It’s been almost a year since we first brought you news of Jeremy Renner starring in the fourth film in the ‘Bourne’ franchise. All that time we’ve wondered how he would do as the new Bourne and if he would be able to make us forget about Matt Damon who, let’s face it, did a pretty good job.

Well, pretty much all of our questions have been answered now with the first trailer for The Bourne Legacy being released today. In it we see Renner in action as the new ‘Bourne’ (actually, as a character names Aaron Cross, but who’s counting?) and also get a better idea of where his character comes from.

We also get more of an idea who will be accompanying him on his journey. Fortunately, many of our favorite supporting players also make an appearance. All of it serves to make this trailer, and the upcoming film, look pretty darn good.

As to the question of Renner helping us to forget about Matt Damon, the answer to that is “Matt Damon who?” Plus, the movie has Rachel Weisz in it so we’re going no matter what.

Look for The Bourne Legacy, directed by Tony Gilroy and featuring Renner, Rachel Weisz, Edward Norton, Joan Alley and Albert Finney, to hit theaters on August 8. Check out the trailer after the break.

Continue Reading →

Those who live in Los Angeles or the surrounding areas have probably been to the Universal Studios Hollywood theme park at least once in their lives. Whether it was for the Haunted Halloween Nights last month, or to check out the fun and exciting rides and attractions, most people (locals in particular) probably think they’ve seen all the park has to offer. They’re wrong.

In just 4 months, Universal Studios Hollywood will unveil their new Transformers ride, which is only one of the huge attractions coming to the park. Also coming soon, you can see a smaller version of “The Wizarding World of Harry Potter”, which is currently thrilling attendees at Universal Studios in Orlando.

Continue Reading →

Most of the fanboys and fangirls will get plenty of Kristen Stewart next week with the first half of Twilight: Breaking Dawn, but for those who want to see her in less of a”damsel in distress” capacity and more of a strong heroine type, you’ve got the upcoming film Snow White and the Huntsman.

The film is going to highlight a bit more of a mythical take on the classic Snow White fairytale, which will be nice, seeing as how this is one of three Snow White incarnations we’re getting now, including ABC’s Once Upon a Time series and Relativity Media’s Mirror Mirror.

So you’re caught up to speed on this prett-people-filled flick, here’s the synopsis.

In the epic action-adventure Snow White and the Huntsman, Kristen Stewart plays the only person in the land fairer than the evil queen (Charlize Theron) out to destroy her. But what the wicked ruler never imagined is that the young woman threatening her reign has been training in the art of war with a huntsman (Chris Hemsworth) dispatched to kill her.

You can see this trailer embiggened this weekend as it’s attached to reels of Immortals, or just catch it after the jump. Snow White and the Huntsman is set to hit theaters June 1st.

Continue Reading →

The best performance in Tower Heist comes not from its most bankable stars Ben Stiller and Eddie Murphy, rather it’s the nervously underplayed schlub Mr. Fitzhugh, an out-of-work stockbroker played by Matthew Broderick, who’s channeling parts of Bob Newhart and parts of Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion. Director Brett Ratner (Rush Hour) tends toward broad comedy, but the funniest bits by far are Broderick’s subtle squeaks of concern.

There’s a scene early on when he’s being evicted from his apartment. The living room is completely empty save for two tents. Broderick explains to the building manager that he’s sold all the furniture. “I told the kids we’re going green,” he gives a resigned shrug, “my kids aren’t very smart.”

The manager is Josh Kovacs (Ben Stiller), who’s been working at the building for years and is the golden boy of its owner Arthur Shaw (Alan Alda), a Madoff-inspired Wall Streeter who, we learn, has taken the employees’ pensions and either stolen them or made some really bad investments (the movie never really makes it clear, but since he’s rich, he’s automatically bad, I guess). The Feds, led by the sexy Claire Denham (Tea Leoni) naturally swoop in to cart off Shaw for some SEC violations, leaving little hope for the tower employees to recover their life savings.

Continue Reading →

The experts were wrong again. Last weekend’s huge success of Paramount’s Paranormal Activity 3 lead everyone to believe that the film would have continued success on the weekend leading up to Halloween. Turns out, kids who love Shrek and folks that love adorable, animated kittens proved them all wrong.

