Here's the Poster for Like Crazy

The Poster seems to have more going on than it appears to at first glance, and I like it...thoughts?

Take a gander at the Poster for Drive!

Thoughts?

Curious who is doing the score to Cameron Crowe's new film We Bought a Zoo?

Well, wonder no further, according to The Playlist:

It was just over a week ago when director Cameron Crowe teased on his website that despite earlier indications that the soundtrack to his forthcoming “We Bought a Zoo” would contain lots of Neil Young and Eddie Vedder, another mystery artist was vying for the gig. “I think it’s going to lean heavily into one or two artists, but not necessarily either of them. We did play a lot of Eddie, Neil and PJ during the movie. It’s kind of revealing itself now,” Crowe explained. “There is another artist who is campaigning in the editing room with his music ala Cat Stevens in ‘Harold and Maude.’ We’ll see how far it gets.” Well, Crowe hasn’t taken too long to let the secret out.

Todd VanDerWerff, TV editor for The A.V. Club is currently attending the TV Critics Press Tour—where Crowe was on hand to promote “Pearl Jam Twenty” which hits PBS in the fall—and he broke the news over Twitter saying, “Jónsi from Sigur Rós is scoring We Bought A Zoo. Everybody add him to your Oscar predictions all at once.”

It’s definitely a name that’s a far cry from the likes of Young or Vedder, but this history between Crowe and Jónsi is significant. Sigur Rós licensed their first pieces of music for use in a film when they allowed Crowe to use “Svefn-G-Englar,” “Agaetis Byrjun” and a live version of “The Nothing Song” in “Vanilla Sky.” At the time, Jónsi joked that he thought it would be funny for Tom Cruise to act over their music, but also said “Almost Famous” made him want to be in a band.

As for Crowe, he had gushed, “Sigur Rós is one of the great bands to know this simple fact — the best music creates a movie in your mind. Making ‘Vanilla Sky,’ we played Sigur Rós constantly. It inspired us and gave us grooves that became part of the DNA of our own movie. But that’s just us. Play Sigur Rós yourself. In every sound and song, they will reach deep into your soul. Sigur Ros is some of the best filmmaking you’ll ever hear.”

And that positive spirit carried through to “We Bought A Zoo” as Crowe explained at TCA, “It was a music-filled experience. Matt Damon loves Sigur Ros. We played some of the music on his first day on set, and he said, ‘Keep it coming man, keep it coming.’”

Of course, any other details are unavailable and it’s unknown if Jónsi is creating new music, will be using some cuts from his solo album “Go” or perhaps will dip into the music he has created with his other side project, Riceboy Sleeps. Also unknown is if he’ll stand as the film’s lone voice or if Crowe will be adding any others to the mix.

Regardless, it’s a great twist to the upcoming film, adding an interesting dimension to the domestic drama. Based on the memoir by Benjamin Mee, with a script from “The Devil Wears Prada” writer Aline Brosh McKenna, the story follows Mee (Matt Damon), a single father who attempts to fulfill his late wife’s wish of moving their family to the titular animal sanctuary. Scarlett Johansson, Thomas Haden Church, Elle Fanning and more co-star. There is definitely a big risk going with Jónsi whose voice in the right mix is deeply moving and in other’s can be somewhat treacly and perhaps over the top. But Crowe has proven himself to be a master of music and song placement, so we’ll definitely give him a huge benefit of the doubt.

“We Bought a Zoo” opens on December 23rd.

-Joey's Two Cents: Works for me...thoughts?

Roman Polanski's film Carnage will open the New York Film Festival

Deadline has the story:

Roman Polanski's Carnage will make its North American premiere Sept. 30 as the opening-night film of the 49th New York Film Festival, the event that kicked off The Social Network's big awards-season run last year. The film, starring Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz and John C. Reilly, is an adaptation of Yasmina Reza's Broadway smash God of Carnage, which won the Tony in 2009 at best play -- making its New York return a kind of fitting homecoming. The plot revolves around the events of an evening when two Brooklyn couples are brought together after their children are involved in a playground fight. Said Ben Said produced the film; Sony Pictures Classics is releasing it. Of course, it's a safe bet that the festival, which runs Sept. 30-Oct. 16, won't have the director of its kickoff film walking the red carpet, as Polanski remains a fugitive in the U.S. after fleeing sentencing following a 1977 conviction for unlawful sex with a minor.

