours. When it turns out that Bane is no more than a henchmen, all of the previous mystery and menace is instantly diffused. Bane’s cult-leader status is wiped clean and he’s reduced to sniveling lap dog. It’s deeply unsatisfying but at least has the effect of making his ignoble and absurd death seem reasonable by comparison. The Nolan brothers don’t even do a good job of making Tate’s motives believeable. Is she looking for revenge? Does she simply want to finish her father’s plan to destroy Gotham? The first is plausible, but poorly explained, while the second is flat-out stupid and inconsistent with the back story she’s given.

And here is where I have the most problems with the movie overall. While Nolan sticks his story beats in his final Batman chapter better than Raimi did in Spider-Man 3 or Ratner in Xmen 3, the whole things starts to feel bloated by the time we reach the middle acts. If we can buy the movie’s “eight years in retirement” premise, the opening act is snappy and incredibly enjoyable up until the (first) return of The Batman. After that the movie hobbles along trying desperately to get Batman into a place to fight Bane. However, to do so it crams a lot into a tiny time frame. Batman chases Bane, loses Alfred, returns as The Batman and then is subsequently betrayed by Catwoman, which leads to his epic first fight with Bane and subsequent breaking. Granted, the first time Bane and Batman square off is as cool as it should have been. Unfortunately, it’s over very quickly and we’re soon shuttled into to the slow middle acts.

Because of how Nolan’s structured his plot beats, the whole middle part of the movie is split between Bruce Wayne’s exile from Gotham and Gordon’s counter-force trying to take down Bane without the help of The Batman. Wayne’s prison time is a slog and devolves into a montage of Bruce getting back into fighting shape for his escape and return to Gotham. Sadly, Gordon’s efforts to fight Bane are given short shrift and what could have been an interesting “city under siege” middle act gets stuffed in with a Rocky-style comeback story. Neither one is given enough time to feel fully developed or believable. Even after Batman’s (second) return, the third act fails to live up to the ridiculous amounts of hype and speculation we’ve been subject to for the last year. Batman’s final showdown with Bane doesn’t nearly match the intensity or suspense of the previous fight, nor does it feel like an appropriate end-cap for either Bane or the series. It’s also here that Nolan decides to stick his unnecessary third-act plot twist.

Even after all of that, Nolan still manages to cram in a chase, a noble (if totally unnecessary) sacrifice by Batman and a happy ending that leaves this series completely open-ended. It is, sadly, totally unearned. With so many plots and characters up in the air, Nolan has no time to develop them beyond their already known and defined limits. New characters have to spit and sputter out their motivations and backgrounds just so that we can get a sense of them, which in the end makes their arcs feel rushed and sloppy.  And, with Nolan’s tacked-on happy ending, it doesn’t feel like anything was really at stake. Was I glad to see principle characters survive beyond Bane’s reign of terror? Sure I was. Was I glad to see the Bat-mantle passed on, leaving the series open? Of course. But it didn’t feel like the ending to a trilogy of movies. It felt more like the middle piece to a bigger trilogy. If this was really Nolan’s final film, why not kill of The Batman for good? What use is it to leave something like this open for a continuation or reinterpretation? Surely DC doesn’t want to use Nolan’s Batman in their Justice League movie otherwise Bruce Wayne would STILL be Batman. The ending seems tacked-on to comfort executive bean-counters. Nolan’s films have been criticized as being “nihilistic” since square one, so the tragic death of the Batman would not be outside the bounds of Nolan’s gritty naturalism.

Even so, the movie manages to move through these annoyances with confidence and aplomb. There’s still a lot to like between some of the silly coincidences and poorly-handled plot points. I got so caught up in the pure spectacle that I actually clapped at the end. I hate clapping at movies, it’s completely ridiculous. But there I was, clapping and smiling like a nerd. You can beat me up later, it’s fine. I think at the end of the day Nolan will get a pass on this movie not because it was so well-handled or because of its thematic consistency or “message” (which is, oh my god, horrible for a certain political subset) but because of the breathtaking scope that Nolan achieves. This is by far the most “comic booky” of all three films and in some ways I’m glad. I don’t know if I could have say through three hours of Nolan’s gritty Batman universe unless it bent a little and allowed for some absurdity. There’s weird coincidences, at least two McGuffins and a few large, action-packed set pieces. We get what we wanted from a Nolan Batman movie, but I doubt in the end it will hold up well for all but the most die-hard fans. Also, I want to be quick to point out that The Dark Knight Rises is a far superior Part 3 than just about any that have been made in the history of cinema. No superhero movie has come close in its third act to being as good as TDKR is, nor have any other high brow films managed to recapture the same spirit as their first two counterparts. To wit: I’d rather watch The Dark Knight Rises over The Godfather: Part III any day. That said, I don’t think it will hold up in time against Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, Ironman, or even The Avengers as far as this generations “Superhero Movies” are concerned. 

