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Mastering the Art of Bending: The Cast of The Last Airbender 0

Posted on July 12, 2010 by kankan

The world is engulfed by the fires of war, and no one has the power to stop the inevitable destruction…until now.

For nearly a century, the Fire Nation has waged its deadly campaign for global domination over its fellow tribal nations of Air, Water and Earth.  They offer but one choice to the tribes who fall to their might—complete surrender, or complete annihilation.

As the villagers vainly attempt to defend themselves, they stand behind the chosen few who can command their nation’s element and ‘bend’ it to their will.  Backed by enormous armies and weapons of destruction, however, the firebenders have already eliminated every airbender on the planet and now, they turn their attentions to the Water Nation, headquartered in their northern fortress.

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The Last Airbender in 3D 0

Posted on July 02, 2010 by kankan
Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon Movies present The Last Airbender, an action-adventure fantasy film scheduled to be released in digital 3D and regular theaters in the Philippines on July 21, 2010 (Wednesday).  It is a live-action film adaptation based on the first season of the animated television series, Avatar: The Last Airbender.
The series, influenced by Asian art, mythology and various martial arts fighting styles, was created by Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, and was adapted by M. Night Shyamalan, who will also direct and produce the film. Other producers include Frank Marshall, Kathleen Kennedy, Sam Mercer and Scott Aversano. Filming began in mid-March 2009.
The film stars Noah Ringer as Aang, a reluctant hero who prefers adventure over his job as the Avatar. Aang and his friends, Katara and Sokka, journey to the North Pole to find a Waterbending master to teach Aang and Katara the secrets of the craft. At the same time, Fire Lord Ozai, the current Fire Lord of the Fire Nation, is waging a seemingly endless war against the Earth Kingdom, the Water Tribes, and the already vanquished Air Nomads. The film also stars Nicola Peltz, Jackson Rathbone, and Dev Patel.
In a world where the elements, Water, Earth, Fire, and Air can be controlled by people known as “benders”, the Fire Nation is waging a ruthless war to control the other great nations. The only hope for stopping the war rests on
the shoulders of a young boy named Aang.  The last known Airbender and survivor of the peaceful Air Nomads, Aang is the Avatar. The Avatar is the physical embodiment of the world, with the ability to control all four elements and draw upon the combined power, knowledge, and experience of the Avatar’s previous incarnations. The Avatar’s duty is to maintain peace between the four nations and the spirit realm, ensuring that the world remains in balance. Aided by a protective teenage Waterbender named Katara (Nicola Peltz) and her warrior brother Sokka (Jackson Rathbone), and his animal guide Appa; a Flying Bison, Aang begins a perilous journey to restore balance to their war-torn world. Standing in their way is the ambitious Fire Nation Admiral Zhao (Aasif Mandvi) and Prince Zuko (Dev Patel), the banished prince of the Fire Nation who seeks to capture Aang to regain his honor.
THE LAST AIRBENDER is released and distributed by United International Pictures thru Solar Entertainment Corp.  In Cinemas 21 July 2010 (Wednesday).

airbender

Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon Movies present The Last Airbender, an action-adventure fantasy film scheduled to be released in digital 3D and regular theaters in the Philippines on July 21, 2010 (Wednesday).  It is a live-action film adaptation based on the first season of the animated television series, Avatar: The Last Airbender.

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Shrek is back! 0

Posted on May 17, 2010 by kankan

shrek_isback

After challenging an evil dragon, rescuing a beautiful princess and saving his in-laws’ kingdom, what’s an ogre to do?  Well, if you’re Shrek (Mike Myers), you suddenly wind up a domesticated family man.  Instead of scaring villagers away like he used to, a reluctant Shrek is now a local celebrity who begrudgingly agrees to autograph pitchforks.

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Russell Crowe as “Robin Hood” 0

