Movieblaze

New pics are online of the Volturi, the ancient, deadly vampire clan from The Twilight Saga: New Moon. Played by Michael Sheen (Aro), Dakota Fanning (Jane), Christopher Heyerdahl (Marcus),  Jamie Campbell Bower (Cauis) and Cameron Bright (Alec), they’re among the more powerful fang club members to crop up in the Twilight series.

Resident in Volterra, Italy, these thousand-year-plus-old creatures act as enforcers, making sure that the vampire population remains largely unknown to humans and are naturally narked when they learn of Bella’s relationship with Edward.

To me, they look like the scariest goth club you ever met at school, plus their dad and grandad. But I wouldn’t say that to their faces.

Check out their posters and some new pics here, with thanks to MovieWeb. New Moon arrives on 20 November.

The first one introduced Steve McQueen to the moviegoing world. The second one starred Kevin Dillon and had a screenplay by Frank Darabont. And we will soon be able to beware The Blob again when Robert Cummings, aka Rob Zombie, gets to work next year.

Zombie’s nightmare finding distribution for House of 1000 Corpses seems to be long over, and he’s now firmly ensconced with creative control (read R ratings, lots of nudity and casting his wife Sheri Moon) at Dimension, who have been trying to get a Blob up and running for a while. 

Variety reports that Zombie is dispensing with all notions of big red blobbiness, should anyone be concerned that this idea seems ridiculous. “That’s the first thing I want to change,” he says. “That gigantic Jello-looking thing might have been scary to audiences in the 1950s, but people would laugh now.”

So after Halloween and its sequel, why another remake? ”I’d been looking to break out of the horror genre, and this really is a science fiction movie about a thing from outer space. I intend to make it scary, and the great thing is I have the freedom once again to take it in any crazy direction I want to.”

The budget is set at around $30m (similar to District 9 and Cloverfield) and filming is planned for next spring. Rob has a new album out in November and plans to write the Blob script while he’s on his winter tour. It’ll give him something to do on the bus.

Zombie-related trivia: Bill Moseley, who played Otis Firefly in House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects, and Z-Man in Halloween, played “Soldier no. 2″ in the 1988 Blob remake.

Halloween 2 is out in the US today, but doesn’t seem to have a UK release date yet.

There’s no sign yet of the promised “John Rambo” director’s cut of Sylvester Stallone’s fourth Rambo outing, but Variety reports that work on Rambo 5 is underway, with Stallone again directing and (obviously) starring.

Stallone previously said that Part 4 was the final instalment: a similar cap to the series to Rocky Balboa. But he’s clearly changed his mind. Apparently the story this time revolves around “Rambo fighting his way through human traffickers and drug lords to rescue a young girl abducted near the US-Mexico border”.

The film will be produced under the wing of Nu Image / Millennium, where Sly is currently in post-production on The Expendables. Shooting, in every sense, will start next spring on what we’re sure will be a sensitive examination of cross-border American societal issues. With awesome killing and maiming.

Bad Boys 2 may have been the sequel that nobody/everybody (depending on who you are!) asked for, but we bought it anyway and it took a reported $273m worldwide. Its stars (well, Will Smith and Michael Bay) have risen astronomically in the years since the 1995 original, but The Hollywood Reporter says this morning that “all parties have expressed a willingness to return if a story can be hammered out”.

Enter Peter Craig, who’s knocking out the script as we speak. An established author of “darkly comic novels”, and a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop under the tutelage of Tobias Wolff (thanks Wikipedia!), he’s recently been working on the screenplay for Cowboy Bebop, adapted from the anime and set to star Keanu Reeves as Spike.

Bad Boys was solid but unremarkable. Bad Boys 2 was an absurdly overblown, late-coming surprise follow-up, which mixed the good (it’s sporadically funny and has a freeway car chase which knocks a similar scene in its immediate contemporary The Matrix: Reloaded into a cocked hat), the bad (it was two and half bloody hours long) and the ugly (another, supremely bad-taste, but very funny, chase in which morgue-corpses are strewn all over the road). It was so ridiculous that it was a key inspirational source for Hot Fuzz.

So what do you think? Is there any way that Smith and Bay will actually turn out for this? And do we want them to? Was Bad Boys 2 fun enough to warrant more, or have we had enough already? Over to you…

Jon Ronson’s madder-than-fiction odyssey with the US Military, The Men Who Stare At Goats, is almost with us in movie form, starring Ewan McGregor, George Clooney, Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey. Have a chuckle at this trailer over on Apple.

Ronson’s book accompanied the Channel 4 series Crazy Rulers of the World, revealing that 30 years’ worth of US paranormal military research have resulted in playing the Barney theme to prisoners of the War on Terror as a psychological interrogation technique. Well, we’d certainly talk.

The movie, which is looking awesome, gives us McGregor in the Ronson role (renamed Bob Wilton and saddled with an American accent), and a twitchy Clooney as Lyn Cassidy; a reactivated psychic spy and “Jedi warrior”. And yes, we do see him staring at goats, in an attempt to kill them with the power of his mind.

Jeff Bridges plays Bill Django, the hippyish founder of the Psychic Soldier programme designed to create “warrior monks who can pass through walls and see into the future”. And Spacey is Larry Hooper, an alumnus of the programme who now runs a military detention centre in Iraq.

We’re intrigued about the part where McGregor is being strangled by a guy with a Dr Strangelove arm. All will be explained on January 22nd when i hope this is more The Big Lebowski than Burn After Reading…

Starring: Zach Galifianakis, Will Arnett, Bill Nighy (& the voices of) Nicolas Cage, Sam Rockwell, Penelope Cruz, Jon Favreau, Steve Buscemi

Director: Hoyt Yeatman 

Writer(s): Cormac Wibberley, Marianne Wibberley

Cinematography: Bojan Bazelli

Original Score: Trevor Rabin

Running Time: 88 Mins.

