Movie Make-out

Special effects legend Stan Winston passed away Sunday night, after a seven-year struggle with multiple myeloma. He was 62 years old. I’ll let Quint’s write-up over at AICN go into more depth about it, but Winston’s unparalleled make-up and creature effects work was showcased in Aliens, the Predator movies, all of the Terminator films (including the upcoming sequel), all of Jurassic Park movies, and — of course — his most recent blockbuster, Iron Man, among many, many others.

He was in a league of his own, and movies will never be the same again.

A trailer for the upcoming Matthew Broderick flick Diminished Capacity, is up thanks to Moviefone. It kind of looks like a feelgood indie comedy-by-numbers; I’m mostly posting this because Broderick plays a newspaper cartoonist and it’s partly set in Chicago, my town! But it’s pretty well shot and the cast is solid (Alan Alda, Virginia Madsen, Dylan Baker, and Louis C.K. co-star). Diminished Capacity hits theaters on July 4th.

An alternate trailer for Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight has been leaked onto the YouTubes, and so far Warner Bros. doesn’t seem to mind. It doesn’t contain very much new footage, and I think the official one is a bit stronger, but if you’re jonesing for this film like almost everyone I know, you’ll welcome the extra buzz.

Related post: Trailer Watch: The Dark Knight

A trailer for Mirrors, the new supernatural horror flick from the director of The Hills Have Eyes remake Alexandre Aja is up at Yahoo! Video. The film stars Kiefer Sutherland, Paula Patton, Cameron Boyce, Erica Gluck and Amy Smart, and focuses on an ex-cop who must protect his family from… something… that is using mirrors (and apparently other reflective surfaces) as gateways into their home. Boy, am I tired of this supernatural horror stuff, but it looks creepy enough, if this genre is your bag.

Spike Lee’s next joint, Miracle at St. Anna, an adaptation of has a trailer up at Yahoo! Movies. Adapted by James McBride from his own novel, the film stars Derek Luke, Michael Ealy, Laz Alonso, Omar Benson Miller, Matteo Sciabordi, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. It looks pretty exciting and beautifully shot, but the statue head should way a hell of a lot more than it looks like it does.

Aaand, finally, Green Street Hooligans director Lexi Alexander’s Punisher: War Zone has a teaser trailer up. I don’t like the “comic booky” primaries used throughout the trailer, and only a few shots gave me any impression that the action was going to be terribly interesting. Consider me not teased. For better or for worse, the film is out on December 5th.

No, I’m not talking about Ghost in the Shell: Innocence, but actually Ghost in the Shell “2.0″… It’s okay, say it with me: “Wha—?”

I’m a couple of days behind on this, I guess, but Variety’s Kaiju Shakedown blog reports that “Mamoru Oshii’s ground-breaking Ghost in the Shell is getting new visual effects, a new dub and a re-recorded soundtrack and will be re-released in [Japanese] theaters on July 12 under the title Ghost in the Shell 2.0.” The grainy-ass YouTube video doesn’t really look any different to me, but I’m guessing they’re updating the CGI elements of the movie, which do admittedly look a bit dated, and audio buffs will be happy about the new 6.1 surround sound audio. Unfortunately, there are no plans to send this to America, but I’m sure it’ll make it’s way onto the film’s next DVD edition.

Mamoru Oshi’s next meditative anime masterpiece, Sky Crawlers, hits Japanese theaters on August 2. No US release date has been set.

Related post: Ghost in the Shell gets the live-action treatment — in 3-D