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The new Iron Man 2 trailer debuted on Sunday March 7th, the night of the Oscars. The trailer looks great. We see in this trailer Don Cheadle actually being a second Iron Man along side Tony Stark. The 2 of them take on a robot army built by the bad guys, which appear to be Sam Rockwell in addition to Mickey Rourke.

Check it out here.

Also, as a bonus, for those that missed it, Jimmy Kimmel had a hilarious skit Sunday night after the Oscars. The skit is called the “Handsome Men’s Club.” Check out the video below.

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Would a studio rather have an Oscar winning movie or a big blockbuster?  That seems to be a big question out of Hollywood studio execs and although it may seem that studios would want the best quality movie possible, the answer is they don’t care.  Cause like anything else, it’s all about money, and big blockbusters are big money.  Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen just won the 2009 Razzie award for Worst Movie of the Year.  Well it also was one of the top money making movies of the year, so as bad as it was, it made a ton of money, and already a 3D third movie is in talks.

But recently a ton of big blockbusters have been very bad.  Sure they have crazy CGI technology and may be entertaining, but they are terrible.  It seems the new trend over the past few years is there is always a few movies each year that goes under the radar, then suddenly blows up around Oscar time and beats out some big time movies.  Crash (2005), Slumdog Millionaire (2009), and now The Hurt Locker (2010) are three small budget movies that have won the Oscar for Best Picture recently.  Event No Country For Old Men (2008) could even be considered a smaller budget movie as well.

In a time when the economy is in a recession, paying millions for big name actors and big names stunts may not be the best way for a studio to get the biggest ROI out of their product.  It may be better for studios to produce smaller budget films but those of better quality and push those.  It won’t require the big money to make, clearly it doesn’t need the big names to draw fans in, and when the positive press gains, the studio will clearly have a great money making movie, and a quality movie on top of it.  They will increase DVD/online sales, TV rights, and additional positive press for the studios.  I hope studios can learn from these smaller movies like The Hurt Locker and can produce better movies for movie fans in the future.

Would you like to see studios produce more small budget but quality movies?

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The Oscars have come and gone and I can’t believe I spent about 4 hours (including the red carpet preview) watching the Oscars last night.  Wow…do I really need to find something to do on Sunday nights.  I was very happy with the winners announced and was glad to see The Hurt Locker come out on top with 6 awards.

Here are some brief observations of the Oscars.

-How the hell did they come to the decision to have Kathy Ireland do the red carpet interviews?  I feel like the guy in charge must have had a crush on her back in her Necessary Roughness model days and now this gave him the chance to meet her in person.  She is more irrelevant than pogs and was so incredibly fake and that necklace was just not necessary it was laughable.

-The hosts were very good.  You can’t go wrong with pairing Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin.  They worked off of each other very well, kept it simple and the jokes were basic.  Some fell short on me since I’m not an LA person, but like the job they did and too bad as the show went on we saw less and less of them.

-Neil Patrick Harris did a good job with the preopening opening to the Oscars and it seemed like that was an audition to see if he could host the awards next year.  I’m putting my money down now that he will be looked at and possibly get it next year, I was very impressed with him.

-Star Jones had the most awkward red carpet interview with George Clooney.  She basically hit on him and acted like a 13 yr old girl whose locker was filled with Clooney pictures, right in front of his girlfriend/wife person.  If she would have punched her, it would have been youtube gold.

-Was it me or was George Clooney pissed off the entire night?  He’s usually a huge fun goofball and was on the red carpet, but during the show just seemed real pissed off.  Maybe that’s just his face, or maybe he hates the camera on him.  Maybe I missed a joke that was at his expense but it really seemed like every time the camera was on him he was so pissed off.

-Why did they waste time with dancers as they nominated the Best Score category?  I give the dancers credit, they were amazingly talented and it broke my back just looking at them, but what was the point.  The show was running long enough as it was and it was just a pointless waste of time.

-They didn’t show movie clips when presenting Best Cinematography.  Isn’t the whole point of that category to visually show how good the cinematography was?  I consider that a more important category than some others and it got no credit.  Just weird.

-What happened to Farrah Fawcet and Bea Arthur on the memorandum video montage?  Somebody messed up big time on that one.

-Tyler Perry’s little speech as he gave the Best Editing category made no sense.  He kept talking about the camera angles and how different shots could look and different angles would help make the scene look differently, except that doesn’t have to deal with editing, that has to deal with directing.  It just didn’t make any sense and he wasn’t funny like his movies.

These are just a few observations I had, what were some of yours?

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Tim Burton’s trippy live-action take on Lewis Carroll’s classic novels, Alice in Wonderland, premiered at #1 with a record-breaking $116.3 million domestic, $210.3 million worldwide gross. In addition to far surpassing director Burton’s previous weekend all-time grosser, 2005’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Wonderland became the biggest opening of all time for a non-sequel movie in the States. Converted to 3D after being filmed in 2D, the movie made 70% of its killings from the red-and-blue glasses. Showing on 3,728 screens, Friday’s intake was a whopping $41 million. Nowhere near the $35 million three-day overall I was predicting. Wonderland is over halfway to making back the $200 million budget Disney gave Burton to make it. However this unsettled many critics (including yours truly) as well. The majority claimed the 2010 imagining boosted style over substance.

