Plot Synopsis for the Sci-Fi Comedy Paul Starring Pegg and Frost

by Kasper at Film Junk

Working Title Films has released the official plot synopsis for the upcoming sci-fi comedy Paul, which re-unites the comedy team of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost of Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead fame. The movie, which is being directed by Superbad director Greg Mottola, centers around the two sci-fi geeks Willy and Collings (played by Pegg and Frost) who accidentally come across the alien Paul (voiced by Seth Rogen) when he jumps aboard their truck. Chased by the government, they embark on a road trip with Paul which changes their lives forever.

“For the past 60 years, an alien named Paul (voiced by Seth Rogen) has been hanging out at a top-secret military base. For reasons unknown, the space-travelling smart ass decides to escape the compound and hop on the first vehicle out of town—a rented RV containing Earthlings Graeme Willy (Pegg) and Clive Collings (Frost).”

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Teresa Palmer Talks The Sorcerer’s Apprentice!

via Movie Web

Australian actress Teresa Palmer has been generating a lot of buzz in Hollywood for sometime now due in large part to her attachment to two high profile projects that she ended up not participating in. She first gained the attention of fan-boys everywhere when director George Miller cast her as the evil Talia al Ghul, daughter of Batman villain Ra’s al Ghul, in the unmade film, Justice League Of America based on the popular DC Comics’ book. While ultimately that film did not get made, it did put the actress on the map and she next gained attention when rumors began to fly that Miller had cast her in his upcoming forth chapter of the popular Mad Max series, entitled Fury Road. But in an interview that we conducted last month, the actress confessed that she had to back out of that project due to scheduling conflicts with the Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg produced film I Am Number Four, which she will appear in early next year. Now, fans finally have a chance to see the actress shine on the silver screen in the new live-action Disney film The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, opening on July 14th staring Nicolas Cage.

To begin with, you mentioned in an earlier interview that you feel like your character, Becky, is the key to David (Jay Baruchel) unleashing his potential as a sorcerer, can you talk about that idea and how it helped you in the course of making the film?

Teresa Palmer: I really believe that Becky’s the trigger for Dave in terms of him finding his confidence and embracing the sorcerer within.

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Two New Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows Featurettes

By Krystal Clark at Screen Crave

Over the weekend, ABC Family premiered two new featurettes that take us inside the latest and final adventure in the Potter series. It features interviews from its stars including Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson who talk about the challenges they faced filming the biggest Potter ever!

In the first video we discover that the 3 magical musketeers spend a good chunk of the movie on the run. This might be where we get to see Hermione and Ron get up close and personal if you know what I mean.

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Harry Potter, Scott Pilgrim, Green Hornet, Thor Among Films Invading Comic Con

by Rebecca Murray at About.com

The schedule for the 2010 Comic Con has been released and once again San Diego will be invaded by Hollywood. Kicking off the annual gathering of comic book lovers and TV/movie fans on Thursday, July 22nd, is DreamWorks Animation with Megamind and voice actors Will Ferrell, Tina Fey, and Jonah Hill. Disney follows with much-anticipated new footage from Tron: Legacy and appearances by cast members Jeff Bridges, Garrett Hedlund, Olivia Wilde, Michael Sheen, and Bruce Boxleitner. Lionsgate’s represented with the action pic The Expendables and will have writer/director Sylvester Stallone and actors Dolph Lundgren, Steve Austin, Rand Couture, and Terry Crews on hand to answer questions. And finally, Thursday finishes up with a star-studded panel promoting Scott Pilgrim vs The World.

I wouldn’t say they’re saving the best for last because Thursday and Friday’s offerings are pretty incredible, but Saturday will see Harry Potter finally making an appearance at the Con! This is big news for Muggles who happen to have already bought tickets to the sold-out event. And Warner Bros is bringing cast members from two of their other big releases: Green Lantern and Sucker Punch. Overture will be trying to sink their teeth into vampire fans with footage from Let Me In starring Chloe Moretz and Kodi Smit-McPhee. Screen Gems is bringing Resident Evil: Afterlife and its always popular stars Milla Jovovich and Ali Larter to the Con along with what they promise will be ‘stunning’ 3-D scenes from the film.

