Lucasfilm Announces Second "Star Wars Reads Day"

LUCASFILM LTD., DISNEY PUBLISHING WORLDWIDE AND PUBLISHING PARTNERS ANNOUNCE SECOND ANNUAL STAR WARS READS DAY

Bookstore and library events to be held October 5, 2013.

New York, NY – Lucasfilm, Disney Publishing Worldwide, and its publishing partners announced today the second annual Star Wars Reads Day to be held this October 5, 2013. Last year, 30 authors and 1,500 costumed volunteers participated in over 1,200 Star Wars Reads Day events across North America. On October 5 of this year, Star Wars fans, authors, and artists will again come together in this multi-publisher initiative that celebrates reading and Star Wars. Participating publishing partners include Abrams, Chronicle Books, Dark Horse, Del Rey, DK, Quirk Books, Random House Audio, Scholastic, Titan Magazines, and Workman.

“Star Wars Reads Day is the kind of initiative that we at Lucasfilm love to support” says Carol Roeder, Director of Publishing at Lucasfilm. “Reading and Star Wars have gone hand-in-hand since 1976, when the novelization of the original Star Wars movie was released. Over the years, many fans have discovered the joy in reading through Star Wars books, and we hope to continue encouraging more people to read.”

Official Star Wars Reads Day author events are already confirmed at the following locations:

Ann Arbor, MI – Barnes & Noble

Austin, TX – Barnes & Noble

Carle Place, NY – Barnes & Noble

Cincinnati, OH – Joseph-Beth Booksellers

Denver, CO – Tattered Cover

Madison, WI – Barnes & Noble

New York, NY – The Scholastic Store

Portland, OR – Wordstock Festival

Redondo Beach, CA – Mysterious Galaxy

Richmond, VA – bbgb

Roseville, MN – Barnes & Noble

San Francisco, CA – Books Inc.

Seattle, WA – University Bookstore

Warwick, RI – Barnes & Noble

For updates and more information, follow Star Wars Reads on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/StarWarsReads

An official Star Wars event kit (free of charge), including reproducible activity sheets and trivia, will be available for download at: http://starwars.com/reads/

Lucasfilm, STAR WARS™ and related properties are trademarks and/or copyrights, in the United States and other countries, of Lucasfilm Ltd. and/or its affiliates. TM & © Lucasfilm Ltd. All rights reserved. All other trademarks and trade names are properties of their respective owners.

Review: "Fast and Furious 6" is Pure Furious

TRASH IN MY EYE No. 37 (of 2013) by Leroy Douresseaux

Fast & Furious 6 (2013)
Running time: 130 minutes (2 hours, 10 minutes)
MPAA – PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action and mayhem throughout, some sexuality and language
DIRECTOR: Justin Lin
WRITER: Chris Morgan (based on the characters created by Gary Scott Thompson)
PRODUCERS: Vin Diesel, Neal H. Moritz, and Clayton Townsend
CINEMATOGRAPHER: Stephen F. Windon
EDITORS: Greg D’Auria, Kelly Matsumoto, and Christian Wagner
COMPOSER: Lucas Vidal

ACTION/CRIME/DRAMA

Starring: Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Dwayne Johnson, Luke Evans, Jordana Brewster, Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson, Chris “Ludacris” Bridges, Sung Kang, Gal Gadot, Elsa Pataky, Gina Carano, John Ortiz, and Shea Whigham

Two years ago, I started off my review of Fast Five, the fifth movie in The Fast and the Furious film franchise, by telling you, dear reader, that my beat up Random House dictionary defines the word “furious” as meaning full of fury, and defines the word, “fury,” as unrestrained or violent anger.

Fast & Furious 6 is a 2013 action movie from director Justin Lin and released by Universal Pictures. It is the sixth installment in The Fast and the Furious movie franchise. Justin Lin was able to add scenes he could not use in his previous franchise installments (for various reasons, including budget and technology), so Fast & Furious 6 is even more unrestrained than Fast Five. It is the first Summer 2013 movie I have seen that really made me say, “Wow!”