In a land outside of your local Alice screenings, Antoine Fuqua’s (Training Day) latest Brooklyn’s Finest, first debuting at the Sundance Film Festival over a year ago, opened to mostly dismissal reviews, earning a 36% on Rotten Tomatoes. The gritty cop drama, following the lives of three New York police officers during a week-long drug affair, started off with $13.5 million. The lowest debut for a Fuqua picture, Brooklyn’s Finest may have only been placed in a bad weekend. I mean between a coked-up cop thriller and a coked-up Disney movie, which would you pick to see?

Shutter Island dropped two spots and 41.3% to third place, bringing in another $13.3 million. Martin Scorsese’s mind-bender has a total of $95.8 million in three weeks. Kevin Smith’s Cop Out, a movie no one I know has seen yet has still managed to nab a spot in the top five two weekends in a row, grossed $9.1 million, falling 49.8% from last Sunday’s tally. James Cameron’s Avatar closes us out with $7.7 million at #5, a domestic haul of $720.2 million in 12 weeks.

Out of the top five-

• Oscar-nominated animated feature The Secret of Kells debuted with $40,000 on one screen.

Here are the box office results according to studio estimates Sunday-

1. 1. Alice in Wonderland (2010)…$116.3 million
2. 2. Brooklyn’s Finest…$13.5 million
3. 3. Shutter Island…$13.3 million
4. 4. Cop Out…$9.1 million
5. 5. Avatar…$7.7 million
6. 6. The Crazies (2010)…$7 million
7. 7. Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief…$5.1 million
8. 8. Valentine’s Day…$4.3 million
9. 9. Crazy Heart…$3.4 million
10. 10. Dear John…$2.9 million

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Earlier today the 2009 Razzie Award Winners were announced. Sandra Bullock took home the top, or should I say worst, acting prize of the night by winning Worst Actress of the year for “All About Steve.”

Never has the same actress won the Razzie and Oscar in the same year. Bullock will be at the Oscars tonight and is the front runner for Best Actress. Her portrayal as Leigh-Ann Toughy in “The Blind Side” was one heck of a performance and is likely to get her Oscar gold. I guess all I can say is, Bullock is fairly dynamic if she can put on the best and worst acting performances. Could she make history?

If somebody else has something to say about it, it might be Gabby Sidibe in Precious.

Anyways, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen won for Worst Picture and the Jonas Brothers collectively won Worst Actor for the Jonas Brothers Movie.

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If I could grade a director on effort alone, Tim Burton would have gotten a much higher rating from me on this. Alice in Wonderland, the 2010 imagining of Lewis Carroll’s novels, is brimming with so much excess everything at times it’s uncomfortable to watch.
Alice is 19-years-old, thirteen years after she first fell down the rabbit hole as a little kid. Summoned by the original film’s gang-bang cast of character, Alice must defeat the evil Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter, hilariously imperialistic) from her reign over the magical kingdom.
Oddly enough, it’s the little things that make the movie feel epic. Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter was an expected but triumphant role for Burton’s go-to guy, and newcomer Mia Wasikowska in the title role is top-notch. However way too many characters are introduced in the movie’s 90-minute time frame, and are left wandering around with nothing at all to do. That’s not the Burton I know; the adaptation-happy Burton never sacrifices a good story to include all of the original’s characters. Look how well he made Sweeney Todd and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory!
Burton reportedly had a $100 million budget for his take on Wonderland. (Or as this movie stupidly calls it “Underland”, blaming a seven-year-old’s misunderstanding of the world’s original name.) He goes nothing short of crazy with that amount of money, painting every aspect with gross amounts of color and random zany paraphernalia. All of it wildly unnecessary.
Leading to a conclusion that reminded me of something out of Chronicles of Narnia, Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is no threat to the original. Yet I still couldn’t bring myself to hate it. It’s not one of Burton’s better works, although the great acting and mesmerizing supporting players we’ve come to love make it that much easier to digest.

3/5 stars.

Watch my full review of Alice in Wonderland here!

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The Jersey Shore 15 minutes of fame is still going strong and most likely will continue with parodies like this.  The Jersey Shore gang has somehow become the king of the Parody and has been mocking the movies of the past year for months now.  Their latest is an installment of the Oscar Nominated The Hurt Locker.  This movie which recently became controversial after it was found that one of the Producers of the movie emailed the Academy pitching for The Hurt Locker to win over Avatar which is a big no-no.  Forget all that for now, now it’s time to just laugh.

