In a year crowded with some of the most anticipated movies in years (The Hunger Games, The Hobbit, The Avengers, and The Amazing Spider-Man, to name just a few), The Dark Knight Rises might be the most anticipated of them all. The third and final installment in Inception director Christopher Nolan’s trilogy of Bat-flicks — which will once again star Christian Bale as the caped crusader and introduce Thomas Hardy as the brilliant, brutish terrorist Bane and Anne Hathaway as the purrrrfectly mercurial Selina Kyle — will swing into theaters on July 20, four years after The Dark Knight ignited a cultural sensation, grossed $533 million, and earned Heath Ledger a posthumous Oscar. The new issue of Entertainment Weekly – our annual Forecast issue, which previews the pop culture year looming ahead — goes to the Rises set and offers some insight into how Team Nolan hopes to match their previous success. “I can tell you the truth because I’m done with it: I felt immense pressure,” Christian Bale tells EW. “And I think it’s a good pressure, because you owe it to the films — and the people’s expectations — to make great work.” READ FULL STORY »
Tag: Inception (1-10 of 28)
This Week's Cover: Our 2012 Forecast issue takes you to the set of 'The Dark Knight Rises'
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Rated Arrrrr! Top 10 most pirated movies of all time
Image Credit: WETA
In response to Netflix’s recently released list of the “Top 10 Movie Rentals of All Time,” BitTorrent has release its own — albeit utterly illegal — list of the “Top 10 Most Pirated Movies” of all time. The usual suspects were there, with Avatar (21 million downloads) taking top (dis?)honors, and The Dark Knight tying for second place with Transformers at 19 million downloads apiece. And, yes, of course there’s a Pirates of the Caribbean installment on there. It’s only right.
Still, there is surprisingly little overlap between the lists (only Inception and The Departed). Apparently Netflix users favor Oscar bait while Internet thieves go for tentpole popcorn movies, with the Venn Diagram overlap between those two strangely being Leonardo DiCaprio. So what other movies made the list, and which were the most head scratch-inducing? See the full list after the jump. READ FULL STORY »
Videogames vs. Movies: Have games replaced films as the modern popular narrative medium?
Image Credit: Melissa Moseley
Comparing one narrative medium to another is a tricky business. Anyone who has read a Harry Potter book and then seen the ensuing film adaptation — which is to say, almost everyone on earth – knows that every storytelling method has its own strengths and weaknesses. Still, there is something particularly fascinating about the rivalry between movies and videogames. Cinema was the original popular art form, but it has spent over half a century fighting against rival media: Television, home video, and finally the videogame, which has evolved in just a few short decades from the primordial elements of Pong into the culture-defining medium of Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, and The Legend of Zelda.
The key to the great Film/Videogame debate is that the two have evolved alongside of each other. Videogames have become more “filmlike,” with more realistic characters and complex plotting. In turn, movies have absorbed many lessons from videogames, some of them good (films like The Hurt Locker and Children of Men have a you-are-there grandeur that feels very gamelike) and some of them not so good (watching Michael Bay’s Transformers trilogy is are exactly as enjoyable as watching your little brother play videogames you used to love before you turned 6). Now, I and fellow videogame fiend Adam B. Vary debate whether videogames have outright passed the movies as the popular narrative medium. Tell us your own thoughts in the comments. READ FULL STORY »
Oscar Twitter stats: James Franco feels the online love/wrath
James Franco may not have won the Best Actor Oscar, or the hearts of Oscar watchers (save our Ken Tucker), but according to Tweetbeat, which tracks the most talked about things on Twitter, he was by far the most tweeted about personality during last night’s Academy Awards. Of the estimated 400,000 Oscar-related tweets logged — half as many as the Super Bowl — 21,117 of them involved the actor/cohost. Anne Hathaway was the second most mentioned person with 14,530 tweets — though users were kinder to her than Franco. See the full Top 10 list below, along with other fun stats such as: the Top 3 most tweeted designers during the red carpet, the moments that caused “unexpected spikes of tweets” (hello, Melissa Leo!), which films were referenced the most (and whether those sentiments were positive or negative), and who Kirk Douglas bested… READ FULL STORY »
Christopher Nolan's 'Memento' turns 10: PopWatch Rewind remembers the film. And then immediately forgets it.
With all that Christopher Nolan has done since, from gravel-voiced Batmen to Russian-nesting dreams, it’s easy to forget just how great his 2000 backwards-is-the-new-forwards thriller Memento really is. Almost as easy as it is for its main character to forget just about everything. To refresh people’s memories, the film will be celebrating its tenth anniversary with special one-night screenings tonight in 11 cities. We decided it’d be a good time to revisit the movie that put Nolan on the map and made a practical case for body art and Polaroid cameras. Now, where were we?