Following the successful Rio heist (shown in Fast Five), Dominic “Dom” Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his crew have retired to different places around the world. That includes disgraced FBI agent Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker) and his girlfriend, Mia Toretto (Jordana Brewster), who welcome the arrival of their first child, a baby boy.

Retirement is not to be. Diplomatic Security Service (DSS) officer, Lucas “Luke” Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson), who was tasked with capturing Dom and company in Rio, arrives at Dom’s home with a shocker. He has a recent photograph of Letty Ortiz (Michelle Rodriguez), Dom’s former girlfriend and fellow street racer who is supposed to be dead. Letty is apparently working for Owen Shaw (Luke Evans), a former British Special Forces soldier. Shaw leads a crew of professional criminals who steal military-grade technology.

Shaw plans to build a device that could leave an entire nation or region in the dark. Hobbs promises full pardons for Dom and his crew if they can help him capture Shaw and his gang. Roman Pearce (Tyrese Gibson), Tej Parker (Ludacris), and Han Lue (Sung Kang) reunite with Dom and Brian in what may be their fastest and most furious heist yet.

Fast & Furious 6 takes the massive gun battles, bone-crunching fights, and reality-bending car chases of Fast Five and makes them even crazier. I thought that Fast Five proved the franchise could still surprise, but Fast & Furious 6 seems to declare that this movie franchise will always surprise. You may think you’ve seen the car chases through the city streets before in other Fast and Furious movies, but you’ve never seen them with these cars (especially the cool “flip car”), nor have you seen these crashes, with cars spinning through the air, as you will see in Fast & Furious 6.

Remember the body-slamming brawls between Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson’s characters in Fast Five? Fast & Furious 6 offers the hot-chick version of that with Michelle Rodriguez and Gina Carano’s characters crashing into each other like angry bucks in two monster clashes of the lady titans.

But it comes down to this simply fact: Fast & Furious 6 is a joy to watch. It is another fine action movie from director Justin Lin. I laughed and cheered, and the audience that saw it with me did, too – almost as much as the audience that saw Marvel’s The Avengers with me liked that movie. Fast & Furious 6 is one of those movies that deserve to be called “the ultimate summer movie.” It has fights, non-stop action, car chases, tanks, gunplay, sleazy Euro-trash bad guys, girl fights, and guys who love cars probably more than they love girls (even if it’s just a little more). Fast & Furious 6 has all the low-brow stuff that makes an action movie good, and this action movie is quite good.

8 of 10
A

Monday, June 03, 2013

Oscar-Winning Visual Effects Artists Launch Kickstarter Campaign

Image copyright © 20013 Studio ADI

Academy Award-Winning Team Attempts to Resurrect Lost Art of Classic Horror Film Through Launching Kickstarter Campaign

In the spirit of classic films such as Alien and The Thing, Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff, Jr. aspire to bring “Harbinger Down” to the silver screen with the help of fan support for their independent project

LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Academy Award-winning Visual Effects artists Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff, Jr., co-founders of Studio ADI (Amalgamated Dynamics, Inc.) have launched a Kickstarter campaign to bring their science fiction/horror film celebrating animatronics and makeup FX, “Harbinger Down,” to the silver screen. Gillis and Woodruff hope fans are excited to help not only make a new horror classic, but also to uplift an art form. The filmmakers’ goal is to raise $350,000 from fan support via the Kickstarter campaign by June 7, 2013 to get the project off the ground.

Harbinger Down, set to star notable sci-fi and horror film actor Lance Henriksen, depicts a group of grad students who have booked passage on the fishing trawler Harbinger to study the effects of global warming on a pod of Orcas in the Bering Sea. When the ship's crew dredges up a recently thawed piece of old Soviet space wreckage, things quickly become deadly. It seems that the Russians experimented with tardigrades, tiny resilient animals able to withstand the extremes of space radiation. The creatures survived, but not without mutation. Now the crew is exposed to aggressively mutating organisms. After being locked in ice for three decades, the creatures aren't about to give up the warmth of human companionship.