Posted on April 28, 2010 by kankan
Academy Award® winner RUSSELL CROWE reunites with his blockbuster Gladiator director, filmmaking legend RIDLEY SCOTT, for the epic action-adventure Robin Hood.  Joining with Oscar®-winning producer BRIAN GRAZER (A Beautiful Mind, American Gangster) and Oscar®-winning screenwriter BRIAN HELGELAND (L.A. Confidential, Green Zone), they tell the story of the legendary figure known by generations as “Robin Hood,” whose exploits have endured in popular mythology and ignited the imagination of those who share his spirit of adventure and righteousness.
In 13th century England, Robin and his band of marauders confront corruption in a local village and challenge the crown to alter the balance of power between the king and all of his subjects.  And whether outlaw or hero, one man from humble beginnings will become an eternal symbol of freedom for his people.
Robin Hood chronicles the life of an expert archer, previously interested only in self-preservation, from his service in King Richard I’s army against the French.  Upon Richard’s death, Robin travels to Nottingham, a town suffering from the corruption of a despotic sheriff and crippling taxation, where he falls for the spirited widow Lady Marion (Oscar® winner Cate Blanchett of The Aviator, Elizabeth), a woman skeptical of the identity and motivations of this crusader from the forest.  Hoping to earn the hand of Maid Marion and salvage the village, Robin assembles a gang whose lethal mercenary skills are matched only by its appetite for life.
With their country weakened from decades of war, embattled from the ineffective rule of the new king and vulnerable to insurgencies from within and threats from afar, Robin and his men heed a call to ever greater adventure.  This unlikeliest of heroes and his allies set off to protect their country from slipping into bloody civil war and return glory to England once more.
Crowe and Blanchett lead a cast of accomplished performers, including Academy Award® winner WILLIAM HURT (The Good Shepherd, A History of Violence) as Sir William Marshal, MARK STRONG (Sherlock Holmes, Kick-Ass) as Sir Godfrey, MARK ADDY (The Full Monty, A Knight’s Tale) as Friar Tuck, OSCAR ISAAC (Body of Lies, Che) as Prince John and DANNY HUSTON (X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Children of Men) as King Richard The Lionheart, as well as legendary performers DAME EILEEN ATKINS (Last Chance Harvey, Cold Mountain) as Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine and MAX VON SYDOW (Shutter Island, The Exorcist) as Sir Walter Loxley.
They are joined by rising stars MATTHEW MACFADYEN (Frost/Nixon, Pride & Prejudice) as the Sheriff of Nottingham and SCOTT GRIMES (Crimson Tide, Mystery, Alaska), KEVIN DURAND (Legion, X-Men Origins: Wolverine) and newcomer ALAN DOYLE as Robin’s Merry Men—Will Scarlet, Little John and Allan A’Dayle, respectively.
Filmed on location in England and Wales, Robin Hood spans the years from the death of King Richard I in 1199 to the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215.  It is produced by Scott, Grazer and Crowe, from a story by Helgeland and ETHAN REIFF & CYRUS VORIS (television’s Sleeper Cell) and a screenplay by Helgeland.
The celebrated behind-the-scenes team is led by a crew of longtime Ridley Scott collaborators, including cinematographer JOHN MATHIESON (Gladiator, The Phantom of the Opera), BAFTA-winning production designer ARTHUR MAX (Body of Lies, Gladiator), Oscar®-winning costume designer JANTY YATES (Body of Lies, Gladiator), two-time Oscar®-winning editor PIETRO SCALIA (Body of Lies, JFK) and composer MARC STREITENFELD (American Gangster, Body of Lies).
CHARLES J.D. SCHLISSEL (Body of Lies, Matchstick Men), MICHAEL COSTIGAN (Body of Lies, American Gangster), JIM WHITAKER (Changeling, American Gangster) and RYAN KAVANAUGH (The Hangover, The Wolfman) serve as the film’s executive producers.
ROBIN HOOD is released and distributed by United International Pictures thru Solar Entertainment Corp. In Cinemas 14 May 2010 (Friday)

robinhood

Academy Award® winner RUSSELL CROWE reunites with his blockbuster Gladiator director, filmmaking legend RIDLEY SCOTT, for the epic action-adventure Robin Hood.  Joining with Oscar®-winning producer BRIAN GRAZER (A Beautiful Mind, American Gangster) and Oscar®-winning screenwriter BRIAN HELGELAND (L.A. Confidential, Green Zone), they tell the story of the legendary figure known by generations as “Robin Hood,” whose exploits have endured in popular mythology and ignited the imagination of those who share his spirit of adventure and righteousness.

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Laeta Kalogridis Talks Shutter Island 0

Posted on April 14, 2010 by kankan
“The book is a very complicated emotional rollercoaster, and I wanted to try to convey that as much as possible”
In order to keep up with Martin Scorsese and Dennis Lehane as a writer, you’ve got have a pen that’s dipped in blood… 
 
Shutter Island screenwriter and executive producer Laeta Kalogridis definitely didn’t shy away from the darkest aspects of Lehane’s original text in her script for the film. In fact, she’s the architect of the perfect Lehane adaptation—maintaining the original work’s most unsettling moments, while heightening the unease at all the right times. She keeps Lehane’s original vision in tact, but manages to bring it to life visually in a vibrant and visceral fashion. It’s easily the best film of the past year and a new masterpiece for Scorsese. Kalogridis shows sympathy for Shutter protagonist Teddy Daniels, while flawlessly building a true vision of hell around him with her vision of the eponymous island. And, oh yes, there is blood… 
 
How do you feel like you extracted the darkness from the original text and translated it into a visual story? 
 
