Summer is Over, Lennon, Guitar Hero, Max Payne

Okay, so it really isn't over, but as far as Hollywood cares the Summer Movie Season ends this weekend... which means it is time to recap and for me to provide my Top 5 Movies of the Summer, that if you haven't seen yet, really should... and we look at the beginning of the summer for my predictions of what the top five of the summer actually turned out to be (in terms of gross).

But first I'll go ahead and fill in with the notable movie news from the past couple of days.

Fox/New Regency are apparently in the works on a Voltron movie and have grabbed the Sundance Film Festival award winning director Max Makowski. Not exactly a household name, but is starting to make his own dent in the biz with being in charge of new projects like the movie adaptations of classics like "Kung Fu" and "Hawaii Five-O".

Biopics are in these days it seems. We've got "W" coming down the pipe and have had flicks like "Ray" and "I'm Not There" in more recent days. So I guess it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that the tentatively named "Nowhere Boy", a biopic about John Lennon, is currently starting up solid production. I think the question here is who plays the pretty damn legendary musician.

And while on the topic of music based movies, let's go ahead and ruin the mood and talk about the new flick being pitched by the, who I am now completely convinced is terrible and insane, Bret Ratner... Guitar Hero. Yeah, that's right. Of all the video games to do a movie off of... Thankfully it seems Activision-Blizzard isn't precisely willing to let the rights on their brand go to film... but Ratner is apparently being persistent. What's absolutely horrifying is his premise.

Moving on from that to something potentially worse...

In my less than humble opinion, there are certain movies that simply never need to be touched in Hollywood's obsession with doing remakes. Casablanca would be one, Gone with the Wind, The Maltese Falcon... you get the idea. Well I'd have to say that Poltergeist is probably on that list... but hey, a remake is inbound regardless. Vadim Perelman, director of The House of Sand and Fog, Life Before Her Eyes, etc is in some serious talks about being the helmer for this project. I wouldn't go as far as wishing death upon them, but injury and misfortune leading to the cancellation of the project would suffice.

Back at Comic Con we were given the first Max Payne trailer to wet our nerdy appetites... and wet them it did. It also raised some questions about wtf some of that stuff was for people more familiar with the game's pretty epic story.

Well a full length trailer has been released. It expands quite a bit on the original teaser and is definitely worth checking out. You can find it on Yahoo here.

http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1810007086/video/9486308

Now there's a movie that came out a few years ago that I just thoroughly enjoyed... not because it was some intricate thriller, not because it was an astounding action-adventure... but because it was the perfect laugh-it-up, kick ass, self-mocking fun time guy flick. Crank was the name of the movie and it was all of what I said there and more. When I heard a 2nd Crank was in the works, I was teeming with excitement and immensely curious because they basically killed off the Jason Statham lead character in the first.



For those unfamiliar with Crank... the first is about gunman for hire Chev Chelios who has someone associated with a guy he's offed poison him with a concoction that'll kill him unless he gets his heart pumping as much as possible... the result is an adrenaline junky ride of a lifetime.

One director I enjoy watching the projects of is Ridley Scott... and with the exception of American Gangster, I love his movies. His newest flick, Body of Lies, just got its first poster featuring a couple of the flick's stars: Leo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe.



Okay, time to close this blog off the way I was looking to start it... with that much anticipated recap of my favorites of the summer.

I can't seem to find the link around here, but my early predictions for the Top 5 of the Summer were as follows:

The Dark Knight - $300mil
Indiana Jones - $250mil
Ironman - $225mil
Wall-E - $200mil
Hancock - $200mil

And it turns out I wasn't far off...except in some of the $$ figures.

1 The Dark Knight WB $492,688,931
2 Iron Man Par. $317,545,933
3 Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull Par. $315,325,091
4 Hancock Sony $226,507,190
5 Wall-E BV $216,668,606

So actual figures aside, here's my Top Five Flicks of the Summer:

• Five - Get Smart
  This movie truly surprised me. It was a well balanced mix of comedy and action that I wasn't really thinking would go over well, especially since Steve Carrell's last flick was Even Almighty... the epic flop of last summer.
• Four - Tropic Thunder
  From the promos I knew this would be pretty fucking entertaining, but I had no idea how good it actually was going to be until I made it out of the theater. If this summer did anything, it was provide us with a standard that's going to be hard to live up to.
• Three - The Incredible Hulk
  I had my doubts that this could rebound as well, but definitely had trust in Edward Norton. It was well placed and I have to admit that I enjoyed the flick. The poor performance of this movie really was only because it wasn't marketed as aggressively as Ironman or Batman. It holds up against the other two though.
• Two - Ironman
  In a year with no TDK, this would have been the #1 movie of the summer and more than rightfully so. It set the stage for an amazing summer and I look forward the the Bluray release in the coming months.
• One - The Dark Knight
  Nothing else really needs to be said about this movie that hasn't already...except that I hope by some miracle it manages to make another $100 million before leaving theaters in the US and trounces the Titanic record.

Well there you go. Enjoy your Friday afternoons everyone and I'll see you after the Three Day Weekend.