Let’s put this right out front: nobody’s looking forward to The Dark Knight Rises more than we are. It led off our list of 2012′s most anticipated movies; we sing the praises of every new teaser they put out in our weekly “Trailer Park” roundups. This is a movie we’re really, really looking forward to. But you have to draw a line somewhere, and we think this might be it.
According to Variety, tickets are now available for the first, midnight IMAX screenings of The Dark Knight Rises — that’s right, six full months in advance. So if you’re one hundred percent certain that you won’t have anywhere to be at 12:01am on the night of Thursday, July 19th, you can hop on over to Fandango (here’s the link for my fellow New Yorkers — that IMAX screen at the AMC Loews Lincoln Square 13 is a peach), plop down your $20, and have yourself a ticket right now. You might wanna choose the “print at kiosk” option, though, because the chances of misplacing the “print at home” ticket within the next six months are pretty high. Borderline astronomical, we’d say.
Oh wait, you can’t. The midnight screening six months from now is already sold out.
So, seriously, how out of control is the Hollywood Hype Machine these days?
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If you’ve been curious how Joss Whedon was going to juggle all of the superheroes in The Avengers without making a narrative mess of things or accidentally turning the Marvel universe on its head, then you’ll be glad to hear that he planned ahead. “I set out with a very simple problem: There is no reason for these people to be in the same movie,” he explains to Entertainment Weekly. “So that’s what my movie has to be about. So much of the movie takes place from Steve Rogers’ perspective, since he’s the guy who just woke up and sees this weird ass world. Everyone else has been living in it.”
Interesting. Is it wrong that we’d rather see the film from Tony Stark’s point of view? Sure, Robert Downey Jr. can’t help but steal every scene that he’s in, but vanilla old Captain America (as played by Chris Evans) has to be the dullest member of the team. We get the idea of using him as a straight man, but wonder if he’s got the chops to carry a film when he’ll be sharing the screen with charismatic showboats like Downey Jr. and Samuel L. Jackson. [via Collider]
In an April 1987 essay for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction about the then-hot topic of “colorization” (the repugnant trend of slapping computer-generated color over black and white classics, ostensibly to render them watchable to a younger generation that disliked b&w), science fiction author Harlan Ellison wrote of the process, “We don’t really need it… It’s like going to see a club act in which a whistling dog performs ‘The Stars and Stripes Forever.’ Once, it’s interesting; more than once it’s merely a curiosity. That has very little, if anything, to do with art. And pandering to the corrupted taste of a generation of kids for whom movies are nothing more than a prelude to getting laid is loathsome in every way.”
Can we all agree that we’ve reached that point on the 3-D fad? Three new 3-D movies opened last weekend (two remakes and a sequel, for what it’s worth), and all three tanked at the box office. Spy Kids: All the Time in the World opened in third with $12 million, Conan the Barbarian came in fourth with $10 million, while Fright Night came in sixth (behind the fourth week of The Smurfs!) with just under $8 million. The top spot went to The Help; in second place was Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a well-performing summer tent-pole movie that is continuing to bring in audiences with solid word-of-mouth; it’s a genuinely good movie, people are telling each other, with interesting characters and a script that does not appear to have been written by seven-year-olds. You know what else ROTPOTA has going for it? It’s not in 3-D.
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Thanks to the success of the Spider-Man and X-Men film franchises, and more recently, the Captain America movie, you don’t need to be a comic book geek to appreciate the beauty of these minimalist Marvel posters by Marko Manev — but it definitely doesn’t hurt. Click through for his understated odes to some of our favorite superheroes and villains in the Marvel Universe, and let us know in the comments which ones you’d like to hang on your apartment’s walls.
