The Caped Crusader will be sneaking into movie houses a few days before Ol’ Saint Nick does his annual toy run.

A prologue to director Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight Rises” will hit theaters Dec. 21 in front of the new Tom Cruise feature “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol.”

Nolan says the upcoming film will be set eight years following the action seen in “The Dark Knight,” according to TheWrap.com.

Nolan told the British film magazine that the prologue is “basically the first six, seven minutes of the film” and will serve as “an introduction to [the villain] Bane, and a taste of the rest of the film.”

“The Dark Knight Rises,” the third and presumably final film in Nolan’s Batman trilogy, will hit theaters July 20, 2012. The new film stars Christian Bale, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Tom Hardy, Anne Hathaway and Marion Cotillard.

After all of the talk and the countless award ceremonies that have preceded it, the Oscars ceremony will finally take place tomorrow evening. The 83rd Academy Awards are bound to be exciting with ten best picture nominees and several tight races that could surprise some viewers. I’m hoping for a few surprises and a few well-deserved victories tonight. Here are my predictions as to who will win and who should be taking home Oscar gold in the major categories.

Best Actress:

Will Win: Natalie Portman, “Black Swan”

Should Win: Annette Bening, “The Kids are All Right”

This is the category where I am hoping for the biggest upset. Portman has the momentum but I found both her performance and the film to be disappointing. The plot of “Black Swan” was over-the-top and over-dramatic and the film doesn’t deserve the recognition that it’s been receiving. On the other hand, Annette Bening was in complete control of her character in “The Kids are All Right” and played the part of a woman trying to hold her family together wonderfully. Let’s hope that the Academy agrees and hands Bening her first Oscar. (more…)

 Yeah, sure I do. You were the pride of Lowell. You were my hero, Dicky.

In fairness to those reading this review and those involved in the creation of “The Fighter,” I’m going to confess upfront that  expectations probably diminished my enjoyment of what is arguably an impressive, quality film with a number of exceptional (and Oscar-worthy) performances.  Before moving to Los Angeles in 2003, when I had the nine-to-five life that made such things possible, I was a boxing fanatic who followed the sport religiously on HBO, Showtime, and pay-per-view; I also subscribed to all the magazines, and mourned the cancellation of  the USA Network’s Tuesday Night Fights as though a favorite Aunt had had passed on.

During the 1990’s and the early aughts, there were all kinds of memorable fighters and fights, but nothing like the storied 2002-2003 trilogy between “Irish” Micky Ward and the late, great, and legendary Arturo “Thunder” Gatti.

These two men were never the most talented boxers in their respective weight classes, they were something more. They aspired to greatness in every fight, were incapable of quitting, and had more heart than every superstar, belt-holding millionaire champion put together. We the fans adored these two and when HBO brought them together on May the 18th, 2002, for a fight with no belt or title or championship at stake, everything one loves about the always frustrating and frequently maddening sweet science came together over 10 unforgettable rounds that saw two warriors become living legends. Their second fight was just as good, the third was a rapture beyond my ability to articulate. If you saw it, you know what I mean.

“The Fighter,” unfortunately, roll its credits before any of this takes place. For whatever reason, the filmmakers weren’t interested in the making of an immortal, they were interested in the more provincial aspects of Micky’s (a very good Mark Wahlberg) relationship with his troubled, older brother Dicky (an exceptional Christian Bale) and his difficult mother Alice (an outstanding Melissa Leo). Set in the mid-90’s, when we first meet Micky he’s running out of his prime fighting years at the age of 30, considered nothing more than a stepping stone for bigger names in the fight game, a weekend father, and making ends meet in the city of Lowell, Massachusetts on a road-paving crew. This is a truly decent and gentle man who loves and is loyal to a family that also happens to be his primary problem in life.

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As I’ve written before, 2010 was actually a good year for movies.  The King’s Speech, The Fighter, Inception, Toy Story 3, Tangled, and How to Train Your Dragon were all great entertainment.  We’ve seen terrific starring roles from actors ranging from the heretofore unwatchable James Franco to the ever impressive Christian Bale, from the magnificent Colin Firth to the chameleonic Geoffrey Rush.  We’ve seen some actresses in supporting roles who have outshone their second-tier parts: Melissa Leo and Amy Adams in The Fighter, Helena Bonham Carter in The King’s Speech.