To his credit, Nolan’s created his best popcorn movie to date and is starting to embrace something we could consider a sense of fun. When the film breaks long enough to let its characters breath and act human, there’s a lot of wit and genuine human emotion. Even Bane has his moments where he seems like a three-dimensional person and not just the living embodiment of Wrath of God.  Just don’t expect to revisit this film again and again. In the future it will likely become a compulsory watch for people looking to watch the whole Batman Trilogy, but won’t have the same one-off sticking power that The Dark Knight has had. Which is a shame, but maybe this is a sign that Nolan needs to step away from the camera for awhile to regroup and refocus his energies. I’m glad that this is finally behind him and he can move on to bigger, better things.

Grade:  B- / C+

Note: If you can go see it in true IMAX, you should. It’s a beautiful film and the extra money you spend on the larger format will be worth it for the overall experience. Nolan has filmed a shocking amount of this movie in the larger 70mm format that you’ll miss in a normal-sized theatre.

When Hugh Jackman was cast as Jean Valjean I thought it a stroke of awesome. He’s definitely got the singing chops for the part.

I’m still not so sure about Russell Crowe as Javert, mostly because what I’ve heard of him singing sounded a bit more rough and not as pompously baritone as I’d expect for Javert. Hopefully I’m wrong though.

The idea reminds me a bit of Tim Burton’s version of Sweeney Todd. The Broadway version usually has a good baritone voice, but Johnny Depp can’t really sing, so he ended up just sounding like a raspy Jack Sparrow trying to sing whilst drunk off his ass on rum.

With that being said, here’s the first trailer for Les Misérables! It looks pretty awesome so far, and Anne Hathaway sounds great, so hopefully we will get to hear the rest soon!

Let’s hope he’s not playing a young Sauron, hell-bent on trying to get into some happy fake world existing in some giant streak of energy. Because that totally made for an awesome plot..

Check out the photos below!

Also, there’s also a video of the action! Check it out below!

Pay no attention to the extremely annoying commentator talking over the clip..

Source: (ComingSoon.net)

Back in the early 1990′s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles exploded into the homes of children all over America. The show was awesome, giant green turtles who kick ass! All merchandising you can possible think of was created and sold to hungry fans wanting more and more giant anthropomorphic animal-human hybrid creatures!

this obviously led to the next logical step, copying it.

Among the top offenders are Creepy Crawlers, Biker Mice from Mars and my all-time least-favorite copycat: Street Sharks.

Instead of going on about why DIC Entertainment tried to copy the success of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, let’s just talk about the end result, an incredibly illogical, disjointed mess of a show that was only thrown together because they had a toyline they wanted to sell.

What makes up a Street Shark

Plenty of people could probably look at a picture of a Street Shark and figure out what it is at its base level, a guy with a shark head.

In the series, four brothers are kidnapped by a mad scientist and turned into half-shark freaks. The reason for this is never quite made clear. The evil guy already turned the four brothers’ dad into some hideous monster, so it’s not like he couldn’t have just killed these four brothers instead of giving them the power to stop him from evil-doing every week.

So these four brothers are turned into shark-men! Oh noz!!!

Let’s look at the details, and here is why pretty much NONE of it makes ANY sense…

Problem 1: The hands

Many less anatomically accurate cartoons opt to have all humans have 4 fingers instead of 5. Perfect examples: The Simpsons and Family Guy.

In this form, everyone has four fingers, there are no real exceptions (other than God on the Simpsons). Such cartoons make it clear from the beginning that nobody has 5 fingers, the world they live in is filled with 8-finger problems.

The Street Sharks seem to be having a problem where their world is filled with 10-finger problems, and they are 2-fingers short.

Let’s play a game, it’s called Count The Fingers!

Count: 5 fingers!

Count: 4 fingers..

Count: 5 fingers!

NO FINGERS

Notice the problem anywhere? It seems like the conversation went something like this in the early stages of the show’s development:

Person 1: Hey guy’s, I have a problem, I’m trying to concept what these shark guys should look like, but I’m not sure about the hands.

Person 2: Well we want them to hold things in their hands, so they should probably just have five fingers like they did when they were human.

The Douchebag in the room: Well, I dunno guys. Four fingers seems like what cartoons do, right? And they are going to be really big guys, so bigger fingers look cooler than dinky fingers!

Person 1: But it doesn’t make any sense, if we are going to give the shark guys 4 fingers, shouldn’t the humans have 4 fingers too for consistency?

The Douchbag in the room: Who cares?! We already have them swimming through solid ground like it’s water!

Person 2: Good point. Just go with four fingers, douchebag is right, it looks cooler.

Even the Ninja Turtles had SOMETHING to back up the fact that some turtles have three toes.

Problem 2: Teeth and the Digestive System of a Shark

This is a diagram of the anatomy of a shark:

As far as I can see, there’s nothing there that says anything about being able to eat or process metal, cement, rocks or any other non-edible substances.

I think this is closer to what the creators of Street Sharks thought the inside of a shark looked like:

In the show the Street Sharks can be seen swimming through the street (thus their name! OMG!). In order to do this great feat, the sharks eat through the ground while at the same time kicking with their arms and legs, creating a swimming-like effect.

This must mean their teeth are made of magic, and their bodies poop seconds after eating, because there’s no way they could get more than a few feet without their stomachs EXPLODING from the massive amounts of non-digestible matter being launched into it at like 15 miles per hour.

