It’s rare that a truly original film comes through the system and actually make us take note. The upcoming animated film from Dreamworks, Rise of the Guardians (formerly Guardians of Childhood) is just that.
With an all-star cast an a premise we haven’t liked this much since Nightmare Before Christmas, this flick could be our new favorite from Dreamworks. Here’s the premise:
 
More than a collection of the well-known childhood legends, Rise of the Guardians tells the story of a group of heroes — each with extraordinary abilities. When an evil spirit known as Pitch lays down the gauntlet to take over the world, the immortal Guardians must join forces for the first time to protect the hopes, beliefs and imagination of children all over the world. This epic 3D adventure stars Chris Pine as Jack Frost, Alec Baldwin as North (Santa Claus), Hugh Jackman as Bunnymund (Easter Bunny), Isla Fisher as Tooth (Tooth Fairy) and Jude Law as Pitch (The Boogeyman).
 
With a scheduled release of November 21, 2012, you can expect this one to be the big hit of the 2012 holiday season (provided The Hobbit doesn’t steal our hearts). Take a look at Santa looking bad ass after the jump.

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I tend to think of Scorsese as a master of genre films—he’s done gangster films (Goodfellas, Casino), comedy (After Hours, The King of Comedy), police drama (The Departed), psychological thriller (Shutter Island), boxing (Raging Bull), biopic (Kundun, The Aviator, No Direction Home), concert (Shine a Light), historical (Gangs of New York), literary classic (The Age of Innocence), even a remake Cape Fear) and a sequel (The Color of Money)—but he tends to bring such a distinct touch to the films, they don’t quite feel like genre films.

So when I heard he was taking a stab at a kiddie flick, Hugo immediately shot to my most anticipated Scorsese film to date (outside, of course, of the fictional film he was making with Larry David as the money-hurling mob boss in Curb Your Enthusiasm)—added to that who wouldn’t be interested in Scorsese’s take on 3D?

And Hugo doesn’t disappoint. It’s not the most compelling story, but for all its two-hour-seven-minute running time, I wasn’t bored once. There’s a lot more going on, and I’ll get to that in a moment, but first the rundown.

Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield) is an urchin who haunts a Paris railway station in the early 1930s, repairing its clocks and stealing various cogs and sprockets to rebuild the homunculus he and his father (Jude Law) were working on right up to his death. While Hugo tends to remain out of the sight and mind of the station Inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen), he’s less successful evading the eye of the toymaker he robs (Ben Kingsley). Caught trying to thieve a wind-up mouse, he’s forced to give up his father’s notebook, which includes all the instructions on repairing the mechanical man and provokes a strange reaction from the toymaker.

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Steven Soderbergh seems to have found his new Clooney, as Matt Damon has helped the man snag a #1 spot twice now with The Informant! and as of this weekend, Contagion.

Hard to believe a film about a virus wiping out the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, and Laurence Fishburne could bring in $25 million worldwide in the first weekend, but that’s just what it’s done. Not terrible, considering the film’s budget was a measly $60 million (most of which likely went to the ensemble cast).

Following up in the top 5, The Help finally got knocked from its #1 spot for the first time in 3 weeks and finally hit the $140 million mark. In third, another new release, as the “Rocky of UFC” movie, Warrior, opened to a quiet response, with only $5.6 million.

In fourth place, political thriller The Debt managed to drop off significantly from last week and only pull in an estimated $5 million this weekend.

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Martin Scorsese is a genius. No, I don’t mean he’s just talented or gifted or lucky (well, he may be those too). I mean he’s a certified genius. He’s one man who found his calling early, stuck with it and over the years has created some of the finest moments in cinema history.

And now, it looks like he’s done it again with his latest film Hugo. Based on the novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick, the film tells the story of orphan Hugo (Asa Butterfield) who lives inside the walls of a Paris train station.

His days are spent trying to unravel a mystery that links his late father to an ill-mannered toy shop owner living below him and a heart-shaped lock which seems to have no key. With the help from an eccentric girl named Isabelle (Chloe Moretz), he embarks on an adventure to solve the mystery. The film also features Jude Law as Hugo’s father and Ben Kingsley as Georges Melies, Isabelle’s godfather.

Based on this trailer alone I can safely say the movie looks terrific. Plus, Scorsese and Cholie Moretz. Forget about it, I’m in.

Hugo is set to arrive in theaters on November 23. Check out the trailer after the jump.

