First off, some bad news from the LA Times:

“I saw [‘Iron Man’ and ‘Iron Man 2’ director] Jon Favreau at the Scream Awards and we had a conversation. He said, ‘I hope things are working out for you because we’re writing stuff for you.’ Then all of a sudden last week I talked to my agents and manager and things aren’t really working that well.”

Jackson might just have been taking a public position that could lead to a bigger payday (it certainly wouldn’t be the first time a Hollywood star used an interview as a negotiating tactic) but he seemed especially sour on the whole the topic of working with Marvel …

“There was a huge kind of negotiation that broke down. I don’t know. Maybe I won’t be Nick Fury. Maybe somebody else will be Nick Fury or maybe Nick Fury won’t be in it. There seems to be an economic crisis in the Marvel Comics world so [they’re saying to me], ‘We’re not making that deal.'”

I called Marvel Comics and they gave me a statement that suggested that they still want to see Jackson wearing the eyepatch. “Marvel does not comment on active negotiations,” was the boilerplate response, but there was that emphasis on the word “active” in the voice of the spokesman who phoned me back.

I’m sure we will get some solid answers in the weeks or months to come on Jackson’s future in the Marvel universe, but for right now it looks like it is up in the air…

Now on to some lighter, sexier news, looks like Marvel may have found their real life BlackWidow, courtesy  of Variety:

With Mickey Rourke and Sam Rockwell negotiating to play key villains in “Iron Man 2,” Marvel Entertainment and director Jon Favreau are now looking for the right thesp to play femme fatale Black Widow, another nemesis for Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark.

Emily Blunt has emerged as the frontrunner to play the role of Natasha Romanoff in the “Iron Man” sequel. She’s a Soviet superspy who doubles as Black Widow, a beauty in a skintight black costume enhanced by high-tech weaponry.

Blunt, whose credits include “The Devil Wears Prada,” “The Jane Austen Book Club” and “Charlie Wilson’s War,” will get a profile boost when she stars with Benicio Del Toro in the Joe Johnston-directed “The Wolf Man” for Universal.

Marvel would not comment on the Black Widow casting. The Justin Theroux-scripted “Iron Man 2” will begin production in the spring for release by Paramount in summer 2010.

Patrick McGoohan, creator and star of the legendary surrealist TV series has died at age 80 acording to multiple news sources.  Despite being best remembered as Number Six from the Prisoner show, McGoohan’s carrer spanned from grenere work Danger Man and the Disney series Dr. Syn, Alias The Scarecrow. To more recent works like A Time to Kill and Braveheart (McGoohan has mostly retired from acting and directing).

AMC is in the works making a new Prisoner series that will be in the same spirit as the original, but taking the current climate of the day and applying it to the show. The original show actually stands up to today already, with cameras mounted on every home and street, it’s not unlike living in the UK today.

AMC’s website has episodes of the Prisoner show avalible for viewing in addition to lots of other info relating to the show. If you’ve never watched the series, I sugest you do so now.

Who the fuck is Franklyn?

Cinetic and it’s partners are offering some free documentaries. This is one I thought would be of great interest to the readers of Big Shiny Robot!

Why have I not heard of this before?

This looks great. Like, seriously, really cool.

