I happened to find myself talking to someone who is 2 degrees away from McG, but completely out-of-the-loop as to the director’s work. He’s just that guy she sees occasionally. So, while watching Mean Girls on ABC Family, I took it upon myself to let loose a few bullet points about the director.

- People give him a lot of crap for the fact that he made both Charlie’s Angels movies. These people are idiots who don’t fully understand big-budget directing OR the purpose of the Charlie’s Angels movies.

- More people should have seen We Are Marshall. Yeah, it was one of those “we will persevere” sports stories, but - once again - if you’re just looking to see what McG is capable of with his visual style, it’s not bad in the least.

- His name is McG. Yeah, it’s a nickname that makes him sound like a McDonald’s product, but the man can lens a film on a massive scale. When you saw J.Lo in The Cell, or managed to catch The Fall in an indie theater, you thought: “Wow, cool visuals,” not “What kind of director prick calls himself Tarsem.” Get over the unfortunate nickname, people.

I also mentioned that the tides have turned with the Terminator Salvation public perception. Something that Peter from /Film covers in his set visit post:

Our visit to New Mexico took place last July, before the video blogs became popular, so we’ve decided to record a video blog talking about our visit to the set of Terminator Salvation after the fact, and nearly a year later. You have to understand that perception of this film was a lot different back then. No one in the world had faith in McG, and no one wanted to see another Terminator film, especially after the third movie. Our experiences on set changed our opinions of what this movie is and could be, and I’m sure you’ve seen that in my enthusiastic coverage of the film over the last year.

What follows is Peter’s set report, including video/audio of him discussing the film’s set with Frosty from Collider. The whole post takes awhile to digest, and while I probably could pillage it for cool facts, well, then Peter would yell at me, probably. CHECK IT OUT HERE!

I will, however, point out that McG is already all-up in his next two projects. Namely, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea for Disney and Terminator 5. News on both, under the cut…

Yesterday saw the release of a 40-minute-long Lord Of The Rings fan film that is based off the original Tolkien text, following Aragorn (still Strider) at this point in the months leading directly to Fellowship of The Ring.

Producer Brian Lavery assembled a team of 160 volunteers to make his piece, directed by Chris Bouchard (who Lavery described as “the biggest” LOTR fan in the team), for a budget of 3,000 pounds, about $4,464 dollars. The film’s epic scope owes a lot of it’s look to digital matte paintings and rotoscoping, allowing this low-budget fan film to take on a look similar to Peter Jackson’s trilogy.

As a guy who has a semi for fan films, sitting down to watch a good one last night made me geekily-giddy.

If your interested in LOTR, independent film, no-budget costume design or digital matte painting, you should check it out for FREE (long live independent online cinema!) at TheHuntForGollum.com

Amidst the e-mails I received this weekend about how Wolverine sucked and how fanboys have unrealistic expectations for blockbuster films, there was one that essentially called me out for not posting the first Iron Man II image, above, from USA Today.

I think it’s a pretty bad ass first image, though some internet folks seem to be bitching and moaning. Here’s why those people are wrong: it’s the first image, there are four suits and new screen tech.

First image: what were you guys expecting, Iron Man in full costume with Scarlett Johansson hanging all over him? The flick is right in the middle of principal photography. If director Jon Faverau didn’t know from the last Iron Man that taking care of the internet fanboys is important, we still wouldn’t have seen sh*t from this film. And the shots that would have leaked would have been of cast moving in and out of sound stages, not an actual production still.

Four suits - From left to right, the re-built Mach I, the all-silver Mach II, the beat-up Mach III from the Iron Monger battle at the end of the first flick and a fourth suit that looks to be modeled off the classic Avengers Iron Man with a tad more gold.

Screen Tech - those amazing screens either had rough VFX added to them as a production still or are actually semi-transparent. The fact that I’m thinking about the latter makes me excited as a tech geek.

Oh, yeah, and what’s in the box?

Also evidence of me sucking at the end of last week, I completely missed the first Inglorious Basterds character poster with Nazi-killing Brad Pitt.

Click the thumbnail to enlarge.

Here’s a text message I got last night from Marvel Comics friend Julian: “I read your review. I’m still seeing Wolverine, and it’s still going to suck.”

Ok, I’ve been piling a lot of industry crap on Wolverine recently, and now that you too can spend your hard earned money watching Wolverine, I thought I’d take a step back from my usual bitching.

Wolverine is what this franchise needed to survive. I might have made a big deal about that when I said that they might as well have made an ashcan version of an X-Men movie, but since they didn’t go that route, Wolverine is the best they could have done.