Jersey Shore Mocks The Hurt Locker

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“What are you, some kind of a prophet or something?” I honestly believe that this movie is. A Prophet (or if you want to get really foreign on me, “Un prophete”) is an immaculate gangster conquest. The first in-theater film of 2010 I can sincerely say to rush out the door and see as soon as you possibly can.
A Prophet is an accidental mafia portrayal through the eyes of Malik, an Arab man sent to a French prison where he works as drug runner for a Corsican boss. It’s only later in this late Christmas present where things get interesting. Malik soon faces summons to assassinate, to plot against the dangerous men who got him involved in this business in the first place, and even facing the fact of obliviously coming into his own. It’s as painful as it is a blast following Malik, played by an amazing Tahar Rahim, as his perception of life clears from already-cloudy to murky, though the film makes it seem he’s found a dynasty of sunlight.
A perfect bandit flick among the likes of Goodfellas, and I say this with the utmost respect. I’ve never before compared any movie to Scorsese’s kingpin tycoon, however A Prophet feels so completely epic (and clocking in at around two-and-a-half hours you could see why I feel this way) its meaning can be broken down into anything from antiquity lessons to personal emotional casts.
Where director Jacques Audiard gets it right is by turning A Prophet not into a boring by-the-book film version of a history seminar but a no-holds-barred thespian entourage that will leave you feeling renewed.
Whenever a character overcomes a certain obstacle you as an experienced moviegoer know that something, someone, is always above watching over them, waiting to strike. And the movie takes past crime dramas into consideration and bottles its knowledge up to unleash a fiery monster of gorgeous cinematography, crazed directing, and wonderful acting.
A Prophet is an amazing look into prison gangs and an invested youngster’s rise to the top of a band of thieves with dark hidden secrets too big for a single movie to handle. Yet A Prophet is nearly able to, and still come out as if nothing had ever happened. Because maybe nothing really did.

Five out of five stars.

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We are finally here. This Sunday night, March 7th, is the big night: Oscar Night. I for one am extremely excited for the Oscars.  I think it’s the best of the entertainment award shows probably due to the magnitude of what is on the line.  The past couple years might have been a little dull in terms of the show itself, but I am extremely excited nonetheless. I guess the media does a good job at promoting the show.

The Oscar’s is where history is made and trivia questions are created. My friends and I often try to list backwards the past 10 best actors, 10 best pictures etc. You guys know what I mean.  We all have those great trivia questions to see who knows the most useless movie knowledge. For example, can you name the 5 best picture films since 1985 that start with the word “The.” No cheating.

Anyways, this year we have some interesting battles. The first, the battle of the ex’s. Kathryn vs Cameron – former husband and wife go head-to-head for best director. Cameron got the Globe but the Bigelow got the DGA. What will the Academy have to say?

The other big matchup involves the same movies. The Hurt Locker takes on Avatar as a real-life war movie takes on a fantasy war movie. Again, both movies have received awards during the season, so it is still a toss up. I think the Academy will lean towards the Hurt Locker here, but we shall see.

Then we have plenty of locks. Waltz is a lock for Best Supporting Actor for Inglorious, Bridges is a lock for Best Actor for Crazy Heart, Mo’Nique seems to be  a heavy favorite for Best Supporting Actress, and Bullock is a lock for Best Actress. Also, UP is a complete lock for Best Animated Feature.

The media build up is all for this Sunday night. The big show is upon us. It should be one hell of a night.

Will you be watching this Sunday?

Keep Bantering

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Netflix, the leading movie rental service that has been expanding its online streaming video service even further, is trying to take things mobile now.  There have been rumors in the past about Netflix looking into creating an iphone app.  Well now those rumors just got a little bit juicier.  Netflix has been asking customers about their thoughts on a Netflix iphone app and if they would use it to watch movies and television shows on it using Wifi.  ATT would never allow Netflix to stream over the 3G network with all the issues that currently exist, but Wifi can be found in houses, public stores, parks, buses and more and could easily be something very beneficial to users.

Here’s the full text of what’s being asked in the survey:

“Imagine that Netflix offers its subscribers the ability to instantly watch movies & TV episodes on their iPhone. The selection availability to instantly watch includes some new releases, lots of classics and TV episodes. There are no advertisements or trailers, and movies start in as little as 30 seconds. You can fast-forward, rewind, and pause or watch again. The movies & TV episodes you instantly watch are included in your Netflix membership for no additional fee.

Whenever you want to instantly watch content on your iPhone, your iPhone must be connected to a Wi-Fi network (such as one you might have at home or at work, or in public places like coffee shops, book stores, hotels, airports, etc.)

If this functionality were available, how likely would you or someone in your household be to instantly watch movies & TV episodes on your iPhone via a Wi-Fi network?”

This would be incredible for Neflix and iphone users alike.  Before my iphone was stolen over the summer, this was one app I was specifically asking for.  I have taken the bus several times from DC-NY and back and there is Wifi on the bus.  Granted it’s probably not strong enough to play a full movie streaming, but the fact that there is that chance would have been amazing.  I bet there are others in similar situations, or maybe waiting at an airport that has free Wifi or just sitting in a park with Wifi that easily would take advantage of this.Very smart move on Netflix to take to the mobile mania that is existing.  I’m glad to see this is one rumor that is slowly coming true.  Now the question is will Apple allow Netflix to have an app.  Allowing them to do so will invade their itunes space and hurt sales for Apple most likely.  This will be interesting as things pick up and we can find more news about it.

What do you think of being able to stream movies and TV shows on a Netflix iphone App?