You were supposed to see The Brothers Bloom saddled over the 2008/2009 border, with a limited run in late December over the holidays and a full run in theaters come January 2009. Then, the movie kept getting pushed back until now it’s a fun con man film that is forced to compete in a field full of blockbusters. If The Brothers Bloom opened alongside Oscar-baiting fare instead of explosions ad giant robots, the film would find the audience it deserves and surprise the up-their-own-a**es pretentious film goers with a smart romantic comedy. As it is now, it’s going to surprise f*ck-it-all summer film attendees with charming characters and a winding con man plot.

Either way, there is good reason to see Brothers Bloom, mainly because it’s good.

My mom is a big fan of summer movies to this day. The only problem this year was that she gathered a group of female friends to go see what looked to be the first big special effects film of the year. My mom enjoys movies where things explode or films with a light-hearted plot. I’m guessing that raising me helped develop her taste for escapism. Regardless, her friends are of similar ilk, which it why Mom messed up her film-reputation by taking a whole bunch of housewives to The Watchmen.

Just to cover my own butt here, if Mom had asked me about Watchmen, I would have told her to wait until it came out on Netflix. It just wasn’t her type of film. Now, people are hesitant to go see Wolverine with her, because they’re afraid they will get blasted in the face with more attempted rape and blue penises.

Mom: Take your lady friends to Brothers Bloom. It might be the one film this year that a group of Midwestern housewives and I might both enjoy. It’s like The Sting peppered with Oceans 11 and with the Rachel Weiz role you like.

As for the rest of you, I suppose I have some ’splaining to do…

Something about online film journalists has everyone doing one of three things: 1) Taking wild guesses as to who will land the Green Lantern part, 2) sending passive aggressive tweets about how possible Green Lantern casting is non-news, 3) ignoring it entirely and laughing.

I’m 2 parts 3 with a single part 1 in the sense that less than a handful of posts down is the rumor that Bradley Cooper will be dawning the green tights. And I also posted that story that Latino Review was totally wrong about placing Chris Pine at the top of the list for the Hal Jordan/Green Lantern role. Now, I’m going to link you LIKE THIS to another Latino Review report. This time they are making another semi-educated guess in favor of a muscular 25-year old named Shawn Roberts who worked on Latern-director Martin Campbell on something called “Edge of Darkness.”

I’m also laughing, because whomever ends up getting the part will make all these back and forth blog posts obsolete.

Also on the Green Lantern front, it got pushed back to 2011. The original date had it coming out on December 17th 2010, but now Warners is listing it as June 17th, 2011. The Christmas-to-summer transition sounds like a mix of two things. One, the crew now gets some time to actually film the movie instead of rushing it through. Two, Warners is pushing it to go against Pixar and Cars 2. That’s some confidence to show in a superhero film.

Then again, Warners has always been weird about it’s big films, lest we forget how The Dark Knight doing so well pushed Harry Potter to this July for no other reason than this year needed more Warner-friendly reciepts.

You like noir, you say? Sin City tickle you? Did you want to chain smoke cigarettes and go after those who wronged your dame? After Brick, were you wondering why your high school experience was soft boiled in comparison.

I dig noir almost as much as I dig sci-fi. They both have their tropes, but these days with actioneers bleeding into sci-fi/fantasy territory because it allows people to make pretty CGI, the hard boiled detective noir stories look like a series of cliches.

I’m not sure if it’s bad that director Russell Mulcahy (Resident Evil: Exitinction) and writer Mark Hosack have the dame in red, the detective behind his desk and stoic reaction shots of Thomas Jane as he unravels the deal gone wrong.

This is how familiarity works for non-franchise films. If you’re into noir and violence and caper films, the second trailer for Give ‘Em Hell Malone (the first was just violence) actually does what it’s supposed to: shows you what to expect.

The above production still from District 9 a film produced by Peter Jackson and written and directed by 3D special effects artist Neill Blomkamp went up on Coming Soon without me paying much attention. Talk about the ShoWest trailer had me intrigued, but I’m not gonna lie; the way ti was described I thought it was going to be some sort of “aliens used to live here” mocumentary. Sort of if Cloverfield met 60 minutes.

That being said, I wasn’t far off in the plot/style department, but WAYYYY off in the coolness department. The more this movie’s advertising evolves, the more interesting it gets and the more I move District 9 up my list of badass sci-fi to take in this summer.

