MTSBM: The Lay of Leithian

 I don't want to talk about it.

As we all know, the Lord of the Rings film trilogy is a marvel of modern film-making. More importantly, though, it made scads of money. The obvious Hollywood response to such an obvious cash cow is to milk it for all it’s worth, and to that end The Hobbit will be released in two parts sometime in the next five years. But The Hobbit is a happy children’s tale, not the gritty epic that is Lord of the Rings. I mean, come on, in the book, the main character wins the One Ring to Rule Them All in a riddle contest, and spends most of the climactic battle unconscious. Oh, and it has an even worse deus ex machina than Lord of the Rings. But even if The Hobbit does bomb, Hollywood executives need not fear! Because Tolkien had significantly more than just Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit up his literary sleeve. Tolkien wrote entire detailed histories of Middle-Earth, going back all the way to it’s creation, with stories spanning thousands of years. That’s a lot of movies. But one of these is so perfectly suited to be a movie that it’s almost shocking no Tolkien nerd has ever sent this idea off to MGM, and that is the Lay of Leithian, or Release from Bondage, possibly called more simply “Of Beren and Luthien.” The story goes sort of like this:

Upcoming Films: The Dark Tower, New Most Ambitious Project In Hollywood

Uh, wow.

Stephen King is famous for making a ludicrous amount of money on mediocre but thoroughly entertaining hack horror fiction, thereby causing H.P. Lovecraft to do a barrel roll in his grave every time King cites him as an influence. However, King's own magnum opus - according to him - is the Dark Tower saga. The Dark Tower is a seven-book series, with books ranging in length from too big to doorstoppingly enormous, and this being Stephen King it's likely that about sixty percent of it could have been edited out entirely. But here come Universal and NBC with the claim that they'll be adapting the series into a movie trilogy, with the gaps between the movies bridged by a TV series.

So what is this Dark Tower business? As always, spoilers may follow.

Upcoming Films: Monsters

Gareth Edward's Monsters has been a film I've been keeping my eyes on for a while now. Way back when, I wrote up an article on how it may change horror and sci-fi films (again...) with its in-depth look at characters (which is weird for horror films to do because characterization goes by the wayside in modern slasher flicks. If you're female and white, you live, albeit shallowly, and everyone else dies. Now you know the ending to every horror film created). I was also impressed by its ridiculously miniscule budget!

Not much more news on this film, but there's a pretty good trailer. The studio seems to be hyping it up as a seriously insane action, sci-fi flick, but all the reports I've read, say it's a rather slow moving character study with a lot happening in the third act.

Trailer Courtesy of Hulu (sorry for the ads):

Open Thread: I'm Too Tired to Write a Catchy Title

I don't actually know how this ends... I'm sorry if it's rude...
link to original at the bottom

Hello bloggers and viewers and peoples,

I hope you are excited to perhaps start up school or all that jazz. I am looking forward to get the actual school part started... Week One Orientation is crazy busy.

Anyway, not much more is going on besides ridiculous schedules and stuff. I'm sure my colleagues are similarly swamped. However, that has not stopped us from posting some pretty neato articles. I had not priorly anticipated much activity here over the week, as seen in this article.

Week in Review:

~ Oscar Watch: First Installment
~ Comic Book Adaptions, Upcoming Films, and Other Cool Things
~ Top 10 List, the version of Joseph
~ Box Office Brawl, Round II
~ Movie Review: Spirited Away

So, check those things out if you haven't, and comment away!
We like hearing from you, and we love your ideas! Well... some of them...

Here

Oscar Watch, Pt. I-ish

Snazzy Intro!

Change of plans... In the original article, I had intended to look at eight films in three installments. That didn't happen. Due to the ridiculous busy scheduling of this new idea... college... I was only able to complete a few overviews of the Oscar films to look out for. Very sorry, but if you want to do Week One orientation for me, go right ahead. Then come back and talk to me. Anyway, let's get started on what we've got.

Note: Viewer Discretion Advised on the viewing of the trailers.

Comic Book Adaptations and Pre-Release Sequel Planning...Say, Would You Like Some 3D With That

I see where comicbookmovie.com is telling us that Green Lantern 2 and 3 are already in planning stages.

For those who don't read comics and haven't kept up on the movie news, quick summary: Green Lantern is about mysterious alien artifacts called "power rings," of various colors, each colored powered by a corresponding emotion or drive. The Green Lantern Corps is an interplanetary (possibly intergalactic, I forget) police force wielding green power rings, powered by willpower. That sentence contains entirely too many repetitions of the word "power." These power rings, by the way, are not one-superpower jobbies. They confer a whole slew of abilities, the best known of which are flight and the creation of weapons or other objects, known as constructs, made of green light. They are vulnerable to the color yellow, which corresponds to fear in the same way that green does to willpower. There is also a group called the Sinestro Corps, who can be thought of as Yellow Lanterns, if you like; whose powers are fueled by the fear they cause and who tend to be at war with the Green Lanterns.

The Green Lantern origin story (which is technically not the first appearance of a power-ring-wielding superhero known as Green Lantern in comics, more on that in a moment) is the story of an asshole test pilot called Hal Jordan who gets a green power ring from a dying alien and is forced to adopt said alien's job of Green Lanternship. Seems pretty standard comic book hero fare, right? By the way, there's a few potential spoilers ahead.

Joseph's Top Ten List of the Decade ('00 to now (Sept. '10))

Spoiler Alert . . .

Well, after Ben did his Top Ten of the Decade list, I thought I would just copy him with my own personal take on the best films of the decade. A couple notes: I haven't seen vast amounts of the movies released this decade, so if you have some ideas of what might be better than these movies, feel free to throw them out there. I'd love some suggestions for more awesome movies. Also, this is influenced a lot by my personal opinion, rather than attempting to objectively analyze the best films of the decade (not that this list is completely subjective), so if you're appalled by any of my choices, remember that that's a personal insult to me, 

so . . . way to go.