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Robert Downey Jr. has had a pretty amazing resurgence in his career in the past few years. Mostly due to Favreau’s excellent use of him in both Iron Man and Iron Man 2, but an unrelated film is what put Downey at the top of people’s tongues for time after that. That film starred the once Hollywood bad boy as the world’s first detective, Sherlock Holmes.

The film blew up across the globe, pulling in over $500 million worldwide, and warranting a brand new sequel, that we’re now getting the first look at. Titled “A Game of Shadows, the film looks to give us a pretty awesome rivalry between Sherlock and Moriarty, the shadowy villain from the first film. Here’s the official premise.

Sherlock Holmes has always been the smartest man in the room…until now. There is a new criminal mastermind at large–Professor Moriarty (Jared Harris)–and not only is he Holmes’ intellectual equal, but his capacity for evil, coupled with a complete lack of conscience, may actually give him an advantage over the renowned detective.

Check out the first full trailer for the film (which will likely be attached to prints of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 this weekend) and be sure to catch Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows in theaters on December 15th.

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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 not as many as last week. But still, the release of An Education, Collateral and Sherlock Holmes (pictured above with Robert Downey, Jr and Jude Law) is reason enough to be excited. Plus, there’s always next week. . . and the week after that.

Check them out:

Film

Alice in Wonderland (2-Disc Special Un-Anniversary Edition) ~ Kathryn Beaumont, Ed Wynn, Richard Haydn (DVD)

Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel ~ Anna Faris, Christina Applegate, Justin Long (Blu-ray and DVD)

An Education ~ Carey Mulligan, Peter Sarsgaard (Blu-ray and DVD)

Collateral ~ Tom Cruise, Jamie Foxx (Blu-ray)

I Sell the Dead ~ Dominic Monaghan, Ron Perlman (Blu-ray and DVD)

Rivals of Sherlock Holmes: Set 2 ~ Derek Jacobi, Judy Geeson, Jean Marsh (DVD)

Sherlock Holmes ~ Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law, Rachel McAdams (Blu-ray and DVD)

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Several prognosticators predicted that the one-two punch of Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler co-starring in a romantic comedy would equal box office gold. Well, until the reviews started trickling in. When the dust settled, The Bounty Hunter had amassed a truly rotten score of 9% favorable reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. Ouch.

Despite that, the film made $2 1Million, good enough to place it in third place for the weekend. With a production budget of around $40 Million, it is way to early to call this a flop. $21 Million is a respectable opening weekend take.

The Red Queen and company from Alice in Wonderland continue to surprise everyone.Now in its third weekend in release, Alice is still bringing in some pretty big numbers. It dropped 45% over last weekend, for $34.5 Million, bringing its three week cumulative total to a fantastic $265 Million.

So what box-office star beat out Aniston for the number two spot? Would you believe nobody?  A cast of relative unknowns starred in Diary of  Wimpy Kid, which you probably have never heard of unless you happen to have elementary school-aged children.

It is a hot book franchise for those who run in the pre-tween circles, and apparently that was enough to buoy its box-office take.  Diary narrowly edged out The Bounty Hunter with $21.8 Million, but with a much more modest budget of $14 Million, it is already profitable.  There are plenty of books (4 already out, with plans for a fifth this year) to pillage for a franchise, too.

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Remakes and sequels are a dime a dozen. While Repo Men is neither of those, it bears incredible similarities with Repo! The Genetic Opera, a rock musical released in 2006. The films are very much the same in content and style, while the stories that they tell are very, very different.

Remy (Jude Law) seems like a normal guy. He’s got a wife and child, lives in a house in the suburbs, drives a fancy Volkswagon SUV. What isn’t so normal is Remy’s job. He repossess people’s artificial organs when they can’t afford their payments to The Union, the company that makes and finances the organs to people in need.

Anyone who becomes late with their payments is hunted down by The Union’s “repo men” and their artificial organs are repossessed, usually resulting in their immediate death. Remy and his partner Jake (Forest Whitaker) don’t mind being repo men, in fact they quite enjoy it. But when Remy’s wife decides maybe her husband should consider a career change, everything changes.

It’s hard to discuss this film’s plot without giving away the two major twists that make this film interesting, but I’ll just say that the Remy you meet in the beginning of the film is very, very different from the Remy at the end of the film. Think of Christian Bale’s character in Equilibrium as a comparison. Jude Law does a great job with this transformation, and Whitaker isn’t too shabby either.

