From NYTimes.com: Frank Frazetta, an illustrator whose vivid colors and striking brushstrokes conjured up fantastic worlds of musclebound heroes fighting with broad swords and battle axes to defend helpless women from horrible beasts, died on Monday in Fort Myers, Fla. He was 82.
The death, caused by a stroke, was confirmed by Rob Pistella and Steve Ferzoco, his business managers. In a telephone interview, Mr. Pistella said that Mr. Frazetta, who had a history of strokes, had returned from a Mother’s Day dinner with his family on Sunday night and fell ill. Emergency medical services were called and Mr. Frazetta was rushed to the hospital, where he died.
Read the rest of the article at the link below.
Iron Man 2 opened nation wide this past weekend. Early box office estimates have the latest Marvel superhero opus raking in over one-hundred and thirty million for it’s opening weekend. MVP’s own premiere Mutantville Player, Streebo was granted access to an early screening last week. Check out the video below to see what he thought of the latest effort from Robert Downey jr. and Jon Favreau. Remember to keep checking Mutantville.com for your latest in genre reviews and news.
Posted 2 months, 2 weeks ago at 3:18 pm. View Comments
Streebo made the trip out for the midnight opening of the remake of Wes Craven’s classic slasher film A Nightmare On Elm Street. Watch the video to hear his thoughts on the story, the kill scenes and Jackie Earle Haley’s performance as Freddy Krueger. For more up to the minute reviews of modern horror – keep checking Mutantville.com!
Part one:
Part two:
Posted 2 months, 3 weeks ago at 4:34 pm. View Comments
There are a few things that I am asked pretty often. I will not be answering the “what’s wrong with you?” question. Instead, I’ll be answering a question about film terminology.
“What is a Gaffer?” – A Gaffer is the chief lighting technician that is in charge of the electrical department.
Another one I get is “What is a Best Boy?” – This is the assistant to the chief lighting technician or the assistant to the key grip.
Here is a link to an online a film terminology glossary. This has many, many terms, from A/B printing to Zoom and lots in between.
So head over and check it out. Impress your friends, annoy your enemies. Caution: If you use too much of this terminology, you may annoy your friends as well. Hope you guys find this useful!
Posted 2 months, 3 weeks ago at 6:55 pm. View Comments
Back in 2007. Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino teamed up to make a two part feature film experience appropriately titled Grindhouse. Each director provided their own feature length film in the grindhouse cinema tradition including bad edits, missing reels, and noticeable film grain. It was a throwback film designed to not only be an enjoyable time at the movies, but to recall a point in history when the rejected films of society were celebrated in dollar theaters in big cities around the country. These films usually consisted of taboo subject matter including large amounts of sex, violence, and drug use and in some cases, all of those. This was a form of entertainment that a large portion of society wanted to see, but Hollywood was just not producing at the time. When Grindhouse came out in 2007, it inadvertently opened the flood gates to a style of filmmaking that would invoke a new renaissance of stylistic qualities.
io9 caught up with Batman and Robin scribe Grant Morrison and asked him about his upcoming miniseries The Return of Bruce Wayne. Grant also filled us in on the We3 movie, Joe The Barbarian, and his take on comic continuity.
In Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne, we’re going to see Batman travel to different historical epochs. For example, we’ll see Pirate Batman and Caveman Batman, who appeared in old-school Bat-yarns. What was your motivation for this and what was DC’s reaction when you pitched it?
Grant Morrison: First off, Batman also wore a kilt at one point! As for DC, they said, “OK, if anyone can do, it’s you.” I guess my inspiration is this – I like to pretend that every story that ever happened to Batman was real and is part of this one guy’s life. Even the Adam West Batman – let’s just say there’s this one year where Batman and Robin were out living this crazy and kooky life, and while the criminals were out killing people, they were just acting like lunatics.
The next year might be the Neal Adams Batman – suddenly Robin’s gone and we have a more brooding Batman.We’ve seen his origin scene a thousand times, we’ve seen his parents getting killed – I thought to myself, “What part of Batman’s life haven’t we talked about for a long time?” And it was those weird 1950s adventures or the Adam West Batman that everyone thought was really uncool when Chris Nolan’s movies came along. Batman comics used to be brightly colored! Batman would fight aliens! I wanted to do that stuff again, but in a more realistic, contemporary light.
From the Times Online: THE aliens are out there and Earth had better watch out, at least according to Stephen Hawking. He has suggested that extraterrestrials are almost certain to exist — but that instead of seeking them out, humanity should be doing all it that can to avoid any contact.The suggestions come in a new documentary series in which Hawking, one of the world’s leading scientists, will set out his latest thinking on some of the universe’s greatest mysteries.Alien life, he will suggest, is almost certain to exist in many other parts of the universe: not just in planets, but perhaps in the centre of stars or even floating in interplanetary space.Hawking’s logic on aliens is, for him, unusually simple. The universe, he points out, has 100 billion galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions of stars. In such a big place, Earth is unlikely to be the only planet where life has evolved.
[Major spoilers for Remember Me, and light spoilers on Kick-Ass, but the ending is not discussed. Lane does spoil it, so look out if you click through to his review.]Dear Anthony Lane,Nearly a year ago I wrote on this blog a response to your colleague David Denby for his review of Inglourious Basterds, in part because he felt the need to spoil the ending of a movie he did not like. In that open letter I mentioned something you did that bothered me: you spoiled the ending of the movie Watchmen, a movie you did not like. I have heard arguments that movie reviewers should be able to spoil movies, because now they are too straightjacketed by “rules.” I am sympathetic to this. The ending of the movie is part of the movie, and as a reader I might need to know about it to understand if it is any good. I never really got into Seinfeld until the brilliant final episode, and it was a wrongly mailed to me copy of Entertainment Weekly that spoiled the season 2 ending of Alias for me and got me into that show — and from there to LOST, a show I love. And a lot of times I want the review instead of the movie. I am never going to see Remember Me, but I totally wanted to hear about the absurd ending in which it turns out this dumb love story — surprise! — does not take place in the present day, but in 2001, and ends with our guy going up the Twin Towers the morning of September 11. So if you guys decided to open reviews up to discussing the endings, this could be a neat thing. It would put you ahead of the game maybe.But the New Yorker has not done this. I know, because after your review of Watchmen your magazine printed a letter to the editor from a reader who was bothered that you spoiled the ending. This was, I think, a gentle rebuke from your editor surely. In printing the letter the New Yorker was saying “hey, we think this guy has a valid point.” That may seem like a dumb thing to point out to someone like you, but the fact that you later spoiled the ending of Kick-Ass shows that you were unable to see that. And I don't think that you want to have a spoiler-ific discussion of movies anyway. I think you believe that movies should NOT be spoiled. That is why you only spoil movies like Kick-Ass and Watchmen — movies you hate. You are spoiling these not for discussion, but for spite.
Read the rest of Geoff’s letter over at his website Remarkable.
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From NYTimes.com: Frank Frazetta, an illustrator whose vivid colors and striking brushstrokes conjured up fantastic worlds of musclebound heroes fighting with broad swords and battle axes to defend helpless women from horrible beasts, died on Monday in Fort Myers, Fla. He was 82.