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Amanda Seyfried To Star In Sci-Fi Thriller ‘I’m.mortal’

By Adam Rosenberg at MTV News

Amanda Seyfried has accomplished a lot so far in her short career, and now she’s angling to stay young forever.

Variety reports that the Variety reports that the “Letters to Juliet” star will lead the cast of Andrew Niccol’s “I’m.mortal,” a sci-fi action thriller set in a world where people stop aging at 25. As was first reported back in April, people in this society treat time as currency; the more of your life’s time you “spend,” the more access you have to various necessities and luxuries.

Today’s Seyfried news is joined by a few more details about the story. A rebellious young man — not yet cast — is fingered for the murder of a member of society’s elite. He ends up on the run with a beautiful rich girl (Seyfried) in tow as his hostage. Regardless of the circumstances that initially bring them together, they end up taking on the system and finding love in the process.

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I am so excited for Paul. Pegg and Frost have been blogging about it since filming, and the two of them together are always funny so you just know it’ll be good. I really wish I was going to Comic Con this year. I had planned to, but I just didn’t have the money for tickets and the flight. But there’s next year to look forward to. And the new Harry Potter.

Is anyone going to San Diego Comic Con this year? Which upcoming movie are you looking forward to the most?

The Year in Concept Art

via io9 by Meredith Woerner

We’ve already appreciated some of the incredible movie concept art from years past. But there’s plenty of gorgeous design work coming out from the movies of 2010. Here’s our tribute to the artists who are making today’s films beautiful.

The Last Airbender

View more awesome concept art HERE

30 Minute Fan Made Batman Film

From Sci Fi Wire by Scott Edelman

The budget for Christopher Nolan’s 152-minute The Dark Knight? An estimated $185,000,000.

The budget for Aaron Schoenke’s 30-minute Batman: City of Scars? $27,000!

Shot in just 21 days, City of Scars can’t compare to a big-screen blockbuster with a budget 6,851 times larger (if we’re doing our math right), but it’s an impressive achievement.

View more HERE

I am a big fan of art in general and seeing how it has developed is awesome. The year of 2010 has brought some really great movies to the screen and the art behind them is amazing! Holy Batman! I didn’t watch the whole 30 minute movie but the beginning looks sweet! And to think they had a low budget and filmed in 21 days, that takes talent!

What do you think of the art that makes todays films beautiful? And did you watch that Batman movie? What did you think of it?

Source: slashflim

INTERVIEW WITH TRON CREATOR, STEVEN LISBERGER

Today we have the transcript from our roundtable set interview with Steven Lisberger, the writer/director/creator of the original Tron, who is on board for Tron Legacy as a producer, writer, and actor (he has a small cameo in the film, in the scene seen above).

The number one question is why not create this yourself?

Lisberger: That’s your number one question?  I just want to clarify that’s the number one question for you, but that’s not the number one question.  So there’s multiple reasons.  Not sure these are in the right priority but after thirty years I don’t want to compete with myself.  And other issues are technically I am not on the level of Joe Kosinski. And third is that Joe has a network of people that he works with, with Shawn.  And if I brought my network in, it would be a little bit like one of those Clint Eastwood movies where all the old guys go to space.

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Source: firstshowing

SIGOURNEY WEAVER WILL PLAY A VAMPIRE IN HECKERLING’S VAMPS

Although the vampire genre is getting quite saturated at this point, one of the few vampire projects that I am looking forward to is Amy Heckerling’s Vamps, and that’s only because Heckerling directed Clueless and is reteaming with Alicia Silverstone on this. Heat Vision reports thatSigourney Weaver has also been cast in the project as Ciccerus, a vampire queen who turns the two women (that this is about) into vamps as well. Weaver will join Silverstone and Krysten Ritter, who play two beautiful young vampires that are living the good nightlife in New York until love enters the picture and each one has to make a life-changing choice.

Read more here…

Source: io9

FOREST WHITAKER AND JUDE LAW SAY REO MAN IS ABOUT AMERICA TODAY

In Repo Men‘s dystopian future, health care has been so privatized, you can buy robotic organs on credit. But if you miss a payment, you’re dead. So how much of this gory film is precautionary? Plenty, according to the cast.

