We Are Your Friends & the History of DJs in Film
Inventing the next big app and selling it to Facebook for umpteen billion dollars is so last year. If We Are Your Friends, opening today and starring Zac Efron, is to be believed, contemporary, money-minded millennials would rather make it big throwing the party, rather than get rich in order to get into it. Coming up with the next big EDM hit is the new inventing Instagram for Efron’s Cole Carter, a college student busy DJing parties (with varying success),...
Finn’s Got A Lightsaber? Watch new Star Wars: The Force Awakens Teaser
“There’s been an awakening. Have you felt it”? Um, yes, Star Wars, we have. And now that Star Wars: The Force Awakens released a teaser to a teaser trailer today on Instagram, we can be pretty sure that the 8 people who haven’t yet felt it (they’ve been on the International Space Station) have as well. While short in length, it reverberated with in sound, scope, and dramatic effect. Also, it showed our new favorite character,...
New Star Wars: The Force Awakens Images
Disney has released a few more choice images from Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and they give us quite a bit to chew on. Let's take a look:
Here's Finn (John Boyega) running towards (or by) a downed Tie-Fighter. Who shot it, and why is he in Stormtrooper gear?
We finally get a name for this cooler-than-your-average Stormtrooper, Captain Phasma (Game of Thrones' Gwendoline Christie).
Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) looking a little like a galactic Maverick as he marches away from his X-wing...
The Iron Giant: Signature Edition Re-Entering Theaters With 2 New Scenes
Yahoo! Movies! gives us this glimpse of Brad Bird's (The Incredibles, Ratatouille, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol) 1999 classic The Iron Giant, now being re-released into theaters after getting remastered, including the addition two all-new scenes. The Iron Giant was two-time Oscar winner Brad Bird's debut, and is the story of an unlikely friendship between a rebellious boy named Hogarth (voiced by Eli Marienthal) and a giant robot,...
Pixar in a Box: Learn Pixar’s Creative Process in Free Online Class
Animators, filmmakers, students of (almost) all ages, and fans of Pixar alike have reason to smile this morning, as a new online resource that explores the concepts behind Pixar's creative process goes online at KhanAcadmey.org. The series will consist of interactive exercises, video lessons and hands-on activities, where students from middle school up to people of all ages can learn the academic concepts Pixar filmmakers use to create their worlds.
Starting today, students can access Pixar in a Box and learn:
How combinatorics are used to create crowds,...
Creating Star Wars: The Force Awakens Newest Droid—BB-8
When it came to creating a new droid for the upcoming Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the task for J.J. Abrams and his fellow filmmakers was not without potential disaster—R2-D2 and C-3P0 are such iconic characters in the Star Wars universe that any new droid that was to have a decent sized role (larger a role than, say, the jealous droid R5-D4) would have to be worthy of its legendary predecessors. The folks at StarWars.com published this eye-opening long form article about the newest droid in the galaxy—BB-8,...
Imagine Engine’s Awesome VFX Breakdown Reel for Chappie
Imagine Engine helped turn actor Sharlto Copley (District 9) into the robot Chappie for director Neil Blomkamp’s film. Using performance capture equipment to track Copley’s every move, Imagine Engine was able turn man into machine with flawless precision.
Imagine Engine's work became more widely know with Blomkamp's first film, the visually stunning District 9. They've put their stamp on a wide variety of critically acclaimed films, from Zero Dark Thirty to ...
M. Night Shyamalan’s Surprising Choices While Making The Visit
Much has been made about the odyssey of M. Night Shyamalan’s film career. He had one of the most explosive debuts in modern film history, bursting onto the scene with The Sixth Sense, his 1999 blockbuster that resonated with audiences and had that incredible twist ending. The twist ending became the young director's hallmark, as would his ability to make intimate, uncannily creepy films. He followed The Sixth Sense up with two more hits—his ordinary man who is actually a superhero film, ...
Star Wars: The Force Awakens Toys Offer Chance to See Characters, Vehicles
Next Friday, September 4, has been christened “Force Friday” by the Walt Disney Company. That’s the day that more than 1,000 retail partners around the world will be opening their stores at midnight to unveil toys and products associated with the upcoming Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
Disney has also initiated a video component to promote the toys. Beginning in Australia on September 3 and continuing over the next 18 hours in 12 countries, their network of online video creators will open up the new toys...
9 Things You Might Not Have Known About Back to the Future
Our friends over at CineFix are it again, this time with a look at 9 things you might not know about Back to the Future as we celebrate it’s 30th anniversary.