That’s right, Universal’s Shrek spinoff, Puss in Boots, managed to blow Paranormal’s creepy handicam shots out of the water this weekend with a decent $34 million in the domestic box office. Don’t worry, horror fans, Activity stil stayed relevant in 2nd place as it pulled in $18.5 million, bringing its total gross up to $81 million so far.

Also opening this weekend, Justin Timberlake’s foray into the world of sci-fi with In Time made a whisper in the box office, only making $12 million, while the faux continuation of Johnny Depp’s performance in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (The Rum Diary) underwhelmed audiences and only pulled in $5 million for the weekend.

Next weekend, it’s the tale of two crowd-pleasers, as the Ben Stiller/Eddie Murphy caper flick Tower Heist hits theaters alongside A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas, which both open up wide across the country. Are people already in the Christmas mindset or will Heist prove that the Ocean’s 11 formula works with lesser grade talent? We’ll find out in a week!

Welcome to Monday Picks, a new weekly feature that examines a new movie every week from a wide array of different genres. In the spirit of the Halloween season, and being that the prequel opened this weekend, to kick us off is this week’s pick: John Carpenter’s 1982 classic The Thing.

The Thing is one of my favorite sci fi horror films for several reasons. 1) It is one of John Carpenter’s best films besides Escape From New York, Assault on Precinct 13, Starman, and Big Trouble in Little China. 2) Kurt Russell’s acting is phenomenal and his character MacReady is the textbook hero of the film, who overcomes and triumphs. 3) It is a very well done film in which the suspense, and the acting play a crucial role in executing the plot. From beginning to end, the film is truly a flawless picture.

The film was based off of John W. Campbell Jr’s short story “Who Goes There?” The film is not a remake of the classic 1951 Howard Hawks film, but is a very faithful new version of the short story for a new generation of sci fi horror fanatics.

Continue Reading →

Say what you will about Mark Wahlberg but his movies are often entertaining and he does know his way around an action sequence. Case in point is his latest upcoming film Contraband.

In the action thriller, which is based on the 2008 Icelandic film Reykjavic-Rotterdam, Wahlberg plays a security guard trying to go straight who must return to his old life of high-stakes smuggling to settle a family member’s debt with a ruthless former boss. Naturally, things don’t go exactly as planned and, you can bet, stuff ends up blowing up.

Starring with Wahlberg are Giovanni Ribisi, Kate Beckinsale, Lukas Haas and Ben Foster. Check out the trailer after the jump.

Look for Contraband to hit theaters early next year.

Continue Reading →

The online content streaming landscape just got a bit more interesting as Amazon announced late Thursday it has made a deal with NBCUniversal to provide 1,000 Universal Pictures movies to its streaming customers. The new content includes films such as Being John Malkovich, The Jetsons, Flipper, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Billy Elliott. Well, that’s quite a cross-section of content.

This new deal is in addition to the one Amazon recently made for it to offer CBS shows such as Star Trek and Cheers to its customers. All these deals for content make perfect sense if you think Amazon is about to release a tablet in the next few months.

It’s widely been speculated that said tablet would be coming out and give users access to the company’s Amazon Unbox, Amazon Mp3, Kindle, Cloud Music and Cloud Drive services. All of that and a well done tablet powered by Android could, potentially, take a bite out of Apple’s iPad dominance. We’ll see.

Check out the full press release after the jump.

Continue Reading →

It has cowboys. It has aliens. It has cowboys and aliens. It’s not a bad film. It’s not a good film. It is a movie. That’s a pretty lackluster opener, but, walking out of the screening, I felt almost completely neutral about Cowboys and Aliens–it was like the things I liked and the things I disliked were in perfect balance.

The film doesn’t fail to deliver on anything the title promises, and you can lose count of the standard tropes from either genre that it hits, but it’s tough to maintain the toothy grin I expected all throughout. Though I’m getting ahead of myself.

Daniel Craig plays Jake Lonergan (one of many last names I suspect are puns but am not entirely sure), a notorious outlaw who awakes one morning with a heavy case of amnesia and one hell of a bracelet on his left arm. He makes his way to the nearest town, controlled by the gruff cattle rancher Colonel Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford) and his uppity son Percy (Paul Dano), whose favorite pastime is terrifying the community at large and in particular the local bartender (Sam Rockwell) and his wife (Ana de la Reguera).