-Joey's Two Cents: I'm always on the verge of going to the fest, and this might be the year. This particular film could be really interesting...thoughts?

Kathryn Bigelow’s ‘Kill Bin Laden’ film will come out on October 12, 2012!

The Playlist has the story:

Continuing to be developed well under the radar, almost to the point where we were wondering if it was still happening, Kathryn Bigelow‘s “The Hurt Locker” followup, her currently untitled Seal Team 6 flick now has a firm release date: October 12, 2012—right in the heart of awards season.

Since late last year, Bigelow and writer Mark Boal have been hard at work on the black ops thriller, the details of which, at the time, were being kept under wraps but was rumored to be about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. Those rumors turned out be true but when the Al Qaeda leader was suddenly killed the spring, it was reported that Boal a former investigative reporter, shifted his research and resources and was already rewriting with a section covering the 40 minute firefight that resulted in Bin Laden’s death. Even more, Aussie actor Joel Edgerton was said to be a frontrunner for the untitled film—also referred to as “Kill Bin Laden”—and despite Columbia picking up the rights to the film, nothing has been heard on casting since. And considering Edgerton will be busy on Baz Luhrmann‘s “The Great Gatsby” this fall, we’d guess he’s no longer in the running.

Of course, any other details are being sealed (ha!) for now. But with a release date now looming just over a year away, updates should begin to trickle out soon. There is no other film slated for that weekend yet, but the film is now poised to be a major player on the fall festival circuit next year (you can bet Venice and TIFF folks are making calls now) and will be a strong contender to get Bigelow back on the podium in the Kodak Theater.

-Joey's Two Cents: I'm eager to see them back at work, as The Hurt Locker remains a modern day war classic to me...thoughts?

The Ides of March gets a Trailer!

Could this be one of the bigger Oscar players this year? Check this out and see for yourself:

-Joey's Two Cents: It looks incredible to me, but it's still early...thoughts?

Nicolas Cage and Charlie Kaufman to re-team?

The Hollywood Reporter tells all:

Charlie Kaufman and Nicolas Cage, who collaborated on the Spike Jonze-directed Adaptation in 2002, are looking to team again on a new project, Frank or Francis, that Kaufman will write and direct.

Jack Black and Steve Carell are also attached to the project, which is currently looking for financing. It has been described as a Hollywood satire in which Frank, a film director, finds himself dealing with an online blogger, Francis, out to attack his work.

No word yet on who will take on which role.

Anthony Bregman is producing through his Likely Story, which also produced 2008’s Synecdoche, New York, which marked writer Kaufman’s directorial debut.

WME reps Kaufman, Black and Carell, who is also repped by Media Four, while CAA reps Cage.

Moneyball gets an elegant Poster

Thoughts?

Behold the Red Band Trailer for Drive!

Take a look:

More Drive (2011) Videos

-Joey's Two Cents: I'm very excited for this one...thoughts?

Twilight panel kicks off Comic-Con!

The Hollywood Reporter spills the beans (or should I say, BLOOD?! Hardy-har-har…):

The honeymoon sequence from The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 1 had the audience shrieking at the movie’s presentation at Comic-Con Wednesday.

The Hollywood Reporter was on the scene for the panel, which is the first of what will be a cavalcade of movie presentations in San Diego Convention Center’s cavernous Hall H as part of Comic-Con, saw Kristen Stewart, Rob Pattinson, Taylor Lautner and director Bill Condon take the stage.

Two scenes plus a trailer were shown but the sequence featuring newlyweds Bella and Edward (Stewart and Pattinson) on their honeymoon, with Bella preparing for the big night, garnered breathless screams after almost every line.