“Animatronics and Makeup FX have been utilized less frequently in recent films, but this is not because of audience disinterest,” announced Gillis, who will write and direct the film. “In the spirit of sci-fi/horror classics, Alien and The Thing, Harbinger Down is a tense, claustrophobic full-length creature film that will feature only practical Animatronics and Makeup Effects. Fans of the art of Animatronics and Makeup FX know this technique is currently overlooked by the big studios; I'm hoping the fans will help us remedy that by supporting this labor of love.”

“Our company, Amalgamated Dynamics, will create the kind of Oscar caliber Creature Effects for which we are known,” commented Woodruff, who will produce, along with Studio ADI’s Jennifer Tung. “Traditional techniques still have a place in modern genre films. We didn’t give up painting, when cameras were invented.”

Gillis and Woodruff have over 60 years of experience between them and have worked with many top filmmakers, including James Cameron, David Fincher, Paul Verhoeven, Ridley Scott, Neill Blomkamp, Robert Zemeckis, Joe Johnston, Nora Ephron and Mike Nichols just to name a few. The filmmakers are utilizing Kickstarter to ask supporters of “old-school” visual effects to give them the opportunity to show it.

Contributors to the Harbinger Down Kickstarter Campaign will receive unique, amazing, thrilling, one-of-a-kind incentives for supporting the project. More details about the project can be found on the Harbinger Down Kickstarter website: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1117671683/harbinger-down-a-practical-creature-fx-film


About Studio ADI (Amalgamated Dynamics, Inc.)
Amalgamated Dynamics, Inc. was founded by Academy Award winning creators of special characters and character effects artists Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff, Jr. Calling upon a diverse range of talents and techniques, Studio ADI creates prosthetic make-ups, animatronic puppets, actor duplicates and replica animals. With over twenty years of professional experience, we bring “real” character effects to the set to interact with the actors, lighting and practical atmosphere. We pride ourselves on working with the industry’s leading Computer-generated imagery (CGI) companies to find the right balance of digital and practical effects. For more information and a resume of work on past productions, visit the Studio ADI website: http://www.studioadi.com/ or, the Studio ADI YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/studioADI

Review: "The Italian Job" Remake is Quite Slick

TRASH IN MY EYE No. 174 (of 2003) by Leroy Douresseaux

The Italian Job (2003)
Running time: 111 minutes (1 hour, 51 minutes)
MPAA – PG-13 for violence and some language
DIRECTOR: F. Gary Gray
WRITERS: Donna Powers and Wayne Powers (based on the 1969 screenplay by Troy Kennedy-Martin)
PRODUCER: Donald De Line
CINEMATOGRAPHER: Wally Pfister (D.o.P.)
EDITORS: Richard Francis-Bruce and Christopher Rouse
COMPOSER: John Powell
Black Reel Award winner

ACTION/CRIME with elements of a thriller

Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron, Edward Norton, Donald Sutherland, Jason Statham, Seth Green, Mos Def, Franky G, Gawtti, and Shawn Fanning

The subject of this movie review is The Italian Job, a 2003 heist film from director F. Gary Gray. It is a remake of the 1969 film, The Italian Job, which starred Michael Caine and was directed by Peter Collinson.

The current version is quite entertaining, but a bit on the sedate side. Perhaps, the filmmakers mistook a low-key approach and a low wattage use of pyrotechnics as being cerebral. It’s not necessarily slow, but TIJ is an action movie meant for the kind of people who prefer action crime thrillers like Out of Sight and Ronin. Because I really liked those two films, I heartily recommend this one.

Career thief John Bridger (Donald Sutherland) and his protégé Charlie Croker (Mark Wahlberg) plan a successful heist of $35 million in gold in Venice, Italy. One of their crew, the slick and violent Steve (Edward Norton), however betrays them, kills Bridger, and steals the gold. Croker tracks Steve to Los Angeles where he’s living it up. Seeking revenge and the return of the gold, he convinces Bridger’s daughter Stella (Charlize Theron), a legitimate, professional safe cracker, to join him and his crew on a mission against Steve. The team plans to pull of the heist of their lives by creating L.A. largest traffic jam ever.