But when we look at the leading actresses of 2010, the dearth of great performances and great parts is stunning.  The Golden Globe nominees for best actress this year were Halle Berry in the anonymous flick Frankie and Alice, playing a crazy person in her usual over-the-top style; Nicole Kidman in the anonymous flick Rabbit Hole, playing a grieving mother in her usual cold and remote style; Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone, playing a teenage girl looking for her meth-making dad; Natalie Portman in Black Swan, playing a crazy person with a constipated look plastered on her mug; and Michelle Williams in Blue Valentine, playing a spoiled girl who gets knocked up, married, and presumably divorced.  Has anyone seen any of these women in any of these films?  And if the disastrous Natalie Portman – Queen Amidala masturbating, anyone? – is the frontrunner for Best Actress at the Oscars, how far have female figures fallen?

Far.  Quick, think of the ten greatest living film actors.  It’s not that tough – we have iconic male film stars all the time.  Now think of the ten greatest living film actresses.  Now take away all women over 50.  Still thinking, aren’t you? (more…)

“The Fighter” is an actors’ film. Unlike other movies that feature one or two strong roles, this new boxing film features four strong characters and four great performances. Mark Wahlberg, Melissa Leo, Christian Bale and Amy Adams all excel in the story of a fighter whose opponents in the ring aren’t the only obstacles standing in the way of  his success.

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The movie starts with a film crew videotaping an emaciated former boxer named Dicky Eklund (Bale). Dicky believes that he’s being recorded for a documentary about his long-awaited comeback. He’s a local legend in Lowell, Massachusetts who is well known for knocking Sugar Ray Leonard to the ground in a fight he lost years earlier. Dicky thinks that he’s on the way back to the ring. In truth, he isn’t heading back to the ring anytime soon and the documentary isn’t about his comeback. It’s about his addiction to crack and how that addiction is controlling his life.

One of the people most affected by Dicky’s addiction is his half-brother Micky (Wahlberg), who is pursuing a boxing career of his own. As an underdog, Micky is known as a stepping stone for other boxers.  However, Micky’s trying to become a champion himself. He’s training with his half-brother but Dicky’s drug addiction often stands in his way.

There are two groups of people supporting Micky in his quest to become a great fighter. His mother (Melissa Leo) and many of his sisters want Mickey to train solely with Dicky, in spite of the latter’s drug addiction and irresponsibility. They ignore Dicky’s poor lifestyle and his  frequent trips to a local crack house. The other group supporting Micky include his new girlfriend Charlene (Amy Adams) and an older policeman named O’ Keefe, who is played by the real police sergeant who helped train the real Micky Ward. They want Micky to train with professionals who won’t hold him back with their own personal problems.  (more…)

We don’t choose the families we’re born into, and yet we are shaped for better or worse by the people we are forced to live with for at least the first 18 years of our lives. Most people luck out and find love, support and friendship from the ones they grow up around. Others suffer lives of physical or emotional abuse. But then, perhaps the hardest situation of all to deal with is when the person who is stuck in a sort of limbo, whose family loves them and wants the best for them but simply has no clue whatsoever bout how to provide it.

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That’s the kind of dilemma that Boston boxer Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) faces in the new biopic “The Fighter.” At heart, he is a quiet, soulful man who wants to do the right thing with his life – and yet, he has been surrounded by a family of drunken, uneducated losers who have forced him into a life of journeyman boxing and still seek to control his career moves well into his 30s. That’s because Micky is the younger half-brother of Dickie Eklund (Christian Bale), a once-promising prizefighter who got hooked on crack a decade ago and has been spiraling downward ever since.

And so it is that Micky is forced to live as a surrogate for Dickie’s dashed dreams and abject failures, taking the literal punches that Dickie avoids both in the ring, and outside it by sucking on a haze of cloudy crack smoke. But two things are about to shake up the brothers’ lives and give Micky a chance to finally pursue his own dreams on his own terms: Micky meets a bartender named Charlene (Amy Adams) who encourages him to pursue a better life and offers him unconditional love, and Dickie finally is snapped into awareness about his pathetic life by an HBO documentary he thought was about his delusional “comeback” but which in reality set him up as an example of the destructive influence of crack in America. (more…)

“Is the ecstatic truth actually a religious term?”

That question was posed to Werner Herzog a few weeks ago in an interview with the German broadsheet Die Zeit (The Time). Those of you who tuned in last week know that ecstatic truth is Herzog’s way of describing the poetic, transcendent heights of illumination to which his films aspire. “Yes, there is something of that there,” Herzog replied, “something of late medieval mysticism.”

However, he immediately provided a caveat, one that should warm the cockles of conservative hearts everywhere: “But I want to get away from the religious, from the mystical,” he stressed, “because it leads all too quickly to the cloudy waters of the New Age, which is the most horrific thing you can possibly imagine in the spiritual realm.” And then, the coup de grace: “And this is something you see in a film like Avatar, by the way.”

Whoops — guess Herzog didn’t get his marching orders this awards season! (more…)

One day … ONE day after gushing over how exciting the recession is now that those forced to work jobs they hate or who have lost them entirely can focus on their passions, Natalie Portman bought herself a $3 million castle-like estate.