The world of Repo Men, twenty years from now, is a fast-moving and epically violent place. The public has been thoroughly desensitized to violence. Which explains why the idea of a group of retired military types running around, legally ripping life-saving “artiforgs” out of defaulting clients isn’t too much of a traffic-stopper for the masses.

Read more here…

Are you a fan of Tron?

I think Sigourney Weaver would made a great vampire, what do you think?

Repo Man is a metaphor for  today’s health-care system. You can’t pay for insurance, sorry. Will you be seeing Repo Man?

via io9:

by Meredith Woerner: Tron Legacy Will Use 3-D The Way The Wizard Of Oz Used Color

Tron Legacy director Joseph Kosinski has just set our minds at ease. He promises that the new Disney Tron will be less like Avatar and more like the Wizard of Oz, in that only the Tron world will be 3D.

Kosinski explained the substance-over-3-D-sparkle mantra on Tron Legacy to MTV, stating:

“Our approach is not like “Avatar,” which I think is 3D from the first shot to the last. Ours is sort of a Wizard Of Oz. approach. Ninety-eight percent of the 3D is in the world of “Tron.” The 3D really starts once we get into the Tron world.”

He goes on explaining that the focus has been on the story, not the effects. And that famous Comic Con teaser video, showing lightcycle racing and the two Jeff Bridgeses, won’t actually appear in the movie — those events take place before the movie starts. In fact, the movie will look much more advanced than that teaser, which a small team put together on its own.

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By Charlie Jane Anders: Paranoid Cyberpunk Religious Thriller Gets A Movie Deal

Is Trevor Sands the new go-to guy for science-fiction movie adapations? He’s written the screenplay for Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos and the Six Million Dollar Man movie. And now he’s taking on Jeff Somers’ The Electric Church.

Somers’ The Electric Church, the first volume in a series, seems like a slam-dunk cool concept for a movie: it’s got religion, weirdness, dystopian futures and noir. The books follow Avery Cates, a bodyguard/assassin who sometimes works for the police force of the council which oversees this future Earth’s federation of nations. In the first book, Cates is forced to kill the head of a church that converts people by transplanting their brains into more easily controlled religious bodies. The film is tentatively called The Avery Cates Project.

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By Annalee Newitz: Is Avatar Too Realistic For Its Own Good?

Chinese writers condemned Avatar, a branch of the Russian communist party condemned it, the Vatican has weighed in, and other groups are endlessly debating its political meaning. What makes people respond so strongly to this flick? It’s the realism.

But how can such a blatantly fantastical movie be realistic? This is a movie about blue cat people who ride dragons and bond with six-legged horses. The whole thing takes place on the moon Pandora, whose lush mega-forest is actually wired up with synapses so that the moon can think like a giant brain. Plus, one of the most memorable features of Pandora, other than its bizarre flora and fauna, are its floating mountains that hover inexplicably over a weird magnetic anomaly that’s never explained.

It’s this kind of realism that has inspired Chinese people evicted from their homes to call the plight of the Na’vi their own. It’s what turned representatives of the Vatican into film critics, evaluating whether this piece of fiction undermined Christianity with its portrayal nature-worshiping aliens. And it’s what inspired me to write an essay several weeks ago about the race politics of a story about blue people. Even though we are well aware Avatar is fiction, all of us are behaving as if the events in this movie are woven into the fabric of our real lives.

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by Helen O’Hara at Empire: Should Spider-Man Have Gone 3D?

So this morning we’ve learned that the next Spider-Man film will have a budget of about $80 million. That puts it on a lower budget than Sherlock Holmes, lower than X-Men Origins: Wolverine (by nearly half). Heck, it’s less than Fast & Furious, which cost about $85m, and only just more (not adjusting for inflation) than the first X-Men movie. So what does this mean for the film, and might Spidey have been better going for balls-out 3D instead?

And of course filmmaking should never be just about money, trying to outspend what went before. Just because the third Spider-Man cost a reported $258m doesn’t mean this one should spend higher. So there’s a sense in which this budget is to be applauded – and you can see why the studio would go for it. Think about it: people will turn out for the Spider-Man name. Even if you count on getting fewer people than the $890m-worth worldwide who went to see Spider-Man 3 (allowing for the loss of Raimi fans, those so disappointed by that movie that they’ve left the franchise, and those who don’t want to see a teenage Spidey) and maybe losing a few more with a trailer that promises less action than before, you could still comfortably project a take of $500-600m worldwide.

