IFC Films transmits Haunter your means by Feb

1/22/2014 10:10:27 AM, by Guido Henkel
IFC Films transmits Haunter your means by FebAbigail Breslin stars in director Vincenzo Natali's (Splice, Cube) unique undertake the standard haunted house story with Haunter which will arrive on Blu-Ray Disc in Feb.
In 1986, 15-year-old Lisa (Breslin) and her family died within their home under sinister conditions. Not able to maneuver on, their spirits have ongoing to roam the home. As well as for nearly 3 decades, they've needed to live exactly the same miserable day again and again, never thinking they are not alive.
However, Lisa has began realizing stuff that make her think that she and her uncomprehending family are actually ghosts. In addition, she knows that they must achieve from past the grave to assist her living counterpart Olivia and her family steer clear of the same nasty fate that Lisa and her family members experienced all individuals years back.
IFC Films and MPI Media are getting “Haunter” to Blu-Ray Disc, giving this eerie horror thriller a awesome hd presentation. No bonus materials happen to be introduced for that release, but anticipate seeing this reverse ghost story in shops on February 11 for $29.98. Secure your copy today at Amazon . com.comView the original article here

Remaking Scifi Films: The Economic Argument

John Scalzi is an award-winning science fiction writer.A couple of weeks ago I made the observation, regarding The Thing, that the new versions of popular horror films don't tend to come anywhere close to the success of the films they're drawing from -- in this case, the 1982 version of The Thing (which was in itself something of a box office disappointment at the time). This resulted in a friend asking me whether the same held true for straight-ahead science fiction films: How did their remakes and reboots do, relative to the originals?

The answer, unsurprisingly, is: It depends. For some films, it's hard to say, simply because the way movie companies collect data is different now: For example, the 2008 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still had a domestic box office of $79.3 million, while the 1951 version of the film took in $1.85 million in rentals. What are rentals? What it sounds like: Cinemas would rent a film for a fee from the studios. Today the studios take a direct cut of the exhibitor's ticket prices.

Very roughly speaking, today's box office is a gross figure, while rentals are a net figure, which from an economic point of view is comparing apples to oranges. We have the same problem for a number of remakes of popular '50s and '60s science fiction films, including War of the Worlds, I Am Legend (remade from 1964's The Last Man on Earth), and The Fly.

Sticking to the films we have box office information for, the answer is all over the board. To illustrate that, here are some salient examples. To keep everything simple, I am a) using domestic box office grosses noted by Box Office Mojo, and b) using the site's inflation adjuster to put everything into 2011 numbers.

1. Star Trek (2009): The first Star Trek film, 1979's Star Trek: The Motion Picture, grossed $82.26 million back in the day, which comes to $260.8 million adjusted to today's dollars. The 2009 version topped out at $257.7 million, which with a couple of years inflation tacked on comes to $275 million. This puts the two films within 5% of each others' grosses -- the 2009 version squeaks past, but fundamentally this is a pretty even race.

2. Planet of the Apes (2001): The original 1968 version made $32.6 million at the box office -- or $198 million in today's dollars. The 2001 version by Tim Burton made $180 million, which a decade on adjusts to $253 million. So despite the fact that Burton's version is generally considered something of an artistic and critical failure (it's arguably Burton's least interesting film), financially speaking it's the alpha male of the pack.

Interestingly, this year's Rise of the Planet of the Apes is something close to a reboot of 1972's Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, which features a chimp named Caesar leading an ape revolution. The modern version outstrips the original here, too, with Rise's $176.5 million handily outstripping Conquest's adjusted gross of $42.3 million. Time has been kind to the apes.

3. The Invasion (2007): This Daniel Craig-Nicole Kidman film was yet another take on The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which was first essayed in film in 1956. If you have a hard time remembering the Craig-Kidman film, it's probably because it grossed just $15 million in the theaters, which is $17.4 million adjusted to today's dollars. The good news for The Invasion is that this tops the box office of Body Snatchers, director Abel Ferrara's 1994 version of the film, which didn't crack a million dollars, even adjusted for inflation. The bad news is its $17.4 million adjusted gross doesn't come close to the famous 1978 version's unadjusted gross of $25 million -- which in today's dollars comes to $84.8 million.