Pattinson revealed that during most of the honeymoon sequence, which was shot in Brazil, the production filmed through monsoon-like rains, which made getting into the mood challenging.

“It (felt) like having a honeymoon in England, playing board games instead of making love on the beach,” he said.

Condon, coming on as director of the series for the first time, said he was lucky as a director since Breaking Dawn “is all third act,” which he appreciated.

He also said he started out in horror movies and liked returning to his roots. “Breaking Dawn turns into a horror movie,” he said.

The audience Q&A provided its share of laughs. One fan addressed Pattinson by saying, “I think I speak for all of us when I say mnyum, mnuyum, mnyum.” (Shrieks ensued.) One young lady asked a question on behalf of her mom while one young girl naively asked Pattinson if he likes “having babies with Bella.”

Halfway through the panel Elizabeth Reaser, Nikki Reed and Ashley Green joined the group, and provided some revealing moments when asked what will the end of the series mean to the actors.

Reed was [sic] said she will miss the company but said “I would love to say we’ll have dinner every week but I don’t think so -- some will keep in touch, some won’t.”

“For the next two years we should be ok,” said Greene. We’ll have premieres and conventions. But eventually it will be very sad when it all comes to an end.”

Shia LaBeouf to star in Robert Redford's upcoming political thriller!

From Variety:

Robert Redford and Shia LaBeouf are set to star in Voltage Pictures and Wildwood Enterprises' political action thriller The Company You Keep.

Redford will direct from a script by Lem Dobbs (The Limey), who adapted the novel by Neil Gordon.

Redford will play a former Weather Underground militant wanted by the FBI for 30 years who must go on the run when a young, ambitious reporter exposes his true identity. LaBeouf will play the budding journalist who's determined to make a name for himself.

Wildwood's Redford and Bill Holderman will produce along with Nicolas Chartier of Voltage, whose Craig J. Flores will exec produce.

"This is an edge-of-your-seat thriller about real Americans who stood for their beliefs, thinking they were patriots and defending their country's ideals against their government." said Chartier.

Could Harry Potter be a Best Picture contender?

Possibly, according to E! Online:

Harry Potter was very, very good to Hollywood this past weekend.

Will Hollywood finally be very, very good to Harry Potter at the Oscars?

"Hopefully, it will be given the attention it deserves," Warner Bros. exec Dan Fellman told us Sunday.

The first seven Potter films combined to earn nine nominations and zero wins. More than that, not one of the movies was seriously in contention for Best Picture.

But if the history-making opening weekend of the franchise's finale, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, isn't enough of a game-changer, then the film's critical reception may be.

Said Fellman: "The reviews are sensational."

True enough, HP8 has a 97 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the highest of any of the series' films, and higher than any of last year's Best Picture nominees, save Toy Story 3.

On the downside, the last film to burst out of the gate (nearly) as big and acclaimed as Deathly Hallows: Part 2 was The Dark Knight, which, of course, did not get nominated for Best Picture.

On the upside, Harry Potter is no Batman.

For one thing, post-Dark Knight, the Best Picture field was expanded to include 10 nominees (though since revised to include as many as 10 nominees).

For another thing, the ailing Hollywood of today owes the boy wizard more than the booming Hollywood of 2008 owed the Caped Crusader.

And then there's this: Per a tweet Sunday from Entertainment Weekly's Dave Karger, Academy members have seen Deathly Hallows: Part 2, "and loved it."

So, yes, it's plausible, if not possible: Potter has one more trick up his sleeve.

Take a gander at the Trailer for Martin Scorsese's kid flick Hugo!

An Oscar contender? You be the judge:

-Joey's Two Cents: I'm a bit skeptical, but I like Scorsese trying something new...thoughts?

Here's the Trailer for This Must Be the Place

Behold:

-Joey's Two Cents: Well, that certainly appears to be...something. Thoughts?

Behold the trailer for Contagion!

Check it out:

The Adventures of Tintin gets a new Trailer!

Behold:

-Joey's Two Cents: It kind of has an Indiana Jones vibe to it, at least in my eyes...thoughts?