If I had anything to do with The Spirit I would be embarrassed. Frank Miller has taken Will Eisner’s classic superhero, bent him over and raped him up the ass. The result of said violation left poor Denny Colt a amalgam of uninspired postmodern noir. The Spirit, in true Frank Miller style, is filled with forcibly “gritty” dialogue, hollow romance and boring action. Miller has had a knack lately for bastardizing other creator’s characters (just read the constantly late Batman and Robin All Stars); he has spun a tacky Sin City yarn with the likeness of Will Eisner’s heroes and femme fatales that lacks any emotion and semblance of humanity. Miller can’t decide if he wants the movie to be an episode of Loony Tunes or Pulp Fiction in a ridiculous brawl between The Spirit and The Octopus so bad, that it’s beyond the point of laughing at it’s sheer absurdity. Rather than honoring the source material Miller chooses to have The Spirit go toe to toe with his arch nemesis The Octopus, where in the comic they never fight, but the biggest difference is the overblown God plot the film poses. I don’t remember The Spirit being an invincible superhuman, just an ordinary cop who faked his own death. The film obviously shows that Miller is not yet ready to direct, favoring style over content; The Spirit’s classic blue suit and fedora, white shirt and red tie is switched to a black suit, red tie and pair of Converse All Stars (a la Dwight in Sin City). In a show of pure narcissism, The Spirit is filled with Miller references, when the title character mutters “looks like he gave himself the hard goodbye” in particular, showing that Miller isn’t looking to honor the late Will Eisner’s work, but pimp out his own. I found myself asking constantly, “what the fuck was he thinking?” and the answer is simple “he was thinking like Frank Miller.” That works when he’s creating his own world filled with delightfully tacky characters that romance crime, prostitution and excessive violence; unfortunately for us movie goers and comic book aficionados it just comes off as blunt, clumsy and plain out idiotic. Have another one Frank, lord knows you must have been drunk off your ass to make a move like this.

This asshole plans to fuck up a perfectly good modern classic.

Variety has reported that Stephen Norrington is gearing up to helm a remake of The Crow. The original version of the film was a wonderful adaption of James O’Barr’s masterpiece about obsession, loss, love and revenge, beautifully stylized and crafted by Alex Proyas. Norrington, whose credits include Blade (a franchise good only when Guillermo del Toro took over the sequel) and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a move that was so terrible it caused Sean Connery to go into retirement, plans to make a grittier, more real version of The Crow, in almost a documentary style. This remake is destined to be just as shitty as the other sequels in the Crow franchise, and sadly, unlike the last two flick in the series this most likely won’t go straight to DVD. Norrington was originally slated to remake 1981’s epic Clash of the Titans only to loose directing rights to Louis Leterrier. It looks like he hopped from one stone to the next. There’s a saying “if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it,” and sadly Hollywood doesn’t seem to get that. Add The Crow to the ranks of The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Escape from New York (thanks Brett Ratner, you fucking asshole).

It’s true that the year is coming to a close, and for some reason I thought that most the good movies had already came out. But I was wrong, it seems some studios have been holding out on us, and there is still good reason to visit the cinema several more times before 2009. Out of pure laziness I will submit only three reasons!!!!!!!

Reason #1 The Wrestler

Apparently I am out of the loop, because I didn’t even realize this was coming out this month, but now that I know it is, I’m really excited to see it. It’s getting really good reviews, and Darren Arronofsky has yet to disappoint…….me. Micky Rourke looks as if he is going to give his best performance ever based on the trailer!!!!!!!!!!!!! So do yourselves a favor and check this movie out. December 26th in Utah.

Reason #2 Valkyrie

I don’t think I have to go to deep into how good this movie is going to be. Mostly because another one of our robots reviewed it…………here’s a link!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It comes out on Christmas for all you losers that aren’t interested in spending the whole day worshiping Jesus.

Trailer!!!!!!

Reason #3 The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

I can’t say I know too much about this flick, but David Fincher so rarely disappoints me that I can definitely put it on my list before The Spirit. Which I am still going to see, but I am just really worried about.

So Benjamin Button is based on a book written by F. Scott Fitzgerald in the twenties, about a man that grows younger. Written for the screen by Eric Roth, the man that wrote the Insider, and Munich. I think this sounds like a good catch. trailer!!!!!!!

This also comes out on Christmas, along with the Spirit. So keep that day open, or at least don’t make any huge plans with your family that day, because it’s obviously all about movies.

I’m sorry for the really boring post. I hope there were enough exclamation points!!!!!!!

From SHH!

The UK tabloids strike again. One, who shall remain unnamed, is claiming that Eddie Murphy is playing The Riddler in the next Batman movie, that Shia LaBeouf will play Robin and that Rachel Weisz is up for the role of Catwoman. Not only that, but the tabloid says the movie will come out in 2010, and that the movie “will end on a cliffhanger over whether Batman survives a blast at Wayne Towers.”

