Posts Tagged: Film

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Of all the wonderful opportunities that come along with being a parent, introducing your child to your favourite books, movies, comics, and music is one of the greatest. When deciding on how to decorate our nursery, my wife and I quickly settled on a theme inspired by two of Hayao Miyazaki’s wonderful films: My Neighbour Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service. These woodblock-inspired posters from Bill Mudron would fit beautifully in our nursery. The drawn back perspective, with an emphasis on Miyazaki’s wonderful worlds, is a nice contrast to the character-centric imagery that you often see associated with films. You get a strong sense of the characters living in this world, of it continuing on past the rolling credits. Terrific stuff.

Posters of Mudron’s Studio Ghibli woodblock prints are available through his online store.

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“After a bidding war with Sony, Warner Bros has won the rights to adapt Joe Haldeman’s Hugo- and Nebula-winning sci-fi novel The Forever War,” Tor.com revealed today. The script will be written by Jon Spaihts, writer of Ridley Scott’s much-maligned (but underrated) Prometheus. Tor.com also spilled the beans about the film’s lead: Channing Tatum, of Magic Mike, and Jupiter Ascending fame. He will play William Mandella, an Earth soldier who has to deal with a rapidly changing human society due to the time dilation necessary to travel through interstellar space.

The Forever War is one of my favourite novels, so I’m duly excited (and duly dubious) about this adaptation.

As Tor.com postulates, many questions remain surrounding the adaptation. Will it be set in modern times, or 1977 like the novel? How will the narrative handle the military narrative and political messaging from a modern perspective, versus Haldeman’s firsthand experiences during the Vietnam war. Are we still on the path to an exclusively homosexual human society? It’s a complicated novel, so hopefully the writer and directors are willing to engage with Haldeman’s book on more than a surface level.

Art by SharksDen

Art by SharksDen

Legendary director Steven Spielberg (Schindler’s List, Jaws, and Jurassic Park) has reportedly been brought on board by Warner Bros. to direct the film adaptation of Ernest Cline’s hit SF novel, Ready Player One. Spielberg is expected to begin work on Ready Player One after he completed The BFG, an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s classic children’s book. Spielberg and several of his films are mentioned in Ready Player One, which could make for a fun cameo in the film.

Ready Player One is set in a near future dystopia where the protagonist, a young man who dearly loves all things ’80s SF, lives the majority of his life inside a virtual world. A nostalgia trip from end-to-end, Deadline points out the challenges that Warner Bros. faces in regards to licensing for all of the various properties that Cline includes in Ready Player One. “The book is loaded with references of popular culture rich in 1980s video game icons. How will the studio handle that?” Deadline asked in their piece about Spielberg’s involvement.

“I think what we have to do is drill down to the best version of the movie and then see who wants to be a part of what will surely be a great film,” Greg Silverman, Warner Bros.’s President of Creative Development and Worldwide Production, told Deadline. “What we found with The Lego Movie is that when we went and talked to those having the rights, people got excited about being involved.” Interesting times ahead for the production company. A lot of Ready Player One‘s plot relies heavily on the properties it directly references.

The initial script was written by Cline himself and Eric Eason, with Avengers screenwriter Zac Penn brought on to pen (*ahem*) a rewrite based on their work.

There is no announced release date for the film.

I think I speak for a lot of you when I say that Peter Jackson’s (unfortunately) epic adaptation of The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien might have benefitted from some brevity. Ignoring the additions made by Jackson and his writers, the films are just too long, and the source material spread too thin (like butter over too much bread.) I eagerly await the day that one of the many talented hobbyist film editors cuts a version of The Hobbit that runs about four hours. What would that look like?

Well, film editor Joel Walden wondered just that and the result is a wonderful trailer for the single film adaptation that an alternate universe version of Peter Jackson may have directed somewhere in the multiverse.

“With Peter Jackson’s final chapter in the ‘Middle Earth Saga’, ‘The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies’ hitting theatres worldwide next week, I thought it would be fun to create a trailer that promotes his cinematic retelling of ‘The Hobbit’ as a single epic piece,” Walden said on the trailer’s YouTube page.

Alas. What could have been.