Could Andy Serkis be in the conversation for an acting nomination again?

The Hollywood Reporter seems to think so:

The Rise of the Planet of the Apes, with its photoreal visual effects, is sure to be a major factor in this year's visual effects Oscar race. The bigger awards question surrounding the film, which 20th Century Fox will release Aug. 5, is whether Andy Serkis, the actor who portrays the ape Caesar, will be considered a contender for an acting nomination.

That honor eluded him ten years ago when he played the tragic creature Gollum in The Lord of the Rings. That role, however, did launch an ongoing Hollywood debate about how much an actor contributes to CG characters who are created through performance capture.

WETA Digital, the Wellington, N.Z.-based VFX company behind both Rings and Apes, has always maintained that the actor drives the performance of its CG creations. "Performance capture (is) really (designed) to give you the actors' moment--the spontaneity, the thought, the insight that really comes from an actor who really truly understands his role," says WETA's four-time Oscar winning VFX supervisor Joe Letteri.

Over the years, understanding of the technique has grown and many filmmakers have spoken out on that position, including James Cameron, who used performance capture and worked with WETA to realize Avatar.

To bolster its position, on Thursday, WETA held a preview and discussion about Apes at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena at which director Rupert Wyatt treated the audience to some exclusive clips of his upcoming film. He and Letteri also discussed the innovative visual effects. And Serkis -- who was in the U.K. but participated in the discussion via Skype -- offered the actor's perspective.

Wyatt -- who calls Serkis the "Charlie Chaplin of our time" -- explained that his film is essentially a reboot, an original story, that takes place before the events depicted in 1968's The Planet of the Apes. "We are working our way toward the original film ... but our film is set in 2011," he said.

The first clip he introduced showed Caesar's' agitated mother, who, echoing the original film, is referred to as "bright eyes." She has been pulled from the jungle to be used in a research project looking for a cure for Alzheimer's.

In the second clip, it is revealed that her aggression was an effort to protect her baby, which scientist Will Rodman, played by James Franco, takes home to nurture. The audience then saw a growing Caesar, who gets aggressive to protect Will's father, portrayed by John Lithgow, who is showing signs of Alzheimer's himself.

Wyatt next introduced a clip where Caesar is separated from his human family and placed in an oppressive facility with other apes.

Another sequence showed how Caesar continues to develop in his new environment. "He uses his intelligence and his wits to rise through the ranks and become the alpha," Wyatt explained. "He turns the tables not only on them, but also on us."

In those scenes, Serkis' performance shows a range of emotions -- joy, love, vulnerability, aggression and terror. Explained Serkis, "This is an ape who has been brought up with human beings. He believes he is loved; he is an innocent. Then he has a moment of self-awareness when he realizes he is a freak and then is thrown into a hard-core prison and then leads a revolution."

There were no real apes used in making Rise of the Planet of the Apes. The director relied completely on the skills of WETA -- whose work has earned Oscars for The Lord of the Rings trilogy, King Kongand Avatar -- to create the photoreal cast that "has a soul when you look into their eyes."

To get that look, the filmmakers did extensive research, which included time spent at the Wellington Zoo. Letteri showed video of apes, including one that Wyatt said was "Andy's inspiration for Caesar."

"There's the look, the physicality -- bones, muscle, tissue, fur," Letteri said. "In a way, that is just the starting point, what we are really after is the performance."

For Apes, the performance capture method used was an extension of WETA's techniques that were employed in Avatar. For Cameron's film -- where the avatars were supposed to be 10 ft. tall -- the actors worked on a motion capture stage, the area where the performance capture takes place, which is covered by motion capture cameras.

Letteri explained that since the apes were human in size, "it made sense to put them in the scene." So Serkis performed on the regular live-action sets with the other actors, including Franco, Lithgow andFreida Pinto.

"It's no different than live action acting," Serkis added. "And I never considered (performance capture) anything else but live action acting. You are reacting and acting with other people."

-Joey's Two Cents: I think he deserved to be in the conversation for King Kong, so I suppose this is another opportunity...thoughts?

