Tag Archives: movies

First Trailer For ‘Thor 2′

Posted by on April 27, 2013 Comments Off

Thor: The Dark World is scheduled for November 8th, 2013. The villain is Malekith, the leader of the Dark Elves of Svartalheim.

From YouTube, via The Superficial

Matt Damon and Jodie Foster Are In A Sci-Fi Movie About Immigration

Posted by on April 10, 2013 Comments Off

You probably know South African director Neill Blomkamp from his first and only movie, District 9, which was about a ghetto full of aliens that look like giant shrimp. Well, it looks like he’s found his calling: after having tackled the especially South African issue of racial segregation in District 9, his next movie will look at the Western issue of immigration. It’s called Elysium, and it’s about a future in which a terrorist uses deadly force to illegally immigrate into America Elysium, in order to steal medical technology and destroy The Great Satan.

From YouTube, via Laughing Squid

Third Trailer For ‘Star Trek Into Darkness’ Is Even Longer

Posted by on March 23, 2013 Comments Off

The marketing machine must be gearing up for May 17th opening of the second Star Trek 2, because we have two new trailers in less than two weeks. This one has less Millennium Falcon than the last one, and more Benedict Cumberbatch – who everyone is in love with all of a sudden.

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From YouTube, via Laughing Squid

 

The New Star Trek 2 Has A Millennium Falcon In It

Posted by on March 11, 2013 1 comment

Back in December, J. J. Abrams released the teaser trailer for the second movie in his rebooted Star Trek franchise, which will be called Star Trek Into The Darkness. Since then, it was announced that he would also be directing Star Wars VII and now we suspiciously have a new trailer for Into The Darkness which includes a ship that looks exactly like the Millennium Falcon, with Kirk as Han Solo and Spock as Chewy.

Either Abrams shot this before he got the Star Wars gig, because he thought it would be his only chance to fly the Falcon, or he shot it after, because he wanted to bring the two universes closer together. In either case: no! Bad Abrams.

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From YouTube, via Laughing Squid

The Iron Man 3 Trailer Is Awesome

Posted by on March 6, 2013 Comments Off

Hopefully the movie will be every bit as awesome. But just as promised, Iron Patriot seems to be prominent in the movie, alongside the Mandarin.

This is the second trailer; the first one, was released in October:

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From YouTube, via Laughing Squid

Nate Silver Predicted Most Of The Oscar Winners, Too

Posted by on February 25, 2013 Comments Off

Nate Silver is now a famous statistician, after correctly calling the presidential election in every state for 2012, and all but one state for 2008. For his next trick, he’s applied his calculus on the movies: on the Friday morning before the Oscars, he published predictions for the main categories and got four of the six right:

  • Best picture: correctly called Argo, with Zero Dark Thirty being a distant second
  • Best director: incorrectly called Spielberg (Lincoln) as a narrow favorite over the actual winner, Ang Lee (Life of Pi). In the write-up, he explains that this was a shaky prediction to make, because his top two choices — Ben Affleck for Argo and Kathryn Bigelow for Zero Dark Thirty – were actually not even nominated.
  • Best actor: correctly called Daniel Day-Lewis (Lincoln), with Bradley Cooper being a distant second (Silver Linings Playbook)
  • Best actress: correctly called Jennifer Lawrence (Silver Linings Playbook), with Jessica Chastain (Zero Dark Thirty) not being far behind
  • Best supporting actor: this was a pretty big mistake, as he predicted the winner would be Tommy Lee Jones (Lincoln), with Philip Seymour Hoffman (The Master) as a second possibility not that far behind. But he forecast that the actual winner, Cristoph Waltz (Django Unchained), was third most likely to win — though very closely behind Hoffman.
  • Best supporting actress: correctly called Anne Hathaway (Les Misérables), with Sally Field (Lincoln) being a distant second.

Not bad at all. He made the predictions by looking at historical data for 16 other awards shows, like the Golden Globes, SAG Awards and BAFTAs. Now if only he could bring that kind of forecasting accuracy to economics.

Nate Silver

 

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From The New York Times, via Slashdot

And Now They’re Making A Google Movie

Posted by on February 14, 2013 Comments Off

Probably because there are not one, but two Apple movies coming out (jOBS and the yet-unnamed Aaron Sorkin Steve Jobs movie), it looks like Google decided to buy themselves a two-hour ad about how awesome and genius-dictator-free their company is. It’s starring Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson:

From YouTube, via Laughing Squid

‘Spring Breakers’ Trailer

Posted by on January 21, 2013 Comments Off

Spring Breakers is about four girls on spring break in Florida who decide to turn to crime to keep the party going. A James Franco you’d hardly recognize helps them out. The movie was shot in and around the St. Petersburg area. Its wide release date is March 22nd.

From YouTube, via The Superficial

‘Zero Dark Thirty’ Is Very Accurate, Right Down To Maya

Posted by on January 14, 2013 Comments Off

While the story of the raid in which bin Laden was killed is widely known in quite a lot of detail, the timeline leading up to it is not, since much of it is classified. That makes it hard to answer the question of how accurate Zero Dark Thirty is, since most of the movie focuses on the intelligence work leading up to the discovery of bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad. But the last part of the film, which shows the raid itself, is quite accurate, right down to including a dog in the raiding party. A lot is obviously left out, but what is shown matches up with accounts in the news.

 

So what about the bulk of the movie: the intelligence-gathering aspect? Few people know the answer to that for sure, but it looks like it’s also pretty accurate. The character of Maya is based on a real CIA analyst around the same age, who has the same give-’em-hell attitude, who worked on catching bin Laden for almost a decade, and who was the lone champion for exploiting his courier network. In fact, the Washington Post reported that “Maya’s” combative personality cost her a promotion from GS-13 to GS-14 — even though most CIA insiders agree that the attitude is not only needed to be successful at her kind of job, but also that it’s not exactly rare inside the agency. Still, she got a cash bonus for catching bin Laden, and the CIA’s highest medal, not involving combat. But, a few other agents also got other awards, so then this happened:

“She hit ‘reply all’ ” to an e-mail announcement of the awards, a second former CIA official said. The thrust of her message, the former official said, was: “You guys tried to obstruct me. You fought me. Only I deserve the award.” — from The Washington Post article

And that sounds exactly like Maya. (The agent’s real name is obviously something else.) The writer and director based the movie on first-hand accounts: they talked to a lot of people at the CIA, including the woman Maya is based on, so they probably got a decent reading of her. Given that they got to know her well enough to portray her personality accurately, it stands to reason that the rest of what she told them — the history of the mission — is also accurate.

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From Washington Post

The First Christmas Movie Ever Was Made In 1898

Posted by on December 26, 2012 Comments Off

Maybe ‘film’ is a more appropriate description of it since, at only a minute in length, it’s not really long enough to be a movie. Anyway, it’s called Santa Claus, and it shows a nanny putting two kids to bed, then — in a bubble which seems really advanced for 1898 — it shows Santa going into the chimney. He delivers the presents, then disappears… which makes us wonder why he didn’t just enter like that.

According to IMDb, the movie was made in the UK, the kids are actually siblings, and the actor who played Santa is uncredited.

From YouTube, via Neatorama