While this past week had a few fun trailers, unfortunately there wasn’t anything that I’m going to be waiting in line opening night to see.  It seems that we have fully transitioned out of the exciting summer films and are now getting prepared for the mediocre releases that didn’t quite make the summer block.

This week we have a couple big budget films that I feel obligated to talk about, a couple smaller indies I’m a little more excited for, and — Moon Nazis!

Real Steel

Click to see the trailer

There was an early teaser that came out for this last year, but this is the first chance that we really get to see the story of this film.  On one level you instantly want to dismiss this film as “Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots: The Movie,” sure to be filled with terrible dialogue and cheesy one-liners.  But on another level you hope that this interesting premise might actually turn out to be a fresh take on inspiring boxing films.

Hugh Jackman (X-Men, The Prestige) is usually pretty decent in whatever he does, but who I would be most interested to see is Evangeline Lilly in this role, who is most famous as Kate from Lost.  Although she was in The Hurt Locker for a bit, this will definitely be her biggest step into features.

While part of me is excited to see some fun robot violence, I feel ultimately this film has to disappoint.  Everyone is going to be expecting Transformers quality CGI, but there is no way they had the budget to pull that off.  And, I get the feeling that people are going to want this film to have more heart that it will end up having.

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Though it was upsetting to see Darren Aronofsky to walk away from helming a reboot of the classic 1980′s sci-fi franchise Robocop, we knew that him working on a sequel to X-Men Origins: Wolverine may be a better fit. Also, we were sure MGM would find someone to take on the half-cop, half-machine.

It looks like that creative team is finally coming together. MGM already announced that foreign action director Jose Padilha will be taking on the role of director for the upcoming film, and now news is coming in that the studio has hired Josh Zetumer to pen the script.

Who exactly is Josh Zetumer? Well from what Deadline has been able to dig up, he looks to be Hollywood’s next big thing, if we ever get to see one of his films.

Zetumer first got on the radar when he wrote the script Infiltrator, which made the Black List. That spy thriller script is set at Warner Bros as a potential starring vehicle for Leonardo DiCaprio.

He also wrote drafts of Dune when Peter Berg was going to direct that remake at Paramount, and he scripted a fourth installment of The Bourne Identity before Universal instead developed a spinoff with Tony Gilroy. Zetumer just turned in Vale, a supernatural action thriller script at Warner Bros.

So while Detroit is still battling with getting their real-life RoboCop statue to kick off, we could be seeing more of this celluloid version very soon. The next question then becomes: who will they get to play protagonist Alex Murphy aka RoboCop? We’re sure to get an answer soon enough.

You have to love the Internets. Things tend to come out or people are more likely to release things these days because they know they will probably end up with a pretty decent sized audience. Recently, we had video of a young Eric Stoltz as the first Marty McFly in Back to the Future and now actress Sean Young brings us video she shot while making David Lynch’s epic, yet flawed, masterpiece Dune.

Shot during 1983 while Young was in production on the film in Mexico, the video shows much of the cast and crew (including co-stars Sting and Kyle MacLachlan) hard at work attempting to realize director Lynch’s vision. If only we could hear what they were saying instead of just seeing them. Oh well, still love the Super 8 camera.

It’s always interesting to watch videos like this and be able to go back and see how things used to be. Plus, insights into a film so many have mixed feelings about are always appreciated. For me, the film was somewhat confusing and a bit of a mess when I first experienced it. But as time has gone on I’ve started to have more of an appreciation for it but haven’t seen it in some time.

This video only serves to spark my interest again. Maybe it’s time for a re-watch? Check out the video after the break.

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This week sees the release of several new movies and TV shows, some for the first time ever on Blu-ray. Of the ones coming out this week, we’re excited for a few of them in particular.

These include District 13: Ultimatum, Elizabeth, Tombstone, the Criterion Blu-ray release of Ang Lee’s Civil War epic Ride with the Devil featuring Tobey Maguire and the Blu-ray release of David Lynch’s misunderstood adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel Dune (pictured above with Kyle MacLachlan and Sean Young).

Movies

Armageddon ~ Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck (Blu-ray)

District 13: Ultimatum ~ Cyril Raffaelli, David Belle, Philippe Torreton, Daniel Duval (Blu-ray and DVD)

Dune ~ Kyle MacLachlan, Virginia Madsen (Blu-ray)

Elizabeth ~ Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush (Blu-ray)

Elizabeth: The Golden Age ~ Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush (Blu-ray)

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It’s been reported by Entertainment Weekly, that Pierre Morel – director of last year’s Taken, and the fun, French Parkour film, District B13, has signed on to direct the new adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune. The movie, which was originally to be helmed by Peter Berg, kind of fell to the wayside when Berg seemed to become more interested in the (clearly higher quality) property of Battleship: The Movie. The good news is that this means Dune could get many more scenes of throat-punching.

Paramount, the studio backing the new film, is also supposedly looking for a new writer to work on incorporating the sensibilities of the French director. Morel is apparently is looking to make a much closer adaptation than the previous version of the script by Quantum of Solace screenwriter, Josh Zetumer. In case you’re not familiar, Dune is the story of Paul Atreides, and the futuristic inter-galactic feudal system involving his family’s rule of the desert planet Arrakis.

The story explores the politics, religion, technology and ecology of it’s incredible in-depth universe. The book was previously made into a movie in 1984 by David Lynch, and been brought to television through a couple of mini-series on the Sci-Fi Channel.

As we sometimes say around The Flickcast HQ: “This is some funny stuff.” And sometimes, we’re actually right about that. Case in point is this parody of David Lynch’s sci-fi “masterpiece” Dune, created by YouTube user Devho89 and his pals at Sequential Pictures.

Dune, which is, of course, a big screen adaptation of the Frank Herbert novel of the same name, was met with mixed reviews and somewhat lackluster response at the box office when it hit theaters in 1984. Well, maybe the film didn’t do as well as it could have because it didn’t have these redubbed voices in it? Sure, that’s a possibly.

Judge for yourself and check out the video after the jump. Oh, and don’t forget to put your goddamn hand in the goddamn box of pain.

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Yes, you read that headline correctly. With at least one costly yet tepid mini-series and a decent, if somewhat misguided, feature film already out there based on Frank Herbert’s classic novel Dune, it looks like producer Kevin Misher and director Peter Berg are giving a big screen version of the novel another go. According to an interview over at io9, Misher confirmed that he and Berg are indeed working on a script for a “reboot” of the Dune franchise and expect to deliver said script shortly.

According to Misher in the article, Dune is “one of my favorite books of all time, and I made a movie with Pete (Berg) called The Rundown. . . so we decided to get back together. Pete had loved the book as well. It’s a great opportunity for us.” As for the progress they’ve made so far, Misher said: “We’re working on the script right now. We’re going to turn it in shortly. The script is coming in, we’re hoping to get a green light shortly.”

So, apparently all systems are go for a reboot of the Dune franchise. However, as much as I loved the novel and would be interested in  a new, updated feature film version, I’m not sure the guy who directed Very Bad Things and Hancock and the producer who made The Interpreter and The Scorpion King are the right guys for the job.

In my world where I run the studios, I think I would assign this task to a different team. Who would I pick? How about Christopher Nolan and Charles Roven or Zack Snyder and Lawrence Gordon?

I think either of those teams would do a bang up job. Peter Berg and Kevin Misher? I guess we’ll see.