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By Eric Ditzian at MTV News: ‘Let Me In’ Is ‘Darker’ Than ‘Twilight,’ Director Matt Reeves Says

Matt Reeves knows he has a target on his back. The director admits as much roughly two minutes into a conversation about his upcoming film, “Let Me In.” That’s what happens when your movie: A) takes on the pop-cultural theme-du-jour of vampires, and B) remakes a beloved flick that pretty much everyone agrees is as perfect as genre filmmaking gets.

MTV: Is “Let Me In” a remake or a reimagining? What are you keeping from the original and what are you changing?

Matt Reeves: It’s very much an Americanization of the tale that John Ajvide Lindqvist tells. The film touched me. And I read the book, which he also wrote, and it moved me too. It reminded me so much of my own childhood in certain ways. It’s so much about that period of preadolescence, that feeling of being a child and of being bullied, the difficulties of growing up. It’s such a beautiful coming-of-age story, in addition to being such a terrific genre story. One of the things I really wanted to do was find my own way into the story while still being very, very reverent to the beautiful film and to the wonderful story that they created. And so the story in many ways follows the same trajectory. I really wanted to put you, even more so, into the point of view of the boy and understand his childhood as vividly as it comes across in the book.

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What do you think of today’s movie news?

via wired

TOTALLY RECALLED: YOUR FAVE 90′S SCI-FI FLICKS

“How could you forget Total Recall?” asked Wired.com reader finwake.

That anguished question, in response to our roundup “Wired’s Favorite Sci-Fi Flicks of All Time — Star Wars and After,” is typical of the hundreds of comments we received. Clearly, the hive mind of the Wired.com readership has near-total recall when it comes to the science fiction movies held dear, deep within its bulging collective brain.

Read more here…

via scifiwire

INTERNATIONAL IRON MAN 2 POSTER: TONY’S GRUMPY!

Another day, another poster for Iron Man 2: This one’s the international onesheet, posted by Empiremagazine.

The sequel, starring a grumpy Robert Downey Jr., opens May 7, 2010.

See the full poster here…

via scifiwire

JEFF BRIDGES REVEALS THE SECRET OF HIS TWO TRON LEGACY ROLES

Jeff Bridges likened playing Kevin Flynn in the original 1982 Tron to being a kid again, playing pretend, so it’s appropriate that he literally becomes a kid again in the upcoming 3-D sequel film, Tron Legacy, in which he plays dual roles.

Though the movie’s storyline is closely held, we know that Bridges will play an older version of his original character, Kevin Flynn, as well as a second character whose appearance is that of Bridges 27 years ago.

Read more here…

via ifmagazine

DIRECTORS SCOTT AND DAVID HILLENBRAND SUCK THE COMEDY OUT OF VAMPIRES WITH ‘TRANSYLMANIA’

Whenever it’s time to make fun of a new movie trend, the studios trot out the unbearably lame SCARY MOVIE-type spoofs that ape better films frame by frame, but with very little wit or originality (EPIC MOVIE/DATE MOVIE anyone?)

For directors Scott and David Hillenbrand, they decided to go a completely different route – to make a vampire movie that was a comedy first and foremost, with none of the SCARY MOVIE spoof trappings. And with TWILIGHT, TRUE BLOOD and THE VAMPIRE DIARIES sucking the life out of the vampire genre, isn’t it about time to suck some comedy out of it too?

Read more here…

It is interesting to see what made the favorite list for the 90′s sci-fi flicks. With so many individual preferences, I think one list just doesn’t cut it. However I do agree with a few listed; such as Dark City, The Fifth Element, Men in Black and Total Recall.  What are your favorites?

Iron Man 2 poster grumpy? Hmmm…I wouldn’t call it that. I’d say a bit more menacing. He looks like he’s ready to kick some ass, which is what a superhero needs to look like.

I’m sure everyone is just as excited to see Tron Legacy as I am. The original was quite groundbreaking and this version sounds like it will surpass it’s predecessor.

If they can make a zombie comedy (Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland) I can’t see why a comedy vampire movie can’t be made. It just has to be done right. What are your thoughts on a vampire comedy, is it pushing the genre too far or is it something it needs?