In closing:

Now I know most of you at this point are saying to yourselves, “Why is this guy even wasting the time to point out how stupid some cartoon was?”

There are two reasons,

1. Even though Street Sharks was a poor, half baked idea from the start, they gave us a powerful word that I use every day,

2. Street Sharks will never be as awesome as the original badass anthropomorphic team of crime fighters, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Therefore I must resort to a bit of delightful childishness:

NINJA TURTLES RULE! STREET SHARKS SUCK!

Street Sharks can SUCK IT.

With that being said, the trailer is pretty solid, aside from the fact that I still think The Lizard’s face just looks like Voldemort with scales.

His hands look good and scary, his tail looks great, but his face just looks sooo wimpy! Shouldn’t this guy have tons of big sharp scary teeth or something? Which would you prefer:

Check out the trailer below for yourself. In the end, you can only judge for yourself if you’ll see this movie or not!

You might be thinking, he must mean Jurassic Park 4, right? The one that Steven Spielberg recently mentioned might be happening, but he would not be directing. But NO! I speak of the 2001 epic (fail) film, Jurassic Park III.

Now let’s talk a bit about why this film COMPLETELY missed the mark.

As usual with any sequel, there is a precedent of greatness from the movie before it. The original Jurassic Park was based on the bestselling Michael Crichton book of the same name. It was a pretty awesome movie and a technical triumph at the time. The film’s CG moments still hold up against present-day efforts. The story was a bit haphazard, and took away plenty of depth that the book provided, but how many people actually want to hear people talk about a tiny chicken-sized dinosaur called “procompsognathus”Procompsognathus: An animal mentioned about 1,000 times in Jurassic Park the book. They were later adorably referred to simply as “compys” (such a long name!) or go into detail on how exactly the parks Cray supercomputers decode DNA? As a side note, my wife and I made a conscious effort recently to try talking about procompsognathus in an every day conversation to see how people would react. We were met with mixed/confused results.

Even the the 1997 follow up film The Lost World: Jurassic Park was a fairly solid effort. It strayed even farther from the Michael Crichton book than its predecessor, but still contained all the elements necessary to be entertaining while developing the key characters.

By the second film it became clear that there were a few “checklist items” that seemed to apply to making a good Jurassic Park film.

1. Make sure there is at least one child throughout the whole film.
2. Make sure the child incredibly useless the majority of the film.
3. Have raptors! LOTS OF RAPTORS! ROAR!
4. Be sure to have everyone running from dinosaurs a lot!

Unfortunately, the above checklist was NOT the end-all solution to building a great Jurassic Park film. Which lead to this:

Jurassic Park III: Keep Running!

The first two films had all the things in the above checklist, but they had something else that the third film must have forgotten about: a script.

I’m sure someone copy and pasted a few chase sequences into a document and tried calling it a script. So I guess we can say they at least “tried”…

So how did Jurassic Park III miss the mark?

Story.

Visually it was a pretty film, filled with plenty of big crazy dinosaurs, but it was missing all the character depth from the first two films. All the characters could have died at the end and we still would have been left thinking “Oh did someone die? I couldn’t tell in between each scene of vague characters blindly running from dinosaurs.

The film even goes as far as to take Alan Grant, (the main character of the first film) and take all the depth from his character in the first film and flatten it out into a bland 2-dimensional character.

Apparently Grant didn’t learn his lesson in the first film. Jurassic Park starts by showing Grant at a dig site in Montana. John Hammond comes and says “Come see my park! It’s great!”

At this point Grant says, “No way, I can’t! I have a dig here!” to which Hammond replies, “I’ll fund your dig site!” And there off to the island!

Grant then goes to Jurassic Park and nearly dies and barely escapes with the other people. You would think that if anyone ever came to one of his dig sites in the future offering to go to an island filled with dinosaurs, he would probably just say no.

Unfortunately, Grant must have gotten partial amnesia between the first and second film, because what happens next is almost an exact copy of the first film.

Grant is at his dig site when an annoying looking rich couple walks up to him. They “just want to fly over one of the dinosaur islands” because…well..they’re big fancy rich people! And that’s what rich people do!

This should have set off about 15 different red flags in Grant’s head. And it seemed like it did until the rich couple pulls out his ONE weakness: “I’ll fund your dig site!”

Grant: “Well hell! Where do I sign??”

This pretty much negates anything smart the guy did in the first film. He has essentially rebooted to original Grant, with no memories of everything that happened in the first film.

Oh did I mention that he totally communicates with the raptors at one point too? He uses a replica “resonating chamber” from a raptor skeleton to tell the raptors “It’s ok fellas, nothing to worry about with us! Here’s your dino-eggs back, we cool, G?”

In the end, how did Jurassic Park III miss the mark?

• Lack of script depth
• Lack of any logic in the main character
• Humans should never “communicate” with dinosaurs. They are big scary eating machines and thats all they ever should be.

Here’s hoping that Jurassic Park: IV does NOT go the way they originally intended:

Jurassic Park IV: Raptor Assassins