Darren Franich: Memento should feel more like a gimmick. The quick description is that the story moves “backwards,” but that’s not really true. Just like the dream-heist in Inception, the movie’s actually constructed on multiple distinct planes. The main plotline starts with the death of Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) and moves backwards. A secondary plotline, shot in black and white, moves forwards in time. Through those black-and-white scenes, we learn the fable of Sammy Jankis, which runs throughout the movie. Finally, there’s the occasional flashback to Lenny’s life before “The Incident.” It sounds like a film written on a 3-D chessboard. So how is it possible that Memento is actually the funniest movie Christopher Nolan has ever made? READ FULL STORY »
Oscar nominee and Oscar snubbed 'Inception' director Christopher Nolan: Good day or bad day?
Image Credit: http://img2.timeinc.net/ew/dynamic/imgs/100803/chris-nolan_320.jpgAll things considered, Christopher Nolan had a fantastic day today. His film Inception received eight Oscar nominations, and the helmer himself was nominated for two awards. Nolan is one of two producers on the film — his wife, Emma Thomas, is the other — and if Inception should win Best Picture, they’d be taking the stage together. Nolan also wrote the script for Inception, and his work was nominated in the Best Original Screenplay category. “And well deserved,” composer Hans Zimmer, who picked up his ninth Oscar nomination today for his Inception score, tells EW. (He’s won only once, for The Lion King.) “I’ve been telling people forever this is one of the most beautiful scripts I have ever read.”
Of course, there’s only one way in which Christopher Nolan’s day could have been even better, and that’s if he had been nominated for Best Director, as well. READ FULL STORY »
Andrew Garfield? Emma Stone? Tom Hardy? Who was 2010's Rising Star?
Solarpix; Landmark; Tina Gill; Chris Hatcher; Albert L. Ortega; all PR Photos
We Americans are inclined to assume that most all Brits are smarter, classier, and more refined than us Yanks, and the movie business is especially susceptible to such impressions. The Oscar is the industry’s gold standard, but a BAFTA Award has the Land of Shakespeare’s stamp of approval, lending itself unique artistic credibility. So it’s a little surprising-slash-refreshing that BAFTA presents an annual Rising Star Award, and even more unexpected that the winner is voted on by the British public. (And even more unlikely that the contest is sponsored by a British company.) How utterly People’s Choice Awards! READ FULL STORY »
'Inception' trailer soundtrack makes 'Ghostbusters' and most other films more awesome
Who you gonna call (to do your soundtrack)? Zack Hemsey, if you like awesome things. YouTube user Rothje released a trailer today that remixes Ghostbusters with Hemsey’s track from the Inception trailer, and it’s pretty epic. READ FULL STORY »
'Inception' clip to hit theaters just as Oscar fever peaks
That Inception deserves some Academy Award love is not an idea that needs to be planted into your subconscious, but Warner Bros. is taking no chances. Beginning Dec. 31, a trailer-length behind-the-scenes featurette of director Christopher Nolan’s mind-blowing adventure will be sent to key movie theaters around the country and will also become available online.
It’s smart timing. Many people, including Academy voters, will be at multiplexes that weekend checking out the season’s critical darlings: Black Swan, The King’s Speech, The Fighter. It can’t hurt to remind folks that one of the summer’s biggest blockbusters, which has been available on video for three weeks, is every bit the artistic achievement that its rivals are, and that it deserves to be part of the Oscar conversation.
In the clip, embedded below, the surreal images that entranced you all summer come crashing back — the runaway train, the zero-gravity hotel fight, the wobbly totem — heightened by Hans Zimmer’s pulsating score. The actors take turns raving about Nolan’s gifts, and then the director returns the favor for his leading man. Nolan appears to be a shoo-in for a Best Director nomination, but the Inception refresher course can only boost Leonardo DiCaprio’s deserving but long-shot candidacy. READ FULL STORY »
2010 pop time capsule: What would you put in?
Image Credit: Stephen VaughanLet’s put together a 2010 pop-culture time capsule, PopWatchers. What cultural artifacts can we entomb to communicate to our distant descendants what this year was like? What mattered to us? What shaped up? What made us laugh, made us think, or made us chitchat? My picks:
++ The top from Inception: I was at a party last weekend where people were passionately arguing about the merits and contents of this movie. This movie that came out six months ago.
++ Lady Gaga’s meat dress: Sure, Gaga wore some gagagadawful outfits this year, but it seems like the meat dress captured our imaginations more than any other.
++ Antoine Dodson’s red bandana: Hide your kids, hide your wife. Dodson’s response to his sister’s attack became a local news story, then a viral hit — and then an even bigger sensation, thanks to an Auto-Tuned song that itself was covered over and over and over again.
What would you put in the time capsule, PopWatchers?
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