It’s not long before Jake endears himself to the locals, among them the soused preacher (Clancy Brown), the woman with a secret (Olivia Wilde), and, naturally, the sheriff (Keith Carradine) by punching out Percy, and not long after that that his identity is revealed, and he’s locked up. Still less longer, the aliens arrive, capture a handful of significant townsfolk, and everyone’s differences are set aside as they form a posse to recover the abductees. ‘round about this time, Jake discovers that his bracelet is able to sense the aliens and, better yet, can blow ‘em up real good.

Continue Reading →

If toys make an effective inspiration for movie franchises, why not games? After all, regardless of its relative creative merits, the Transformers franchise has managed to make a metric crapload of money.

So, why not try to do the same with a movie based on a classic game? It could work. That’s just what director Peter Berg and his team have done with the upcoming Battleship. To prove it, we’ve got the first trailer for the film for you right now.

In it we get a lot of the film’s story of a young, upstart naval officer (Taylor Kitsch) in love with his Admiral’s daughter (Brooklyn Decker) who needs to put aside his personal feelings and learn to be a man when an alien invasion threatens his fleet of ships. The movie is, of course, based on the classic board game Battleship and from the trailer, it actually looks like director Berg gets that he’s making a movie based on a game, is in on the joke and doing his best to make it a fun and exciting film.

When I first heard they were making a movie based on Battleship, I was, to say the least, skeptical. After watching the trailer I’m now intrigued, especially as to how Berg and company are going to pull it off. Who knows, maybe they can?

Check out the trailer after the jump. Battleship, which stars Taylor Kitsch, Liam Neeson, Alexander Skarsgard, Brooklyn Decker and Rihanna, arrives in theaters on May 18th, 2012.

Continue Reading →

Right after the presentation late yesterday at Comic-Con in San Diego, Universal Pictures released the first promo images for their upcoming re-imagining of the Snow White story called The Huntsman. And to be honest, they look pretty cool.

In this images we get our first look at Kristen Stewart as Snow White, Charlize Theron as the Queen, Chris Hemsworth as the Huntsman and Sam Claflin as the Prince. The film also features Ian McShane, Eddie Izzard, Bob Hoskins, Toby Jones, Eddie Marsan, Steven Graham and Nick Frost.

Sadly, no pics of any of them just yet. Got to get the big characters and big actor names out in front first, apparently. According to reports from the panel, the proof of concept footage from the film looked pretty good too so if these images and that fact give us a bit of hope that the tend will continue and this movie will end up finishing the sam way.

The Hunstman opens on June 1, 2012. Click through to see all the rest of the images.

Continue Reading →

Happy belated 4th of July to all you War Movie Mondays fans. In celebration of our nation’s 235th anniversary, this week’s pick salutes American submariners of World War II with U-571 (2000) directed by Jonathan Mostow.

The film stars Matthew McConaughey (Lt. Andrew Tyler) Bill Paxton (Capt. Mike Dahlgren), Harvey Keitel (Chief Gunner’s Mate Henry Klough), Jon Bon Jovi (Lt. Peter Emmet), and David Keith (Maj. Matthew Coonan).

U-571 is a fictional account about a U.S. Navy submarine crew which boards, and captures a German U-boat in the Spring of 1942 in order to seize the German’s secret cipher machine code named: Enigma. The device allowed the German high command to transmit radio messages to their U-boat fleet which were destroying the vital convoy lines from America to Britain. The code was unique and made it impossible for the allies to determine the German’s plans in the early stages of the war.

The film is superbly acted and won an Academy Award for Best Sound, but the film was not very well received in both England and Germany. The film was bashed in Britain due to the fact that the British were the first to ever capture an Enigma coding device in the war courtesy of the HMS Bulldog and HMS Aubretia of the 3rd Escort Group in the North Atlantic on May 9th 1941, seven months before the U.S. entered the war. Critics in Germany were none to thrilled of the way U-boat crewmen were portrayed.

Continue Reading →