All of the above is, of course, not true. Moving on…

This was followed up by a less-than-surprising rebuttle from Alan Horn that, of course, debunked all of these… I guess “debunked” for anyone dumb enough to believe them:

From collider.com:

“We’ve been talking to Chris Nolan and what we have to do is get him in the right place and have him tell us what he thinks the notion might be for a great story, but Chris did a great job and we’d love to have him come back and do another one.”

As far as the timing of the project, he went onto say: “The story is everything and we are very respectful of Chris. We have a wonderful relationship with him and we are going to be respectful of his timing and we want to get it right. Also, I think the fans expect that – they want us to make a terrific movie – we have to give them another great movie.”

Sigh… the things people pull out of their asses…

UPDATE: I believe these are the folks that originally reported this “story”.

It will come as no surprise to many of you that this is one of the films I have been most looking forward to this year.  I was crushed when they pushed the date to next year and elated when they pulled it back to 2008.  Now I’m doubly elated that I was able to catch a sneak preview of the film last night.

I’ve been hearing mixed things about the film and I was delighted to get a chance to make up my mind for myself.

Valkyrie has a lot of things going against it.  For one, we all know the ending.  You’d have to have flunked out of 8th grade history class twice to not know that Hitler died at his own hand after it was clear that being captured alive was a bad idea for him.  Those of us more interested in history knew about the July 20th plot and that Hitler had survived a bomb blast assassination attempt, but I wasn’t aware of how intricate and daring the plan was and how far along the resultant coup actually got.  Singer was able to take a story that we all knew the ending to and keep it thrilling.

For two, you sort of have to expect the ending to be a downer.  Fortunately, I like downers, so that part of the film didn’t rub me the wrong way at all.

With those two things going against it, it was refreshing to see that Singer was able to tell the story in a pretty economical way.  I think the filmmaking was better than the script, to be sure, though.  The best moments in the films seemed to come from the interplay of the actors and the construction of the scenes than from the script.

Having said that, I thought that the cast Singer assembled to tell the story was right on target.  Each of the characters, regardless of the size of their involvement, had a presence on the screen that made you identify with each of these soldiers as real people.  Terence Stamp, Bill Nighy, Kenneth Branagh, Tom Wilkinson, Eddie Izzard and so on.  They each breadth fear of discovery into one of the most brazen and daring plots to overthrow a government that came within a hairs breadth of succeeding.

And seriously, the guy they got to play Hitler scared the shit out of me, he looked so right.

There was a lively discussion afterwards about the one thing I think a number of people will be concerned about: the accents (or lack of them) in the film.  Personally, I feel like there’s a precedent set in World War II films for directors to cast Nazi’s as Americans and Brits and use their regular accents (if any.)  This worked for me in the context of this film, though those I watched the movie with seemed somehow slighted or put out by the idea that Tom Cruise didn’t try to fake an accent of some kind (either German for authenticity or British to match the rest of the cast.)  For my money, I felt like an accent on Cruise, though it might have been capable, would have been more distracting than it’s absence.  In The Young Lions, Marlon Brando dons a German accent for his portrayal of a sympathetic Nazi and, though the performance was dynamite, it made him feel slightly out of place.  I’m fairly sure it would have had the same effect in this movie.

I will admit to being a complete sap for movies about the various resistances in World War II before I say this next thing, but the film had me so wrapped up in the emotion and melodrama of the plot that I was pretty moved by the end of the film.

At the end of the day, this was a fairly tight thriller with a great cast that helps the filmmaker overcome the small weaknesses in the script.  (Honestly, though, what can we expect from the guy who brought us that piece of crap “The Way of the Gun”?) It was also a story that I think it would be good for everyone to know.  Seriously.  Opposing the leader of your country as a matter of national pride is something that people shouldn’t look down on.

Knowing full well that Bryan Singer directed the Usual Suspects, I would say that Valkyrie is his best non-superhero movie, hands down and I really can’t wait to see what he sets his sights on next.  I would recommend this to other people and I will certainly be catching it again in the theatre.

This rates an easy 8 out of 10.