Well, I think the obvious thing to say is that Marty, Bob and the actors are far more responsible for making it a visual story than I am [Laughs]. Although, in terms of the narrative—the architectural plans for a movie that the script is—a lot of it was honestly about trying to recreate the emotional ride that I got from the reading the book. It was less about how can this be an exact recreation of the text and more about how can it be an exact as possible recreation of the emotion of reading the text? That book is a very complicated emotional rollercoaster, and I wanted to try to convey that as much as possible.
You tap into the feelings inherent in the book more than the actual events. 
 
That’s the intent. In a perfect world, I think that’s what you want to try to do.
That comes through in the film’s dream sequences. How did you interpret those? 
 
Well, there are a lot of dreams and a lot of nightmares in the book—obviously far more than you could possibly ever put into a movie [Laughs]. It became a question of taking common elements from Teddy’s past and then re-interpreting them through the lens of his subconscious. I’m using the bones of the dreams that Dennis had put in the book. I was asking, “Where did the dreams occur? What were the biggest moments in them that I really loved and how could I interpolate that with a more scaled-down and direct version of Teddy’s dilemma?” The book is much longer. A lot more is going on. It takes place over more days. If one can imagine, there’s more back story. There are many more flashbacks. I needed to combine elements of Teddy’s most traumatic memories, which is one of the reasons there’s a conflation between Dachau and Teddy’s wife Dolores. There’s also a conflation between Dolores’s prodding Teddy about Andrew Laeddis and why he’s there. It’s much more direct than what’s in the book. Honestly, a lot of it was, how do you get across that sense of disorientation? Teddy’s so disoriented. As the story progresses, he’s becoming more and more unmoored. You want his subconscious to be talking to him. You want his past to be haunting him more and more. A lot of it was deciding what the images and characters are that best fit into that dynamic.  
 
The element of psychological horror becomes very tangible because Teddy’s constantly grappling with the past and these dreams. He creates this supernatural element that heightens the terror. 
 
Yes, it is like he’s walking around with ghosts of his own making, and they won’t let him go. 
 
Everyone does that to a degree. 
 
Greek people especially believe very strongly, on some kind of genetic level, that the furies haunt you in life. When certain things are bad enough, there’s a curse to some lives. For me, Teddy embodies that sense of inescapable fate. The Greek myths are about furies that pursue you who can’t get away from. I think they hound men to madness, and they feel appropriate in this context.
Your exploration of insanity, especially during the interview sequences, is very poignant. The people on Shutter Island aren’t very different from the rest of the world, and that makes the movie so unsettling and unnerving.  
 
That, to me, is a huge part of what I want people to take away from the film. I want the audience to have a real sense of empathy for people that we normally think of as being so different from us and so “other” that we don’t even regard them as rational. They aren’t that different and they aren’t that “other.” 
 
Shutter Island feels like a classic Dario Argento film because of that. 
 
Thank you! For me, the second time viewing the film is more fun because you can sink into the experience in a different way. 
 
There are so many nuances to the film. You handled the integration of the WWII flashbacks much differently than the book. 
 
Yes, although I think the emotion that Teddy felt was what I was after. I’m hoping that it feels the same as the emotion that he felt about what happened. In the book, he’s straight-up PTSD guy. What happened in Dachau completely informed his ability or inability to function in “normal” society. The Dachau massacre was real. The goal was to get the intensity of it across and the life-changing aspect of it. Even though he did what most people would consider to be the right thing—there was no right thing that you could really do in that scenario. 
 
Well, as a writer you really connect the emotional thread from start to finish. 
 
I think if that doesn’t work, the rest of it doesn’t work. It doesn’t matter how many clever narrative tricks you can employ to make a plot hold together, if you’re not really in there emotionally with the lead character. It doesn’t make any difference. Then it becomes very pretty and intricate. It’s nice to look at in an emotionalist way, but you’re not really drawn in. The brooding sense of the book was fascinating and sense of something inside you and outside you that’s going to erupt or explode. Somehow, I think the complexity of classical music captured that for me. 
 
Did you have a favorite moment in the film? 
 