Director F. Gary Gray (Friday, Set it Off) might not stand head and shoulders above the current large group of technically talented film helmsman, but he has found his niche by producing entertaining and occasionally masterful crime thrillers. As laid back as The Italian Job seems, Gray gives each scene some special twist or essence that kept me watching. I was never bored, and I really enjoyed the film. Maybe Gray playing down loud explosions and kinetic editing is a good thing. He can certainly direct excellent helicopter/car chases, and he makes good use of a diverse cast of character actors, a pretty lead actress, and a solid leading man in Mark Wahlberg.

6 of 10
B

NOTES:
2004 Black Reel Awards: 1 win: “Film: Best Director” (F. Gary Gray); 2 nominations: “Best Film” (Donald De Line) and “Film: Best Supporting Actor” (Mos Def)

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Review: Michael Caine is Still Cool in "The Italian Job"

TRASH IN MY EYE No. 190 (of 2004) by Leroy Douresseaux

The Italian Job (1969)
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN: UK; Languages: English and Italian
Running time: 99 minutes (1 hour, 39 minutes)
DIRECTOR: Peter Collinson
WRITER: Troy Kennedy Martin
PRODUCERS: Stanley Baker and Michael Deeley
CINEMATOGRAPHER: Douglas Slocombe
EDITOR: John Trumper
COMPOSER: Quincy Jones
Golden Globe nominee

CRIME with elements of action and comedy

Starring: Michael Caine, Noël Coward, Benny Hill, Raf Vallone, Tony Beckley, John Le Mesurier, Fred Emney, Rossano Brazzi, Maggie Blye, George Innes, Irene Handl and Harry Baird

The subject of this movie review is The Italian Job, a 1969 British caper and crime film directed by Peter Collinson. Starring Michael Caine and featuring a soundtrack composed by Quincy Jones, it is a beloved film in Great Britain.

Before it was the remade into a 2003 summer hit, The Italian Job was a cult favorite caper film starring Michael Caine as Charlie Croker, a clever criminal who adopts a complicated heist plan formulated by a recently murdered colleague. The film is a nice crime film with an air of subdued comedy and some short, but exciting action sequences. In fact, the film has aged quite well and, except for the ending, stands with today’s crime thrillers.

Croker, just out of prison, hatches a plan to steal a huge cache of Chinese gold ($4 million) en route to Turin, Italy to be used as collateral for a Fiat automobile plant. The necessary diversion for the snatch and grab comes courtesy of huge traffic jam that Charlie and his gang plan to cause during an all-important Italy-Great Britain soccer match. Croker eventually convinces Mr. Bridger (Noël Coward), an incarcerated criminal genius, to fiancé and equip the criminal enterprise, all from his jail cell. In spite of all their planning, the hitch is that the Mafia doesn’t want the Englishmen to steal the gold, and are willing to commit murder to stop them.

The film is pleasant, but it’s a bit more than just a diversion. Michael Caine is charming, and while he is ostensibly the lead and his character directs the heist, neither the script nor the director gives the audience much time to really get to know Charlie Croker outside of some witty lines. Actually, the film’s focus is almost totally on the criminal enterprise, and the characters are just checker pieces in the story. Other than Caine and Coward’s characters, no other players really stand out except for a few seconds here or there.

The ending is very problematic, and the 2003 remake (in a sense) picks up where the original left off, although in a more spiritual than literal sense. The remake also vastly improves on the original in giving the characters more room to breath. Still, there is nothing like this film, and fans of caper and heist films should like this, especially as it features the golden age of the young Michael Caine.

6 of 10
B

NOTES:
1970 Golden Globes, USA: 1 nomination: “Best English-Language Foreign Film”

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Negromancer Juneteenth 2013

It's June 2013.  Are we all anticipating Man of Steel?

Welcome to Negromancer, a ComicBookBin blog (www.comicbookbin.com). This is rebirth of the former movie review website as a movie review and movie news website and blog.

All images and text appearing on this blog are © copyright and/or trademark their respective owners.