The first teaser graced the webs last week and piqued my interest by coming on like a documentary about immigration…until they showed me a huge spaceship and an alien I couldn’t understand with a pixelated face.

If that wasn’t cool enough, and it was, IMDB released and then pulled an “uncensored” and subtitled version of the trailer, which actually added pathos to the alien by showing his face and letting us know that the humans are keeping the aliens on Earth, in District 9, seemingly against their will.

I’m interested in this movie and the preview hasn’t even breached the Kafka-esque plotline. The movie takes place in South Africa, where a man is sent to do an investigation within the alien district. He’s infected by some kind of alien bio agent, and learns enough about the condition of the aliens’ lives to start fighting against humans on their behalf, possibly by slowly turning into one.

Nifty huh?

I think so.

Nothing like sci-fi with awesome effects, sympatheti aliens and a timely immigration theme.

The dead serious face above is Bradley Cooper, whom you might have caught in the previews for this summer’s comedy The Hangover (preview HERE). Why he is the banner image in a post about your favorite superhero properties is a different matter, because Bradley Cooper is on the short list for a Green Lantern audition:

I’ve just spent the last hour or so on the phones, tracking down a rumor I heard, and HitFix can exclusively report that Bradley Cooper is now one of the guys most likely to don the suit and slip on the power ring as The Green Lantern for director Martin Campbell.

That isn’t the only superhero property to slowly move forward this week, though it is the only piece of news repping for DC Comics (unless you count Quentin Tarantino’s pending and lengthy essay on Superman Returns).

Marvel has the bulk of the news, this via Coming Soon:

Iron Man 2 is, of course, already filming for a May 7, 2010 release, but Marvel said this morning that the Kenneth Branagh-directed Thor is scheduled to start filming in the First Quarter of 2010. No formal offers have been made to actors, though they said that casting announcements are likely the next few months. Thor is targeted for a May 20, 2011 release.

Marvel added that The First Avenger: Captain America, to be directed by Joe Johnston, is scheduled to start filming in the summer of 2010 for a July 22, 2011 release.

And just because the concept of a unified Marvel Universe makes me sequel, here’s another tidbit from Empire about the Avengers film:

“Zak Penn is already on board The Avengers [as writer] and he’s spending a lot of his time looking into what we’re doing with Iron Man, Thor and Captain America, seeing how we’re tying it all together. And he’s beginning to outline the script now – he’ll be doing that over the summer.”

Jason Reitman is really stepping out of his father’s shadow. Of course, when I write it like that, it sounds like I just re-watched Juno, Reitman’s most recent film. But, I’m talking about his newest, called Up In The Air. It features George Clooney as a corporate downsizer who is obsessed with collecting frequent flier miles.

Reitman’s pre-Juno film, Thank You For Smoking starring a single-faced Aaron Eeckhart was a humorous musing on PR lackeys for Big Tobacco. Juno was about teen pregnancy, and Clooney’s involvement in a film about a corporate lackey shot in the middle of the worst financial crisis since the great depression has me psyched for more quirky looks at socially relevant topics.

Yeah, these pictures are of George Clooney in a suit. So, if no one else, my Mom will click ‘em.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: we’re still in a period of big studio movie making where betting tens to hundreds of millions of dollars on a wholly original concept without a built in audience is just not worth the risk involved.

In a MPAA-issued Summer Movie newsletter [PDF] released in 2006, the following facts are given about the basic finances of major motion pictures, and remember, these are pre-recession dollars:

- The major motion picture studios invest an average of $96.2 million to make and market a movie.

- On average, studios spend $60 million for production fees, employee salaries, capitalized interest and overhead.

- Marketing, on average, costs $36.2 million per movie. That includes $3.8 million for film copies and $32.36 million for advertising in newspapers and magazines and on TV and the Internet.

- Only one out of every 10 films recovers its investment from domestic showings.

- Six out of 10 movies never recoup the original investment.

Already, just making a summer blockbuster is a risky investment, so the greater commercial Hollywood has entered a decade where each summer is punctuated by huge movies that are sequels, prequels or reboots of franchises that have a built in audience or schlock marketed as something familiar, even if it’s not.

Take, for instance, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, which I’ve heard good things about, but didn’t see because I knew it was A Christmas Carol meets My Best Friend’s Wedding. However, the more I hear about the performances in this movie and how well the premise was handled, I’m starting to understand that the promotional material I ended up seeing for the Matthew McConaughey flick was designed so I could recognize the premise and take my girlfriend to it, feeling comfortable.

