Movie Make-out

Cinematical just pointed these YouTube videos (courtesy CultExtras), featuring Tim Burton interviewing the special effects legend Ray Harryhausen — the genius behind the 1949 Mighty Joe Young, Jason and the Argonauts, and Clash of the Titans among many, many others.

The interview is in three sections, running 25 minutes in all. The first is below, but I’ll let you head on over to Cinematical or YouTube to watch the other two parts:

The video effects test footage — not a proper teaser trailer — for Tron Legacy that screened at SDCC last year is now officially online, and you can watch it below, or in high definition at FlynnLives.com, and it looks terrific. (Sure, the people — save for old Jeff Bridges — are obviously computer generated, but in a world inside a computer, that works for me.)

Tron Legacy (which was previously known as TR2N or Tron 2.0 or… about a million other names) is targeting a winter 2010 release. Joseph Kosinski is directing the film, which stars Garrett Hedlund, Jeff Bridges, Bruce Boxleitner, Olivia Wilde and Beau Garrett. Here’s the logline (via Coming Soon):

Tron Legacy is a 3D high-tech adventure set in a digital world that’s unlike anything ever captured on the big screen. Sam Flynn (Hedlund), the tech-savvy 27-year-old son of Kevin Flynn (Bridges), looks into his father’s disappearance and finds himself pulled into the same world of fierce programs and gladiatorial games where his father has been living for 25 years. Along with Kevin’s loyal confidant (Wilde), father and son embark on a life-and-death journey across a visually-stunning cyber universe that has become far more advanced and exceedingly dangerous.

Okay, so this isn’t exactly movie-related, but I bet it’s the closest thing to seeing Batgirl, Catwoman, or Wonder Woman on celluloid for at least the next four years. (Almost certainly of the first two, but possibly not WW.) Prove me wrong, WB!

The video is a commercial for Palacio del Hierro, a Mexican department store. I’m guessing the use of these characters was licensed, but you never really know. (via Topless Robot)

It’s not very often that I write up a post based on comments, but I’m actually very glad that I did.

At the beginning of this year, I linked to a few entries about why all the poker bloggers seem to think that movies about playing poker suck, except for 1998’s Rounders—which starred Matt Damon as a wunderkind whose dream to make it to the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, Nevada gets sidetracked by a wisecracking Ed Norton and a bad beat at the hands of John Malkovich and is said by many to have been a major contributor to the rise of online poker.

In the comments to that entry, a reader named Gordon (who is not the same person as my dear editor) linked to a recent Matt Damon interview conducted by the folks at PokerListings.com as he was on the red carpet before the third annual “Ante up for Africa” charity poker tournament at the WSOP, where he, Ben Affleck, Mike Tyson, and others bumped elbows with bonafide professional poker players in an attempt to raise money for the victims of the violence in Darfur.

The “money quote” comes almost halfway through the video, where an unseen interviewer asks if there’s going to be a Rounders 2:

Damon: “I told [Brian] Koppleman and [David] Levien, the writers, that they should write it. They actually wrote Ocean’s 13 and we were sitting on the set one day and I said, “You guys wrote the wrong sequel; we should be in Costa Rica doing Rounders 2.

“I think that everybody would probably come back. The actors all had a really good time working together. I know Edward would want to do it. We had a blast working together. John Dahl, the director, I’m sure would like to do it. Maybe someday it’ll happen.”

However, and I am so ashamed for having missed this, not only has that script already been written, Damon and Norton might not have anything to do with it. Read more

Could you sum up the film in one line of its dialogue?
“I am standing directly beneath the enemy’s scrotum.”

—Topless Robot’s Rob Bricken (and my former managing editor at Anime Insider) tries to explain everything you never needed to know about Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen