Visual Effects shortlist:

Aus­tralia
The Curi­ous Case of Ben­jamin But­ton
The Dark Knight
Hell­boy II: The Golden Army
Iron Man
Jour­ney to the Cen­ter of the Earth
The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

These will be nar­rowed down on the 15th of Jan­u­ary after mem­bers of the Academy’s visual effects branch have viewed 15 minute clips of these movies, pre­sum­ably show­cas­ing their effects. The mem­bers shall then vote, and then there will be three.

Makeup shorltist:

The Curi­ous Case of Ben­jamin But­ton
The Dark Knight
Hell­boy II: The Golden Army
The Reader
Synec­doche, New York
Tropic Thun­der
The Wrestler

There is only a ten minute clip for these movies, they will be voted on on 17th Jan­u­ary, to pro­duce the final list of 3.

The 81st Acad­emy Awards are on EDIT: Feb­ru­ary 22nd.

Philly­Film­Girl has posted a new videos show­ing shots of Shia LaBoeuf, Megan Fox and Ramon Rodriguez run­ning away from some­thing, then fol­lowed by a calm but pac­ing Isabel Lucas as ‘Alice’, a pos­si­ble ‘shell’ for the Rav­age transformer.

In Novem­ber 2008, in a flurry of excite­ment from Conan pro­ducer Avi Lerner it was announced that Brett Rat­ner would be direct­ing the 2010 Conan remake — the ini­tial state­ment in the Hol­ly­wood Reporter implied that Rat­ner had com­mit­ted him­self to the sequel, how­ever it seems that Rat­ner is still in the final phases of nego­ti­a­tion, accord­ing to the LA Times, with the screen­writ­ers pol­ish­ing the script to incor­po­rate new ideas thrown up in the discussion.

Lerner remains pos­i­tive that Rat­ner is per­fect for the job:

“He has the pas­sion and feel­ing for this project–he even wrote a story about Conan when he was 10 years old. He under­stands the char­ac­ter, he ana­lyzed the script really well. He knows how to make this a really big movie. I like his child­like enthusiasm–he almost sees these movies as won­der­ful toys. What can I say, he’s a nice, lik­able Jew­ish boy.”

Ratner’s involve­ment hinges on “a few obsta­cles,” namely “a bud­get, on how to do the spe­cial effects and exactly where we’d shoot the film.” — Early thoughts point to a stu­dio in Bul­garia and some exte­rior work in China.

But when the LA Times con­tacted Rat­ner things turned a lit­tle sour:

“I am not doing ‘Conan’ now. This is totally pre­ma­ture. For now, ‘Conan’ is only a devel­op­ment deal. I have a deal at Para­mount and I’m doing ‘Bev­erly Hills Cop [4]’ first, no mat­ter what. Avi shouldn’t be telling you or any­one else in the press what I’m doing.”

We’ll have to wait and see how this one develops.

Fol­low­ing the Aronof­sky announce­ment MTV caught up with the pro­duc­ers Brad Fis­cher and Mike Medavoy to answer the rush of new questions.

Sequel?

When quizzed about the fourth Robo­cop movie’s inte­gra­tion into the exist­ing uni­verse the pro­duc­ers stated:

“None of [the ear­lier films are] going to be canon­i­cal, as a mat­ter of fact,” Fis­cher revealed. “I wouldn’t say it’s a direct sequel.“
“Def­i­nitely not a sequel,” Medavoy added, say­ing he pre­ferred the term “reimagining.”

Why make a new movie?

But why a “Robo­cop” reboot at all? Medavoy, who worked on the ear­lier three films, said it’s because the themes explored in the first film, of fad­ing human­ity in the face of cor­po­rate and com­mer­cial omnipres­ence, have only become more rel­e­vant in the inter­ven­ing 15 years.

“The themes of machines and tech­nol­ogy, for instance, that’s cer­tainly become even more preva­lent today in terms of man giv­ing up cer­tain things to his cre­ations and his tech­nol­ogy and his reliance to that. It’s pretty provoca­tive stuff,” he said. “You’ve got peo­ple today with all kinds of dif­fer­ent implants and mechan­i­cal implants. Where does that per­son become no longer human? After the first one? After 50 per­cent of the brain gets replaced? A lot of the themes that we dealt with in the orig­i­nal are still very inter­est­ing to us.”

Rat­ing?