Ok, consider, talking animals take on a criminal mastermind, he who has a plot to “take over the world”, animals are trained by the government and employ all kinds of gadgets that 007 himself would be envious of, think you have seen some or all f these plot points lived out before, in cartoon form? Live animal form? CGI animals? The answer should be a resounding “yes”. So we have cleared up that G-Force lacks originality, in spades. What it does have though is one hell of a fantastic voice cast that actually sound like they wanted to do it, Unlike Tobey Maguire and Alec Baldwin (to name but a couple of sleep walking vocal performances is the risible Cats & Dogs.

It is safe to say that without the enthusiasm of the voice cast to paper of the cracks of the entirely bored real life cast memebers G-Force would pretty much be a big fat F! It is sad to see the likes of Will Arnett and Zach Galifianakis sleepwalking their way through the thankfully brief scenes they have, especially given Galifianakis’s outstanding display in The Hangover. Thank heavens for Jon “The Favs” Favreau and Sam Rockwell for making talking guinea pigs if not believable at least fun and most importantly funny! Special mention has to go to one particular “voice”, and this is something I never thought I would ever write, Nicolas Cage as a Mole.

Yes Cage has taken on some wacky roles in his time but in G-Force he well and truly makes Speckles (the mole) the star, funny and geeky with a slightly sinister edge, well you dont get that in Knowing do you! It is just great to hear Cage having fun, especially given his awful output of late, The Wicker Man anyone? Given the choice of that over a talking mole I would take the mole any day.

That G-Force is in 3D is of little consequence, especially as the gimmick becomes more and more common I really fail to see how it enhances a movie experience, especially to the tune of an extra £1.50 (even with Avatar on the horizon). Sqeeing as this is effectively an action film and from uber action-producer Jerry bruckheimer no less you would expect a few explosions and a car chase, well it’s close, imagine The Rock with guinea pig’s, a mole and a fly and your halfway there, with solid direction and so good use of the gadgets, and needless to say (in this day and didgital age) the effects are top notch with the creatures used clearly not real but looking every inch as real as is possible with the thankful omission of zany eyes or bogs mouths that seem to dog this type of film.

VERDICT

G-Force is not going to win over the haters, but as talking animal flick’s produced by Jerry Bruckheimer go, it is a slick and amusing action/adventure/amusing comedy, especially if the thought of Nic Cage as a mole appeals to you!

The Batman rumours just won’t stop flowing. Despite there being no official announcement yet, the latest word on Batman 3 is that Chris Nolan plans to shoot it entirely in IMAX. Yes, while Nolan himself is still playing coy about what he might be planning for the next film (though enough evidence has been building to suggest he’ll get to it after Inception), Ain’t It Cool has heard that he may be ready to commit to the IMAX format.

While chunks of The Dark Knight were shot in the format, the weight and clunky inconvenience of the cameras meant it was impractical to film the whole thing with them. But thanks to advances in the tech, it may now be possible. Still, stick this one in the rumour drawer for now.

Today I am all aflutter because we just heard that the Vin Diesel-starring xXx: The Return of Xander Cage sequel has landed a director, and it’s the similarly macho-named Ericson Core. Just as soon as we get a Max Power and a Trent Steele up in here, it’ll be the most testosterone-y film ever.

The Return of Xander Cage, whose death in the second film was clearly some kind of, like, ruse rather than an inconvenience to be brushed aside to keep the franchise going, sees Diesel’s extreme sports enthusiast turned government agent return to the NSA eight years on. And, er, that’s all we got. But we are willing to put money down now on things EXPLODING and GOING FAST and PEOPLE JUMPING OFF HIGH THINGS. We’re a little bit psychic that way.

Core previously worked with Diesel when he was cinematographer on The Fast & The Furious, and turned to directing a few years back with Mark Wahlberg / NFL drama Invincible. He steps in to fill Rob Cohen’s shoes after the latter abandoned the franchise he created (again) to go and direct Medieval.

So it looks like this is on. Let’s play Guess The Set Piece below – we’re saying helicopters through a series of underground caves. Go!

Angelina Jolie was so freakin’ cool in Wanted that it’s hard to imagine a sequel without her, but given that *SPOILER* she died at the end of the first one *END SPOILER*, that might seem difficult. Well, not for director Timur Bekmambetov, who told MTV that he’s come up with a way to bring her character, Fox, back for the sequel. 

“”If you remember from the first film, we have a recovery room with the baths of wax,” Bekmambetov told MTV. “We know how to do this, but it’s still tough to do, because the bullet is inside her head. But there has to be a reason for her to come back… and we know the reason. I think we found the reason for her to come back.”

We can only hope that Bekmambetov’s reason is as batshit-crazy as his reasons for characters doing things normally are (Loom of Fate, Chalk of Destiny, Badger of Catastrophe, whatever), but even if it’s a simple “but she was ace!” we’re willing to hear it

Susan Sarandon is reportedly in final talks to join Oliver Stone’s Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps, taking a role that we like to think of as “the Martin Sheen part”, since she plays the mother of Shia LaBeouf’s thrusting young Wall Street trader.

 It remains to be seen whether she’s also a blue-collar type with some potentially explosive insider information, since details on her role remain sketchy. With LaBeouf playing a young trader who falls under Gordon Gecko’s (Michael Douglas) seductive spell, she might provide a moral counterpoint or might end up the sort of mother who pushes him onwards.

Shooting begins next month in New York, presumably after Sarandon finishes work on You Don’t Know Jack, the Jack Kevorkian biopic for HBO and Barry Levinson, and before she starts publicity on The Lovely Bones later in the year.