Cinematographer Dan Mindel ASC, BSC will be reteaming with JJ Abrams to shoot Star Wars Episode VII. That comes as no surprise as Mindel worked with Abrams on the Star Trek films and Mission: Impossible III. The big news is that Mindel says that Episode 7 will be shot on Kodak film stock 5219 film, NOT digital cameras like the last couple prequel movies. The Phantom Menace was the last Star Wars film to be shot with film cameras (although some trivia fanatics will note, the movie did include a digitally photographed shot).

This is really, really, extremely good news. Shooting on film…

As I mentioned on The MovieByte Podcast Ep. 54, I have been working on a post for one of my personal sites, ChadTalksMovies.com, for two weeks now, all centered around the character and world of John Carter. Here’s a short excerpt:

Superman. Flash Gordon. Star Wars. Avatar. These characters/films share a common ancestry through Edgar Rice Burrough’s classic novel A Princess of Mars. The creators of these and so many others at some point in their lives picked up this story and were absorbed into the world of Barsoom, introduced to a man named John Carter, a man transported to a world apart…

The planned two sequels to James Cameron’s highly successful 2009 film Avatar have now become three sequels, announces Deadline Hollywood. The three sequels will be shot at the same time, with Avatar 2 set for release in December 2016.

Commented Cameron: “Building upon the world we created with Avatar has been a rare and incredibly rewarding experience. In writing the new films, I’ve come to realize that Avatar’s world, story and characters have become even richer than I anticipated, and it became apparent that two films would not be enough to capture everything I wanted to put on screen.…

Disney announced yesterday that they had teamed up with producer Harvey Weinstein to bring Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl book series to the big screen.

The live-action film will be based on the first two books of the series, titled Artemis Fowl and Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident. Screenwriter Michael Goldenberg, probably best known as the screenwriter for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, will be penning the screenplay, and Jane Rosenthal and Robert DeNiro will be producers as well.

For those who don’t know, Artemis Fowl tells the story of a 12-year-old criminal mastermind who…

RED, a 2010 film starring Bruce Willis, Mary-Louise Parker, John Malkovich, Morgan Freeman, and Helen Mirren, was great because it brought something new to the table: older actors, most not known for starring in action films, coming together to create an action film that works as both a good action film and as a good comedy too. However, I was slightly concerned for the sequel; could the filmmakers capture what was special about the first film without rehashing it in the second? Luckily, I think that they (mostly) pulled it off.

The Mission

RED 2 picks up where the first film left off, with…

For those of you who didn’t know, a biopic about the life of Queen’s lead singer Freddie Mercury has been in the works, with Sacha Baron Cohen starring as the late rock singer, who died of AIDS in 1991. However, according to Nikki Finke over at Deadline, there have been creative differences between the actor and the surviving members of the band, Brian May and Roger Taylor, who have script and director approval for the film. 

The reason is that the band wanted to make more of a PG movie about Queen while Cohen was counting on a gritty R-rated tell-all centered around the gifted gay singer.…

Part of what made the original Star Wars trilogy so great was its use of actors who were at the time unknowns, especially Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker and Harrison Ford as Han Solo. Even the prequel trilogy, as widely derided as it is (I’ll save my personal opinion for another time…), used many then-unknown actors, such as Hayden Christensen as Anakin Skywalker and even, to an extent, Ewan McGregor. However, there’s a rumor circulating that we might be seeing a few familiar faces in the first film of the new trilogy, and I don’t mean “familiar” as in “from previous Star Wars films.”

Latino…

One word: WHY.

The Story

R.I.P.D. tells the story of Nick Walker (Ryan Reynolds), a police officer who opens the film with the burying of some mysterious pieces of gold under an orange tree in his backyard. We quickly learn that the gold was found by him and his partner, Bobby (Kevin Bacon), during a drug bust, but Nick tells Bobby that he has decided to return the gold. Later that day, during a raid, Bobby shoots Nick, killing him and sending him to the office of Mildred Proctor (Mary-Louise Parker), head of the Rest In Peace Department, or R.I.P.D. for short. The organization’s purpose is…

Following my review of World War Z, a discussion broke out in the comments section regarding the merits (and demerits) of the film’s approach to the zombiepocalypse. One of the most interesting things this discussion yielded was the assertion that WWZ is “barely passable” as a zombie film. Why? Mainly because there is no such thing as a fast-moving zombie. The movie shows us infected humans - crushing armies, leveling cities, chasing Brad Pitt hither and thither – but these feral chompers cannot be designated “zombies”. Real zombies don’t move like that.

To tell the truth, I’d never heard…