4. Vanilla Sky (2001), 12 Monkeys (1995), Solaris (2002): Didn't know these films were remakes? That's because they're remakes of foreign films (Abre los ojos, Le jatee, and Solaris, respectively), which didn't receive anything approaching a wide release in the U.S. (La jatee is a short, which makes it even less financially viable). Unsurprisingly, these films wildly outgrossed their originals -- even the 2002 Solaris, which brought in just $15 million ($20.5 million, adjusted).

So, again: All over the board in terms of results, which suggests that science fiction remakes are as much a crap shoot as anything else out there these days. However, there is one additional factor today which I haven't discussed: the international market, which can dwarf the domestic gross of a film, especially in a field like science fiction -- for example, Rise of the Planet of the Apes adds another $300 million to its domestic gross when the rest of the world is added in. You can believe that's something filmmakers are thinking about when they look at science fiction to remake or reboot. 

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Science Fiction and Fantasy Films: The Rest of 2011

John Scalzi is an award-winning science fiction writer.Hey! Want to know what you, the discerning science fiction and fantasy fan, can look forward to at the movies for the rest of 2011? Of course you do. And I want to tell you. It's nice when it works like that.

Contagion (September 9)
Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh is on record that this is his version of the old Irwin Allen disaster films, in which a bunch of big stars wandered around while a building burned, or a ship sank, or a bunch of bees attacked Michael Caine or whatever. This time the disaster is a rapidly mutating virus, and the big stars include Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Laurence Fishburne, Kate Winslet, and Jude Law. A cheerful way to start the fall.

Real Steel (October 7)
Hugh Jackman trains a robot to box. Wait, what? Oh, and there's a kid thrown into the mix so Jackman can have a bonding experience. Wait, what? Also, the film is directed by Shawn Levy, whose most recent film is Date Night. Wait, what? He also did the Night at the Museum movies. Ah, whatever. I think it's pretty clear that a) I'm not expecting much out of this one, b) Hugh Jackman might need to have talk with his agent about the non-Wolverine roles he's getting.  

The Thing (October 14)
This film is titled like a remake of John Carpenter's 1982 film but is apparently meant to be a prequel -- it takes place just before the events of that film. I suspect this will be a distinction without a difference once the alien starts mutating. I want to see whether three decades of special effects advances will be able to top Rob Bottin's makeup and effects work in the '82 version. It's got its work cut out for it.

Giorgio Moroder Presents Metropolis (October 14)
Here's a film with two levels of scifi nostalgia: First for the groundbreaking 1927 science fiction film, and then for the 1984 soundtrack that composer Moroder grafted onto it, featuring Freddie Mercury, Pat Benatar and Adam Ant, among others. The film is getting a 20-city run prior to a Blu-ray release. It's not for purists (not just because of the soundtrack; it was trimmed to less than 90 minutes), but for those of us who saw this version first, oh, the memories.

The Three Musketeers (October 21)
Since when is The Three Musketeers science fiction and/or fantasy? Since Paul W.S. Anderson got hold of it and decided to steampunk it all up, with floating battleships and Milla Jovovich dropped in as a terminatrix (or whatever it is she's doing in the flick). And it's in 3D! I don't hold Anderson in particularly high regard as a director -- he's about what you'd get if you fed Ridley Scott a diet of lead-based paint chips since childhood -- so I expect this to be loud and stupid, with just enough visual panache to squeak by.  

In Time (October 28)
The trailers make this film look like what would happen if Logan's Run and Bonnie and Clyde loved each other very much and had a baby. If you caught the film references there, you may be too old to enjoy the cast of this film, which includes Justin Timberlake, Amanda Seyfried, Olivia Wilde, Cillian Murphy, and Alex Pettyfer. This was written and directed by Andrew Niccol, who has one science fiction classic to his name (Gattaca), so hey, could be fun.

Immortals (November 11)
The previews for this tale of Greek gods and titans make it look like 300 on steroids, which considering how amped-up that movie was, is fairly ridiculous. Two things recommend it to me: an overachieving cast (which includes John Hurt, Freida Pinto, future Superman Henry Cavill, and Mickey Rourke as the bad guy), and director Tarsem Singh, who has a spectacular visual sense and may also just be crazy (see: The Cell and The Fall, his previous films). This will either be very cool or spectacularly bad.