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In the 1990′s, a pair of French directors brought us two fantastical movies unlike anything I had ever seen before. Delicatessen (1991) and La cité des enfants perdus (The City of Lost Children, 1995) were wildly imaginative, twisted, and haunting, but they were also quite beautiful. Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet packed their movies with so many visual delights that repeated viewings were necessary to absorb even a fraction of them. I forgot how much I loved those films. . . until now.

Watching Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, I experienced the same awe and wonderment that those French films evoked in me. Imaginarium is like a grown up version of The Wizard of Oz, painted liberally by the storytelling brush of  the Grimm brothers. It’s dark and twisty, colorful and lovely all at the same time.

Mainstream audiences might recognize some of Gilliam’s work (Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Twelve Monkeys, Brazil, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), but this film will probably not garner him any new fans, it is just too bizarre. The Gilliam loyalist, however, will be richly rewarded by this visual masterpiece. Before I continue, just a warning that this review contains mild spoilers.

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Guy Ritchie puts his unmistakable stylistic stamp on this re-imagining of the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Robert Downey, Jr. plays the slightly disheveled, deranged, but brilliant Holmes, who may or may not be under the influence of various pharmaceuticals at any given moment of the film. Downey’s version of Holmes is a devilishly clever mad-scientist type who happens to be a martial arts expert, an astute observer, an alchemist, and a forensics aficionado.

He also has the amazing ability to call upon whatever skill set that a particular predicament warrants. For me, it was a little hard to swallow. However, Downey darn near pulls it off. He is completely convincing as a man slightly-off-his rocker who has a penchant for scrappy street fighting, and his performance alone is worth the price of admission.

Jude Law plays his trusty sidekick Watson, and the relationship works surprisingly well on screen.  The two banter and bicker like an old married couple, and are constantly rescuing one another from certain death. The fact that Watson is engaged, and will soon be moving out of Holmes’ life,  provides for some comedic moments. Holmes behaves like a petulant child during a dinner where he is to meet Watson’s betrothed, played by Kelly Reilly (Eden Lake.)

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Many trailers these days follow a specific formula: send the audience in one direction, give them the twist, and show everybody in the film looking really, really cool. This formula is written on trailer editors bulletin boards. Sadly, that means that when it’s used incorrectly, the trailer, and in man cases the film, become a subject for ridicule.

This happens to be the case with the trailer for Jude Law and Forest Whitaker’s Repo Men. The film follows quite close to the premise of 2007′s Repo! A Genetic Rock Opera, without any of the singing, or Anthony Stewart Head. In this film, a conglomerate puts artificial organs on an open market for people to purchase on a payment plan. When those people can’t pay, the Repo Men step in to essentially “repossess the merchandise.”

The trailer does a pretty good job for the first 90 seconds or so, but then is subject for many shoulder shrugs and “really?!!?” exclamations towards the end. We’re all aware that Law and Whitaker aren’t known for their best picks in projects (I’m looking at you, Battlefield Earth and A.I.), but do we really need a sci-fi thriller-turned-action-blowout from the two actors?

It just doesn’t seem like the best use of their talents. Like Helen Mirren playing the Bride of Frankenstein. We all know she could do it, but is it necessary?

Check out the red band trailer for yourself after the jump, and see how the preview does it justice on April 2nd, when Repo Men hits theaters.

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It looks like the Family Guy special which was suppose to promote Windows 7 has found a new sponsor since Microsoft backed out late last week. Warner Bros. Pictures stepped up and took the opportunity to pitch director Guy Ritchie’s upcoming Sherlock Holmes film starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law.  It would have been way funnier if Apple took the spot but this should be pretty cool too.

Family Guy Presents: Seth & Alex’s Almost Live Comedy Show is still set to air on November 8 with sneak peeks of the Sherlock Holmes film set to come out Christmas Day. The original concept for the show was to feature Windows 7 promotion spots instead of commercials. However, there’s been no word on how tightly integrated the Holmes content will be by comparison. Hopefully Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane will somehow tie-in the new material for the show itself as originally intended.

Here’s hoping Warner Bros. has watched Family Guy and understands what they’re in for. I’m all for covering stories but the last think anyone needs is yet another update about this special episode. I would hazard a guess and say at this stage this is a done deal. Oh no, I didn’t just jinx myself by saying that did I?