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Today at Flavorpill, we met several other countries’ answers to Captain America — including Canada’s Major Mapleleaf and Japan’s Silver Samurai. We liked this clever redesign of Mad Men’s opening titles by illustrator Paul Rogers. We laughed out loud over some of the zingers in Suri’s Burn Book. We examined a librarian’s worth around the world. We decided that some of the vintage menus in the New York Public Library’s collection could easily double as works of art. We thought that Linda Hamilton might make a better date to the ball than Betty White — at least, if you want to dance the night away. We crushed on Stephen Colbert even harder after watching him break character in this clip for the “It Gets Better” project. We understood why the $10 million intro sequence to Zack Snyder’s Superman Returns got left on the cutting room floor. We found this timelapse video of the New York Times homepage oddly fascinating. And finally, we made ourselves hungry by reading about the history behind the pizza box. Guess what we’re having for dinner now?
When we first received these gorgeous, propaganda-style posters for this week’s Captain America: The First Avenger, commissioned by the Alamo Drafthouse and Mondo, we hesitated to share them — merely out of the fear that a post dedicated to them would amount to little more than a commercial for a big new release. Then we got a look at the movie itself, and figured what the hell, we’ll shill for it — since it’s a work of pure pop bubblegum pleasure, one of the most unabashedly enjoyable pictures in many a moon. (If it is outgrossed by Transformers 3-D, then Americans have lost their will to be entertained.)
One of the many ways that the film sets itself apart from its lesser comic-book movie brethren is in its unique period setting and distinctive production design; as you’ve probably gathered from the trailers, the bulk of the narrative is set in 1942, with Captain America taking on Hitler (specifically, a rogue wing of the Nazi army). That’s why these promotional posters in WWII propaganda art style, as devised by artists Olly Moss, Tyler Stout, and Eric Tan, are so ingenious — they not only promote the picture, but encompass its jazzy aesthetic. Check them out after the jump.
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Welcome to “Trailer Park,” the Friday feature where we collect the week’s new trailers all in one place and do a little “judging a book by its cover,” ranking them from worst to best and taking our best guess at what they may be hiding. This week, we’ve got a whopping nine new trailers, featuring everyone from Jason Statham to Miss Piggy to Antonio Banderas (twice). Check ‘em out after the jump.
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Today at Flavorpill, we wished that we lived in Barcelona, where T-Mobile has installed a larger than life version of Angry Birds. We decided that Brain Pickings’ roundup of 10 books that will teach you (almost) everything you need to know about culture would make a good summer reading project. We watched the worlds of two great artists — Rodin and Beyonce — collide. We enjoyed looking at these photos of famous historical figures in unexpected places. We wondered how long it’s going to take for us to forget this slightly disturbing news about apples. We loved that Paramount decided to go the vintage route with this illustrated Captain America poster. We were happy to read that AMC has renewed The Killing for a second season. We celebrated some of New York City’s best old school jukeboxes. We wondered if reports that NBC’s Salt Lake City affiliate, KSL Television, won’t be airing The Playboy Club this fall is a sign of more drama to come. And finally, we found it impossible to choose a favorite from among these photos of famous people hanging out with their vinyl. It’s probably a tie between Sophia Loren and Brian Wilson.
If you really love movies, if you truly cherish them as an art form, then holy cow is the summer movie season depressing. For three months — or four, or six (Fast Five’s ad line was “Summer Begins April 29,” which goes to show that posters for Vin Diesel movies are no substitute for calendars) — we’re fed a steady diet of sequels, remakes, “reboots,” comic book adaptations, gross-out comedies, mindless blow-shit-up movies, sequels to remakes, sequels to reboots, sequels to comic book adaptations, sequels to gross-out comedies, and sequels to mindless blow-shit-up movies.
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What if Spider Man rode around Queens on a bicycle made out of webs? Or Superman took to the streets of Metropolis on a heat vision bike? Maryland-based mountain biking enthusiast and illustrator Mike Joos has created a hilarious series of affordable posters that re-imagines some of our favorite superheroes on two-wheelers. (Note: If you’re not a comic book geek, he also has bike-themed prints featuring Cookie Monster, Hans Solo, and George Washington in his Etsy shop.) Click through for our favorites.
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