While some of these are reasonably well known at this point (are you really unaware that Michael J. Fox wasn’t the original Marty McFly, but rather this guy was?), lots of these tidbits are juicy,...
Hayao Miyazaki’s Brilliant Princess Mononoke Retold as an 8-Bit Videogame
Princess Mononoke is one of Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki’s most beloved films. It’s been hailed as a landmark in the world of animation, an epic anime action historical fantasy written and directed by Miyazaki and animated by Studio Ghibli. Set in the late Muromachi period (roughly 1336-1573), the story follows young Emishi warrior Ashitaka and her role in the struggle between the forest gods and the humans who hope to plunder its resources. If you haven’t seen it,...
The Walking Dead Teaser for Season 6 is Here
If you caught the series premiere of Fear the Walking Dead last night, that means you also got a taste of The Walking Dead’s season 6. If you weren’t already aware, AMC’s ratings juggernaut features a cast of characters who have, more or less, all gone insane. Okay perhaps not all of them, but Rick and Carol are pretty much batty at this point, making Daryl (remember season one’s feral Daryl?...
Kylo Ren’s Lightsaber! Stormtroopers! Beautiful Star Wars Fan Art
Perhaps more than any other film franchise in the history of the medium, Star Wars has created a vast universe of fan fiction, art, videos and more in a kind of parallel universe in which George Lucas’s creations live on, and on, and on. A lot of is very, very good, too.
Take “No country for old men,” an illustration by Ornicar (and named after Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name,...
The Joker Comes to Gotham
“The laugh is fabulous. Use that.” This comes from Theo Galavan (James Frain) as he gives some advice to a young, increasingly psychotic Jerome (Cameron Monaghan), who is sliding, gleefully, into the man he will become—the Joker.
Gotham is back for season 2, and at its best, the show has given the villains—all a lot more colorful than the good guys—free reign to run amok and wreak havoc on the city’s citizens. The aforementioned Theo Galvan himself seems to be some kind of super villain,...
Andy Milburn on Scoring Screams in Sinister 2
Bughuul (aka The Bogeyman) is back to his terrifying ways in Sinister 2. The Credits talks to composer Andy Milburn, one half of prolific composing duo tomandandy, on working on the score and why horror requires a more delicate touch than you would think.
So, I just saw Sinister 2, and I’m terrified of horror movies, but I got through it. It was scary but I survived,...
ZOMBIE ALERT: AMC Releases First Three Minutes of Fear the Walking Dead
Warnings – if you are squeamish and scared of zombies, cover your eyes and peek between your fingers.
AMC has just released the first three minutes of the companion series to its' hit show The Walking Dead, the first taste of the Fear the Walking Dead is going down well. Fear the Walking debuts this Sunday, and from what can make out its' first three minutes, fans will be pleasantly surprised by a healthy dose of not only suspense and gore,...
Listen to Abel Korzeniowski’s Music for Penny Dreadful & More
The first time I became aware of Abel Korzeniowski's work was by accident. It was one of those serendipitous Spotify moments; listening to a one of their radio stations, a song from the soundtrack of Tom Ford's A Single Man came on. It was called "Daydreams."
That was all it took. I listened to every song on the Golden Globe nominated score of A Single Man and was transfixed...
Artist Drew Struzan Thinks The Force Awakens is Best Star Wars Film Ever
The ripple effects from Disney’s D23 Expo are still being felt—and now we have this: poster artist extraordinaire Drew Struzan, who has been with the franchise since the very beginning, thinks that J.J. Abrams Star Wars: The Force Awakens will be the best Star Wars yet. In a conversation with Movie-Weekly, Struzan and this to say:
"I got to read the script and subsequently I’ve seen half of it (The Force Awakens) and I can tell you and the fans this, honest to god,...
The Witch Will Freak You Out
“What were out in this wilderness to find, leaving our country, kindred, our father’s houses, for what? For the kingdom of God. Let us pray.”
These are the words that open The Witch trailer, writer/director Robert Eggers' (The Tell-Tale Heart, Hansel and Gretel) feature film debut that plants us in a world at once very American but also weirdly, creepily, alien—17th century New England, 62 years before the Salem witch trials...
Matt Damon’s the “Greatest botanist on this planet” in New The Martian Trailer
As we wrote the last time 20th Century Fox released a trailer for The Martian, there’s some very real science behind sending a manned mission to the red planet. A fantastic story appeared in the April 20th issue of The New Yorker, reported by Tom Kizzia, entitled “Moving to Mars,” about a group of NASA recruits who are being studied in a massive, months-long Mars training simulation halfway up Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano...