Daniel Craig is impressed with David Fincher...

...especially how he's handled the violence in their upcoming remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Collider has the story:

Daniel Craig hasn’t been seen in theaters since 2008′s Defiance but he’ll have four films coming to us this year. In a few weeks we’ll see him in Cowboys & Aliens, he’s got the horror flick Dream House in September, he did motion capture for Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, and he wraps up the year with David Fincher’s adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. He can expect plenty of questions about Bond 23 and we can expect that he’ll answer almost none of them. However, he is willing to talk Dragon Tattoo in an awkwardly written quasi-interview with Esquire.

Hit the jump to read what Craig had to say about the adult-nature of the film and how Fincher is handling the violence in the story. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo opens December 21st.

Here’s what Craig had to say about how The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is the increasingly rare drama for adults:

“It’s as adult as you can possibly make it. This is adult drama. I grew up, as we fucking all did, watching The Godfather and that, movies that were made for adults. And this is a $100 million R-rated movie. Nobody makes those anymore. And Fincher, he’s not holding back. They’ve given him free rein. He showed me some scenes recently, and my hand was over my mouth, going, ‘Are you fucking serious?’”

And why did Craig find those scenes so shocking?

“[It's] not that he simply showed me footage that was horribly graphic. It was stuff that was happening, or had happened. And somehow you don’t see it… There’s more than one way to sense violence. Much more powerful ways than seeing it step-by-step.”

In the Swedish adaptation, director Niels Arden Oplev didn’t shy away from the brutality, but it almost felt fetishistic. [Spoiler Alert] The overall mystery storyline of solving a decades-old disappearance was overshadowed by the rape of Lisbeth Salander by her parole officer and her violent retribution. That exchange happens in the first act of the story and it makes the mystery storyline feel small. I have faith that Fincher can reestablish the balance, but the greater problem may lie in the flaws of Steig Larsson’s original novel.

-Joey's Two Cents: As long as the screenplay is an improvement over the original's, we could be looking at a potentially excellent film...thoughts?

Behold the International Teaser Trailer for The Iron Lady

Here you go:

-Joey's Two Cents: It's got almost nothing to go on, but it's our first real look at the film, so I'll take it...thoughts?

Martin Scorsese's upcoming film gets another title change?

Yes, it's an even shorter name than before too. Here's the story from indieWIRE:

It seems the prevailing sentiment in Hollywood right now is that shorter is better. “John Carter of Mars” recently became just “John Carter” and now Martin Scorsese‘s “Hugo Cabret” is simply “Hugo.” Variety’s Jeff Sneider has confirmed the title adjustment which frankly leaves us scratching our head a bit.

You would think that the people behind the film would want to make sure audiences knew the connection between the movie and Brian Selznick‘s best-selling children’s historical fiction book “The Invention of Hugo Cabret” that it is based on. Now it just sounds like that dude from “Lost” got his own movie. But there will be enough star power to get asses in the seats. Led by Asa Butterfield and Chloë Moretz, with a cast including Sacha Baron Cohen, Ben Kingsley, Christopher Lee, Emily Mortimer, Jude Law, Michael Stuhlbarg, Emily Mortimer, Ray Winstone, Frances de la Tour and Richard Griffiths, the 1931-set film follows the story of the eponymous orphan boy living a secret life in the walls of a Paris train station. When Hugo encounters a broken machine, an eccentric girl, and the cold, reserved man who runs the toy shop, he is caught up in a magical, mysterious adventure that could put all of his secrets in jeopardy.

A trailer for the film has recently been submitted for classification and it won’t be a chintzy teaser—it runs over two minutes long—and we’d wager we’ll be seeing it in the very immediate future. “Hugo” marks Scorsese’s first venture into 3D filmmaking as well as directing a film aimed squarely at families so we’re excited to see where the part-time cinema historian draws his influences from for this one. “Hugo” hits theaters on November 23rd.

-Joey's Two Cents: I think "The Invention of Hugo Cabret" had a nice ring to it, but that's just me...thoughts?