And we could use some funding to help make the site better with even more articles and posts - pre-Thank You:

Will Smith Wags "Shark Tale" to Success

TRASH IN MY EYE No. 203 (of 2004) by Leroy Douresseaux


Shark Tale (2004)
Running time: 90 minutes (1 hour, 30 minutes)
MPAA – PG for some mild language and crude humor
DIRECTORS: Bibo Bergeron, Vicky Jenson, and Rob Letterman
WRITERS: Damian Shannon, Mark Swift, Michael J. Wilson, and Rob Letterman
PRODUCERS: Bill Damaschke, Janet Healy, and Allison Lyon Segan
EDITORS: Nick Fletcher with Peter Lonsdale and John Venzon
COMPOSER: Hans Zimmer
Academy Award nominee

ANIMATION/COMEDY/FAMILY

Starring: (voices) Will Smith, Robert De Niro, Renée Zellweger, Angelina Jolie, Jack Black, Martin Scorsese, Ziggy Marley, Doug E. Doug, Michael Imperioli, Vincent Pastore, Peter Falk, Katie Couric, and Phil LaMarr

The subject of this movie review is Shark Tale, a 2004 computer-animated comedy film from DreamWorks Animation. Shark Tale stars Will Smith as a worker fish and Jack Black as a vegetarian shark who take advantage of a gangster shark’s death.

Oscar (voice of Will Smith) the fish lives in the low end of the reef. He works at a whale (think car) wash, but he’d like to be a rich, famous somebody. Lenny (Jack Black) is a vegetarian shark, but his father, Don Lino (Robert De Niro), a shark mob boss, wants him to be tough so that he can run the family business with his brother, Frankie (Michael Imperioli). Oscar and Lenny & Frankie have an accidental encounter that leaves Frankie dead. Through a series of unfortunate misunderstandings, Oscar gets credit for killing Frankie and becomes known as “the shark slayer.” Oscar befriends Lenny and the two help each other; Oscar gives Lenny a place to hide, and the shark helps the fish perpetuate the myth of Oscar being a shark slayer. However, all that wealth and fame make Oscar forget his roots, and he fails to see that his friend Angie (Renée Zellweger), has been there for him all along. And his troubles only get worse when Don Lino comes looking for the shark slayer, and Don Lino isn’t awed like everyone else at the reputation of the shark slayer.

I could never imagine Disney using African-American or Black subcultures as a stylistic basis for one of their animated films, but DreamWorks does just that with Shark Tale. The computer-animated tale uses lots of hip hop attitude and music and a little of its slang, mostly through the performance of actor Will Smith. The film isn’t hip hop heavy, but Shark Tale has enough hip hop-ness to be noticeable.

Hip hop aside, Shark Tale is a very entertaining film, mostly on the strength of Will Smith’s performance, and Smith seems to chose material that he has to save on the strength of his personality. Is that some kind of martyr complex? Shark Tale isn’t all that well directed or written. The film is well cast; even famed movie director Martin Scorsese surprises with a small but wiry voice over performance. However, Scorsese, like everyone except Will Smith, has little with which to work. The film, especially on the writing end, treats the cast like window dressing, but still, the supporting cast gives inspired performances as window dressing.

Shark Tale’s premise, both Oscar’s plot and Lenny’s subplot, are actually effective and intriguing; both however are glossed over. Oscar has some serious self-confidence issues, and Lenny is certainly…a fish out of water with his family. The script focuses on jokes over the substance of overcoming obstacles. Still, Shark Tale is very entertaining, and visually, it’s a vast improvement in the quality of the computer animation over other DreamWorks computer animated films.

So how does Shark Tale compare to the Oscar®-winning, Finding Nemo, which is also an undersea tale? Finding Nemo has more heart, and the screenwriters took time to delve into the character issues and the humanity of the players. Shark Tale creates obstacles for the characters and then sweeps everything under the rug, whereas Nemo saw the characters through heartaches all the way to victory. While it may come up short on that end, Shark Tale still deserves credit for what it does right. It lets a charming film personality and movie star do his thing, and boy, does Will Smith do his thang.

7 of 10
B+

NOTES:
2005 Academy Awards, USA: 1 nomination: “Best Animated Feature Film of the Year” (Bill Damaschke)

2005 BAFTA Awards: 1 nomination: “BAFTA Children's Award-Best Feature Film” (production team)