So many remakes and sequels have been dumbed down to a younger audi­ence, there’s a big fear that the new Robo­cop movie may be bun­dled into the PG-13 group with all the nitty-gritty-grind-n-gore cut out. This is what Medavoy had to say on that,

“Well I was involved with the orig­i­nal ‘Robo­cop,’ and it was an R, and the like­li­hood is that this will be an R. It’s likely to be an R unless the direc­tor cuts back on some of it.”

No details on the plot were announced.

In July 2008 at Comic-con MGM announced to the world that Dar­ren Aronof­sky, (direc­tor of The Wrestler, The Foun­tain, Requiem for a Dream an Pi) shall be helm­ing the 2010 recre­ation of Robo­cop. Screen­writer David Self (Road to Perdi­tion) will be pen­ning the script.

Mary Par­ent, MGM’s chair­man said: “Dar­ren is unde­ni­ably one of the most tal­ented, orig­i­nal and vis­ceral film­mak­ers, and David is one of the great­est writ­ers in Hol­ly­wood. All of us at MGM couldn’t be more excited.” Whilst pro­duc­ers David Thwaites and Brad Fis­cher added: “With a film­maker of Dar­ren Aronofsky’s vision and imag­i­na­tion and a writer of David Self’s cal­iber, we are poised to bring to the screen an enter­tain­ing and provoca­tive film, which will now be under the cre­ative guid­ance of two of the best sto­ry­tellers work­ing in our indus­try today.”

Now all we need is Clint Mansell to do the score… . All of Aronosky’s movies are pure gold, need­less to say I am very excited about this movie.

Aronofsky’s pre­vi­ous work

Pi

Requiem for a Dream

The Foun­tain

The Wrestler

Via SHH:

The Pro­duc­ers Guild of Amer­ica has just nom­i­nated the movie for its annual Pro­duc­ers Guild Awards tak­ing place Sat­ur­day, Jan­u­ary 24 at the Hol­ly­wood Pal­la­dium. The Dark Knight is going up against The Curi­ous Case of Ben­jamin But­ton, Frost/Nixon, Milk and Slum­dog Mil­lion­aire for Best Picture.

Things are look­ing on course for an Oscar nom­i­na­tion come Jan­u­ary 22nd!

In speak­ing with First Show­ing, the Quan­tum of Solace direc­tor, Marc Fos­ter, revealed that he is not keen on return­ing for the 23rd James Bond movie, despite an offer:

“They offered me the next one, but at this point the pres­sure is so intense — it’s a year of not hav­ing a life. And I don’t know if I want to do that again. It’s lit­er­ally not hav­ing a life, and I mean that, it’s not exag­ger­ated. I feel like life is short, you have to find a balance.”

Who should direct the next Bond movie?

In Decem­ber 2008 Com­ing Soon had the oppor­tu­nity to catch up with Daniel Craig, quizzing him about Quan­tum of Solace’s crit­i­cal reac­tion and the future of James Bond:

CS: What more do you want to do with Bond? What other parts of him would you like to explore?
Craig: Well, I gen­uinely think we’ve got a blank page now. We’ve fin­ished this story off. “Quan­tum of Solace” was exactly the right thing to do. We started some­thing with “Casino Royale” and we wrapped it all up with “Quan­tum of Solace.” We’re ready to begin again and we can do what we want.

CS: So you think that the next one will be a throw­back to another Bond era?
Craig: Sub­marines and outer space!

CS: Are you all still look­ing at unused Ian Flem­ing story ele­ments, since that worked so well in “Casino Royale?“
Craig: Yeah, but there’s noth­ing left. It’s all done unless some­one finds a dirty man­u­script under the couch at [Fleming’s Jamaican estate] Gold­en­Eye, we’re stuffed.

Daniel Craig has also been speak­ing to Col­lider about Bond 23:

“We’ve fin­ished this story as far as I’m con­cerned. We’ve got a great set of bad guys. There is an orga­ni­za­tion that we can use when­ever we want to. The rela­tion­ship between Bond and M is secure and Felix is secure. Let’s try and find where Mon­eypenny came from and where Q comes from. Let’s do all that and have some fun with it.”

“We don’t know when we’re going to do the next Bond. Nobody’s think­ing about it at the moment. We’re giv­ing it a rest for the moment. If I can squeeze some­thing in next year I will…but I haven’t fig­ured out what that’ll be yet. But noth­ing in the cold.”