The whole thing is such an incredibly satisfying experience for me on every level, it’s hard to pick one moment. When Rachel Solando is standing there in one of Teddy’s dreams covered in blood, I really liked that [Laughs].
SHUTTER ISLAND is released and distributed by United International Pictures thru Solar Entertainment Corp. In Cinemas 14 April 2010 (Wednesday)
MTRCB Rating: R-13

shutter_cast

“The book is a very complicated emotional rollercoaster, and I wanted to try to convey that as much as possible”

In order to keep up with Martin Scorsese and Dennis Lehane as a writer, you’ve got have a pen that’s dipped in blood…

Shutter Island screenwriter and executive producer Laeta Kalogridis definitely didn’t shy away from the darkest aspects of Lehane’s original text in her script for the film. In fact, she’s the architect of the perfect Lehane adaptation—maintaining the original work’s most unsettling moments, while heightening the unease at all the right times. She keeps Lehane’s original vision in tact, but manages to bring it to life visually in a vibrant and visceral fashion. It’s easily the best film of the past year and a new masterpiece for Scorsese. Kalogridis shows sympathy for Shutter protagonist Teddy Daniels, while flawlessly building a true vision of hell around him with her vision of the eponymous island. And, oh yes, there is blood…

Read the rest of this entry →

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Iron Man 2 0

Posted on March 31, 2010 by kankan
Paramount Pictures and Marvel Entertainment present the highly anticipated sequel to the blockbuster film based on the legendary Marvel Super Hero “Iron Man,” reuniting director Jon Favreau and Oscar® nominee Robert Downey Jr.
The sequel in the planned trilogy of the Marvel Comics superhero will have Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark / Iron Man reprising his original role, with Don Cheadle replacing Terrence Howard as Colonel James ‘Rhodey’ Rhodes aka War Machine. The film would have Mickey Rourke as Ivan Vanko / Whiplash – the villain, a composite of both Blacklash and Crimson Dynamo.
After confessing his identity as Iron Man to the world, Stark comes under fire from the United States Government who demand he hand over the powerful weapon that is the Iron Man suit.
As the Government attempts to create a duplicate suit with the assistance of Stark’s rival, Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell), Tony’s long time friend Jim Rhodes (Cheadle) is put center stage in the conflict.
Hammer who seems to be a direct counterpoint to Tony Stark is an eccentric weapons manufacturer, charismatic, but the difference is that Hammer has no moral compass whatsoever.
Meanwhile, a mysterious and dangerous foe emerges in Ivan Vanko (Rourke), who creates an alternate and powerful persona known as  Whiplash in order to exact revenge on the Stark family once and for all… it isn’t long before he unites with Hammer in an effort to destroy Iron Man.
With the arrival of his shady new assistant (Scarlett Johansson as Natasha Romanoff aka Black Widow), and persistent recruitment attempts from S.H.I.E.L.D. director Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), Stark needs all the help he can get in order to overcome the obstacles.
IRON MAN 2 is released and distributed by United International Pictures thru Solar Entertainment Corp. In Cinemas 30 April 2010 (Friday)

ironman2

Paramount Pictures and Marvel Entertainment present the highly anticipated sequel to the blockbuster film based on the legendary Marvel Super Hero “Iron Man,” reuniting director Jon Favreau and Oscar® nominee Robert Downey Jr.

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The cast of “The Cirque du Freak” 0

Posted on January 27, 2010 by kankan

cdf_cast

Cirque Du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant, based on the popular series of books by DARREN SHAN, is a fantasy-adventure about a teenager who unknowingly breaks a 200-year-old truce between two warring factions of vampires.  Pulled into a fantastic life of misunderstood sideshow freaks and grotesque creatures of the night, one teen will vanish from the safety of a boring existence and fulfill his destiny in a place drawn from nightmares.
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The Lovely Bones 0

Posted on January 13, 2010 by kankan

lovelybones

This is literally the return of the King. Peter Jackson is back to what he does best, directing movies. Peter Jackson’s project with Dreamworks on the movie adaptation of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones is finally coming to the Philippines. It is the magnificent and heart – warming little story of the young Susie Salmon, who is raped and murdered and while in Heaven (or the In-between Heaven, as Peter Jackson puts it), watches her family, her loved ones come to terms from her passing and how their lives play out in front of her, including her rapist’s life. If you have read the novel, you would know that when it comes to telling a story that happens above Earth, but is surely grounded in reality, there is no one better than Peter Jackson to turn to for a spectacular narration. It also helps when you have Steven Spielberg as Executive Producer on behalf of DreamWorks.

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