The jokes on them, or me, for getting dumped awhile ago.

Point being, the millions of dollars spent on marketing a film is often spent making you think that you’ve seen something like the film before, or explaining to outsiders of the established franchise why this installment was made more for them. Marketers want you to settle into a theater, after buying your refreshment, feeling comfortable about what you’re going to see.

Take JJ Abrams’ Star Trek this weekend: a new action-adventure installment of a franchise that has had problems drawing in non-Trekkers, women and international audiences. For the franchise to survive, and to recoup the studio’s investment, you have to bring in the audiences who previously thought they wouldn’t see a Star Trek movie.

How do you do it? Cast younger actors and glitz it up with more action and explosions.

Even then, there’s no point in making a Star Trek movie if the Star Trek fans don’t show up. Here lies the dilemma where most films would just rely on marketing. Star Trek fans are gonna show up for something with the characters they know and non-stop, cross-platform marketing will bring in the newbies who want to see something different. The catch is that the die-hard franchise fans have certain things they want honored and that’s at odds with the casual movie-goer.

Example: Fans of Wolverine would have preferred (among a lot of other things) if Weapon XI wasn’t Deadpool, but the movie is so chock full of other mutants to try and please the fans that introducing another non-character mutant might have confused the franchise newbies who were just there to see Hugh Jackman and shirtless, white-painted Ryan Reynolds.

It looks like Hollywood is going to try and bring in both audiences under the same banner this summer using a theme that is one of my favorite as a geek: Time Travel.

This weekend’s Star Trek takes us back in time and establishes Leonard Nemoy as “Spock Prime” in this alternate timeline where the same people exist, but events are different. In an interview with Mr. Beaks from AICN, screenwriters Roberto Orci And Alex Kurtzman discuss how alternate timelines can be liberating in this type of film:

Beaks: You guys aren’t going to give me a real answer on this, but I’m going to ask anyway. Have you considered working Khan into a subsequent film?

Kurtzman: Who?

Orci: The honest answer is if you’re a TREK fan, there’s no way Khan isn’t at the top of the list of things you want to play with, right?

Beaks: Right.

Orci: It’ll just be whether or not it’s the right thing to do.

Beaks: That’s another iconic character with a very distinctive voice. How would you write Khan if you were to take that character on?

Kurtzman: The whole reason we came to this idea of an alternative time line was so that everyone could feel that canon was being respected while giving us freedom to have the future be unwritten. I think that leaves you as much or as little room for interpretation as you’d like in terms of some of the key characters.

Orci: I think if this works, it’ll be because it sometimes does what would’ve happened in the other timeline, and it sometimes doesn’t. It’s sort of a harmony - and finding that right balance will the be key if we do it.

After Star Trek bows in this weekend and audiences get a chance to wrap their fan/non-fan heads around the idea of divergent and parallel timelines, we get smacked in the face with Terminator Salvation, which will most likely end with the idea that time travel is on the forefront of Skynet’s attempts to kill John Connor, and – assuming as we are that Bale’s Connor lives – John himself might still be concerned with sending his father, a teenaged Kyle Reese back in time.

Or, if you read yesterday’s post about a possible Terminator 5 synopsis, we’ll have more discussion to do about time travel as a story-telling device.

[ED: I didn’t know where else to put this little fact, but it would be negligent not to mention I’m avoiding Lost. I want to watch the whole series in one burst, but I can’t avoid that the show is now jumping through time. I imagine it would be beneficial to this post to know what the series was attempting, but I want to enjoy the full work when it gets close to ending.]

These actual time travel/alternate dimension theories are pretty complex, but not above the average movie goer. If you doubt me, I suggest you read THIS POST on OverThinkingIt.com called “How Time Travel Works (and doesn’t) in Back To The Future.”

It just seems like we’re teetering on the edge of involving sci-fi science in our everyday reboots, even though the decision is made from more of a marketing standpoint. Then again, the convenience of the Superhero Genre being based both on ancient, Joseph Campbell-studied mythology AND having decades of backstory on the printed comics page (and the built in audiences to go along with it) has been bringing us a constant flow of superhero films for almost a decade.

Who’s to say time travel and tapestry timeline theory aren’t going to be the “get out of canonical jail free” card for the next wave of summer blow-em-ups.