Winter is Coming...Err, Next Spring, That Is

There is supposed to be a trailer here. Click Read More to watch; it's there but it isn't displaying on the main page.

George R.R. Martin's dark fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire is probably near the top of the list of post-Tolkien fantasy when it comes to popularity. Unlike the two series I would consider its closest competitors - the late Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time and Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun - as an utterly irrelevant side note, Gene Wolfe also invented Pringles, which is amusing because he looks rather like the Pringles man without hair. But unlike the dense, overwhelming, psychologically driven memoir of a possibly mentally ill ruler of the world and his creepy sword that Gene Wolfe wrote, and the increasingly enormous Tolkien-meets-Herbert-meets-Tolstoy epic that Robert Jordan wrote so long he died of it, Martin wrote A Song of Ice and Fire as a trilogy of byzantine intrigue, resurgent magic, vengeance, justice, fire, blood, and the most likable characters getting screwed over constantly by the same attributes that make them likable.

But you see, because Martin is a fantasy author, a trilogy was too little. Unable to cap it after the first 2400 pages, Martin announced upon the release of the third book, A Storm of Swords, that he was extending the series to a seven-part epic. This news was met with surprise on the part of those who ASoIaF had introduced to fantasy and a resounding we told you so from everyone else. But there were quite a number of people who got into fantasy from ASoIaF, because, considering its doorstopper size, it is a remarkably accessible story - far more so than, say, Stephen King's The Dark Tower, a work of similar length and scope. And now it gets an HBO series, to be released Spring 2011.

Some spoilers may follow. The big one won't, obviously, because it's big.

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.

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.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: Worth Exactly One Watch

When I heard that Bryan Lee O'Malley's indie comic series Scott Pilgrim was getting a movie adaptation, I was more than a little skeptical. While the current Dark Knight-chasing superhero movie craze proves that it's possible to adapt comic heroes, there have been very few successful attempts to actually adapt comics. In fairness, superhero comics, which dominate the American market to a ludicrous extent, don't lend themselves naturally to it - there is no overarching plot to Superman's story, or Batman's, but rather origin stories and then about seventy years of interlocking, self-contradictory, increasingly bizarre plots (is Bruce Wayne still dead, by the way? Or did Blackest Night fix that?) that you can't really make into a film because they depend on everything before them. The few limited series that do get adaptations - Watchmen, V for Vendetta, this year's Kick-Ass - tend to either lose what made a good series good or make a bad one hilariously worse. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, directed by Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) now joins that not-so-illustrious list.

Well, it is a rather decent adaptation of Scott Pilgrim. In fact, I would say it's better as a movie than Scott Pilgrim was as a comic book. If only that were saying much. Spoilers ahead.

B*Team! Assemble!!

Many have heard the calling. Few earned the title to be...
Part of the B*Team (that... did not flow as well as I hoped...)
Well, the blog team has been assembled and is ready for action.
Time for the roll call:
Ben, Blackthorne, Esq., Libby H, J. Bernard Muyskens, Joseph Matheson, Nate S, and yours truly, Peter Schipper.
We hope to bring you the very best in movie entertainment!

The B*Team

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and feel free to contact us at yetanothermovieblog@gmail.com

I Enjoy It When An Undertaking Coagulates (Character Intro: Blackthorne)

Good evening, reader. Or perhaps, reader, good day. It's evening for me.

Dear reader, I watch movies and television on a regular basis, because it is less stressful and expensive than finding a girlfriend. Sometimes I enjoy this pastime. More often, I break down, foam at the mouth at the abject stupidity to which I am witness, and then turn the damn thing off. I then rant incoherently about it on the internet, making increasingly heavy and annoying use of italics.

My name is Blackthorne, Esquire, or more accurately that is the obviously fake name by which I go in order that the cyberpolice (or perhaps, reader, you) do not descend upon me personally when I inevitably rustle your jimmies. You see, reader, I am under no illusions about my incoherent ranting. It tends to draw reprisal in kind. In some circles, this is known as the time-honored staple of trolling: in others, it is more eloquently known as NO U.

And indeed, reader, there will be incoherent ranting. If you have movie news, and I have movie news, and I have a very good internet connection - there it is, that's an internet connection, you see? - Are you watching? - and my connection reaches across the internet and starts to read your movie news - I rant about your movie news! I rant about it!

Again, good evening.