Gavin Hood is no Sam Raimi or Bryan Singer. He’s not establishing ownership over the property. He’s much more akin to a Bret Ratner, who was brought on X-Men: The Last Stand after a story had been developed, populated by new mutants via committee. Though I’m not going to put Ratner on any best director lists in the future, X-Men: The Last Stand was not his fault, it was Fox’s fault, as any movie that is given over to a director in the middle of pre-production with an immovable release date is the studio’s responsibility.

Hood’s occasional fights with Fox CEO Tom Rothman over Wolverine were probably about tone and possibly about characters and story, but they were had. The idea that Gavin Hood wanted some artistic integrity is interesting and, depending on your opinion of the film, a boone to the man’s patience for futility.

The question remains, what did Wolverine do right? And here are you answers…

Me, yesterday: “Hey Ryan, before I go, I wanna pull up the new Transformers trailer on you laptop, ok?”

Ryan: Yeah sure.

(minutes later)

Me: Sweet, come take a look at the last seconds of this trailer. Devastator is huge.

Ryan: I’m not interested in Transformers.

Me: Why not? They’re the best.

Ryan: They are NOT the best.

Me: That’s not what I mean. I mean that it’s a special effects movie and from this trailer, it looks like it might be the best special effects movie this summer.

Ryan: I don’t care about that Shia LaBeouf stuff.

Me: Me niether. But you have some of the best motion graphics artists in the world disassembling vehicles and rebuilding them as giant fighting robots. And each part needs to respond to the light a certain way, and have it’s own weight…it’s complex stuff.

Ryan: I get it. I just have no interest in seeing it.

Me: Not even in IMAX? Dude, if you like visual effects and/or robots you need to see this movie this summer.

Ryan: I don’t like visual effects or robots.

Me: What you talking about, Willis?

Ryan: Okay, I kinda like robots.

Trailer under the cut…

Frequent reader/contributor WeaponXQc (previously called Reader Jay, I believe) sent me his review of the Wolverine workprint literally hours after the leak was announced. I told him that officially I was not going to print reviews of the workprint until the film came out and thought to myself that it wouldn’t matter because the movie would be different…

…which it wasn’t.

I thought I’d resurrect this review because it takes the fanboy route as opposed to my recent “F*ck Fox” route. It’s worth a look, inside…

The creation of Robert Zemeckis’ 1988 live-action/cartoon comedy Who Framed Roger Rabbit is one of my favorite potpourri stories, where multiple source materials meshed with new technology and Bob Hoskins to create a very interesting piece of cinema.

When Roger Rabbit was released, it was one of the more expensive movies of its time with a budget of $75 million. The film managed to sweep up over $150 million in North America alone ($330 worldwide) and went on to win 4 technical Oscars at the 61st Annual Academy Awards in 1989.

The story of the film, revolving around Roger being framed for a murder and Christopher Lloyd attempting to build a freeway through Toon Town, was copped from two different sources and adapted to the film we know today.

Gary Wolf wrote the novel “Who Censored Roger Rabbit?” in 1981. This novel is generally considered to have brought the majority of the ideas to the screenplay. In the novel, detective Eddie Valiant (the name of Bob Hoskins’ character in the movie) is hired by Roger to find out why his bosses have reneged on a promise to give him his own strip (the book is based more around the theme of comic strips than the film’s animated cartoons), eventually he finds Roger murdered with a clue left in the form of a “word bubble.” In the book, ‘toons talk with sprouting word bubbles as well as vocalization as a nod to the comic strip origins of the book’s characters.

The other portion of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the plot involving Chistopher Lloyd’s Judge Doom wanting the deed to Toon Town so he could build a freeway through it, was actually lifted from the proposal for a sequel to Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. The screenwriter Robert Towne, who wrote the Chinatown screenplay had planned out a trilogy for Jack Nicholson’s Jake, the second called “Cloverleaf” and featured - you guessed it - the building of the first freeways and the decline of Red Cars (more on Red Cars HERE).

Since the film was made in 1988, a lot of the Bob Hoskin’s acting was done to thin air. While watching the flick over the weekend with some friends, we all noticed that Hoskin’s, obviously new to the idea of things being animated in later (as Hollywood had yet to break into the post-Juarassic-Park SFX Mecca), acts most of his scenes with toons looking waaaaaay off frame.

Of course, now we live in a world of motion capture and 3D animation. So what property could be suited to deal with the ramifications of such a thing?

I guess that question was leading…