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn (Part One) (November 18)
Oh, you know. Vampire weddings and stuff. At this point, you already know if you want to see this, and if you do, then go. Enjoy yourself. I want you to be happy with your sparkly vampires.

The Muppets (November 23)
Neither science fiction nor fantasy (as long as you're willing to buy into the concept of autonomous creatures made of felt), but there's not a nerd out there who isn't filled with squee about the idea of a new Muppet movie. That said: Hey, Jason Segel (who wrote the script and stars in the film), you mess this up and the Feds will have to put you into the Witness Relocation program. I'm just saying.

The Darkest Hour (December 25)
Invisible alien invaders try to take over Moscow! As they would. And it's up to a bunch of twentysomethings on vacation to save the world! As they would. This is directed by Timur Bekmambetov, who graced the world with Wanted, which I enjoy more than I really want to admit. This looks more than a little silly, but yeah. Still looking forward to it.

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Driving Down the Supernerd Highway With the Cars Films

John Scalzi is an award-winning science fiction writer.A question this week about last weekend's number one film:

My husband and I went to see Cars 2 this weekend (it's cute) but are now having a difference of opinion about what genre of film it is. I say that talking technology means it's science fiction. He says talking cars with no evidence of humans ever existing means its fantasy. Who's right?

Hmmm. Well, strictly from a marketing point of view, it's neither a science fiction nor a fantasy film; it's a Pixar animated film, which is its own category -- and its own highly desirable category, since the average domestic box office gross of the previous eleven Pixar films is just under $260 million dollars, and even the runt of the litter, A Bug's Life, racked up over $160 million. The Pixar brand is so useful that even those films from the company that are unambiguously science fiction -- The Incredibles and Wall-E -- weren't marketed as such; they were marketed as Pixar films. This isn't a complaint, mind you, and even if it were, Disney (which now owns Pixar) would be right to ignore it. Its job is selling its film effectively, not satisfying genre purists.

With that caveat out of the way, and with the additional caveat that things are about to get supernerdy up in here, let's look at Cars 2 (and its predecessor, Cars). The filmmakers at Pixar, as far as I am aware, have been mum about how anthropomorphized automobiles have become the dominant species on the planet, so we're going to have to do some speculating. Here are the scenarios as I see them:

Scenario One: The Cars movies take place in a world where the cars were initially designed by humans, but the humans have disappeared in some way or another, leaving their automobiles to carry on without them. This strikes me as a reasonable theory for a number of reasons. One, at this point we're loading our cars with all sorts of computer processing power, and we're even now at the point where self-driving cars are legal in one state (Nevada, the crazy car nut of American states, apparently). And of course cars have been talking to us for a while now, telling us to put on seat belts and the like.

It's not that hard to make the leap from where we are today to full autonomous, self-driving, self-aware automobiles that have outlived their initial purpose of ferrying about human beings -- whose cultural preferences and bias they would still continue to exhibit without knowing why, or even that they are. Whether the humans are gone due to their own hand or due to, say, an automotive uprising in which Skynet and Lightning McQueen are mashed up into the most adorable autopocalypse ever, is perhaps best left unexamined at this point. The point is, if this is the scenario, then the existence of the cars has a rational basis, and the Cars series of movies is indeed science fiction.

Scenario Two: The Cars movies take place in a world where some celestial Henry Ford or Karl Benz reached down from the sky and with a touch of his finger animated the (necessarily metal-rich) mud into the very first cars. In this world, humans never existed, which makes the general morphology of the cars a little puzzling, and which makes one wonder if automobile philosophers (of which there must have been some) ever theorized as to why they all had spaces inside them clearly designed to convey some sort of creature from one place to another.

No doubt there is a rich vein of automotive teleological debate that has been engaged in over the millennia on just this subject, none of which reaches us the viewers because in the films we're following the adventures of an arrogant jock and his genial but dim best friend, neither of whom is what you would call the deeply introspective sort. Which is fine; no one expects a Pixar version of A Man For All Seasons, featuring cars. Be that as it may, in this scenario, the Cars movies have a non-rational and magical basis, and would be fantasy.

Scenario Three: The Cars movies take place neither on earth nor on a planet watched over by a mystical creator, but rather on a planet where the processes of evolution have given rise to a metal and internal combustion-based form of life, the predominant form of which just happened to (and unbeknownst to them) mirror to an unsettling degree the design of automobiles found here on Earth, not to mention the parallel cultural development. The details (and fundamental likelihood) of such an evolutionary and cultural path I will leave to others to discuss, except to say, hey, it's a quantum physics universe and anything can happen. In which case, the Cars films are neither science fiction nor fantasy, but simply contemporary action comedies.

There's a fourth scenario, in which the Pixar filmmakers simply said, "Hey, talking cars are cool!" and gave little if any thought about where the film could be slotted, in terms of the science fiction and fantasy genres. But come on. That's the unlikeliest scenario of all.

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Q&A - Carla Gugino on Jim Carrey, Family Films, and Mr. Popper's Penguins

Sean is a senior critic for Filmcritic.com.

The summer movie season typically is characterized by big stars driving massive special-effects-laden blockbusters. Mr. Popper's Penguins takes the opposite approach, hanging its hopes on six pint-size leads who dream of swimming circles around the competition. Bitey, Lovey, Loudy, Stinky, Nimrod, and Captain are the tuxedo-clad birds joining Jim Carrey and Carla Gugino for an adaptation of Richard and Florence Atwater's classic children's novels. Gugino spoke to FilmCritic.com about her live-action kid-friendly roles and the joy of sharing scenes with a gifted comedian like Carrey.

Q: Did Jim ever say at any point during the shoot, "This isn't how we did it on Ace Ventura"?

A: [Laughs] No. I think he's only interested in breaking new comedic ground and being as creative as he can. So no, but that is really funny.

Q: How is it that you guys have never worked together before?

A: I don't know. I agree that it seems like we should have worked together. I worked with Ben Stiller on Night at the Museum, but he and I knew each other for a long time. With Jim, bizarrely, we'd actually never even met before working on this film.

Q: How did your acting styles mesh? We've heard he can be a handful, in a good way.

A: You know, I think we were a really good balance for one another. In most of our scenes, we needed to just ground our relationship and make it something that you really care about. We want you to want them to get back together. As for the comedy, he's such an improviser and obviously is amazing, but there's a rhythm to that approach, which led to some fun volleys between us in scenes.

Q: I think it's important to point out that the penguins in your film aren't always CGI. You guys used real penguins for most of this shoot.

A: That is definitely true. We did have to use CGI for certain scenes, but I have to say that, in an impressive way, it's really an amazing combination of real penguins and CGI. The sequence in the Guggenheim Museum, obviously, where the penguins are doing crazy stunts, is CGI. But there are a lot of scenes in Jim's apartment and various other places where we use real penguins. I do think it's a beautiful marriage of the two.

Q: Your résumé has plenty of family-friendly titles, from the Spy Kids franchise to Night at the Museum and Race to Witch Mountain. It appears that you actively seek out this kind of material to balance films like Watchmen, Sin City, or Sucker Punch.

A: You know, it's funny because I think when I got cast in Spy Kids I was still too young to pull off what that role was supposed to be. I was 27 at the time, but it still worked. And now I did feel that there weren't a lot of films I had done for the kids in my life to be able to see. From that, because Spy Kids turned out so well, came for me a love of movies that the whole family could go to. Don't get me wrong. I love doing serious movies for adults. But we're in this weird climate where movies are supposed to be PG-13, yet I feel like those movies aren't always appropriate for kids. I don't know if I seek them out, but certainly when I see a good script I'm really excited to be a part of it.

Q: You've also stuck with live-action family films as opposed to lending a voice to animation.

A: It's so funny that you'd say that because earlier today I actually mentioned just that [fact] because I do think that it's hard to do stories like this well in live action. I was lucky enough to be part of Spy Kids and Night at the Museum, two films that did do it well. But it is harder because, tonally, you are trying to discover something that is fantastical while also keeping it grounded in reality. That can be a tricky balance, but when it works it can be really special.

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