Natalie, whoever’s advising you … fire them. If no one’s advising you, find someone who doesn’t carry a small dog in their purse or dates someone who does. Look to the real world for help. Look to someone who’s spent a few years in a land where the zip codes don’t start with “9-0.” Someone who cares enough about you and your career to say (without any “Honey, babys”):

“Nat, past the gates of your community and away from the hills of Hollywood losing your job doesn’t fuel passion, it fuels despair, and working a job you hate is almost as bad because of the big black  permanent ball of dread it plants in your gut. I know you dig Barack, I did too before he targeted my children and health care, but you can’t flak for his recession. That’s what the mainstream media is for. You have to empathize with your audience, build goodwill. Besides, you’re closing on that castle tomorrow, so today wouldn’t be a good time to get all gushy over how exciting Barack’s recession is. And if you do, I quit.” (more…)

So posters of President Obama made up as Heath Ledger’s Joker with ‘Socialism’ written below it have been showing up around L.A – and it’s being greeted with the usual outrage you’d expect from people who get outraged. Some are calling it racist, others are calling it “mean spirited and dangerous,” while I call it boring, boring, and oh yeah: boring.

The website Newsbusters points out the silliness behind the outrage – after all, President Bush has been depicted as far worse – he’s been portrayed as everything from a bloodsucking vampire in the Village Voice, to the Joker in Vanity Fair, to God forbid, a Republican- everywhere else. No one seemed to mind then. And while people like Bill Maher point out that Obama has been only at this job for six months (whereas Bush earned the bile over eight years) and therefore any criticism is unfair – that’s pure batpoop. Hatred for Bu$hitler began the moment he took office, and the vile lefties only knew Sarah Palin for a few weeks before they were wearing t-shirts with her face and a vulgar word (begins with ‘C’ and rhymes with bunt) beneath it. (more…)

Striving for cinematic greatness is always a risky proposition. The risk is that when you fall short there’s no mistaking the swing-and-a-miss. To his credit, this is the position Director Michael Mann loves to put himself in. He always strives, always puts himself out there and the result is a number of unforgettable films but also a few obvious and glaring misses. “Public Enemies” misses. Not as badly as “Miami Vice” or “Ali,” but other than a couple of sequences, “Enemies” never gels, grabs, bites or takes hold. Instead, the narrative just kind of rolls along hitting insistent beats en-route to the inevitable.

Johnny Depp is John Dillinger, a criminal before crime was organized who specializes in bank robberies and jail breaks. His dash, audacity and refusal to steal from the common folk has made him something of a folk hero to Depression-weary America, but J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup) sees an opportunity to use Dillinger’s exploits as a way to firm up his fledgling national police force (the F.B.I.), but first he’ll have to prove his modern, centralized methods work. (more…)

A Terminator mega-robot is fun to watch only if he (it?) is making his (its?) marauding way toward its target; generally, that’s the good guy in the movie who, by superhuman strength and unprecedented cleverness, will dispatch said Terminator in the last reel. Every Terminator movie has been defined by this simple conflict: man versus super-machine.

Not this time. And that is why, despite spectacular visual effects, a brooding and hyper-popular Christian Bale in the lead role, and marketing that pretty much stamped the title across my kids’ foreheads, Terminator Salvation is not nearly the success that the other three movies were.

John Connor and his mom (and his friends and pretty much everybody else with whom they ever come in contact) become instant targets for future-born Terminator robots. The setup is pretty straightforward. The time is present day. (more…)

The “Terminator” films are about the takeover of the world by machines, and unfortunately the series has itself manifested that phenomenon, being increasingly taken over by special effects and action sequences at the expense of identifiable human concerns.

Terminator Salvation, the fourth film in the apocalyptic action series, is heavy on action and sensational visual effects, but weak on the things that originally made this series so popular. It will please audience members who don’t expect too much from it.

Terminator Salvation is the first in the series without Arnold Schwarzenegger as a primary character, and the series has moved increasingly away from the personal, intimate approach of the first installment (in which the fate of Sarah Connor was at the center of the story and her relationship with Kyle Reese is at the forefront). (more…)

Have at it.

Discuss. Debate. Write your own review…

Big Hollywood’s review can be found here.

As we enter the fourth week of this summer season, I don’t know about you, but after a pleasant surprise with the unpretentious, proud to be a B-revenger “Wolverine,” each new release has gotten progressively worse. Let’s just hope – because there’s a lot of summer ahead of us – that we’ve bottomed out with “Terminator Salvation.”

What a crushing and noisy disappointment this is. For whatever reason, Director McG’s fourth chapter in the “Terminator” franchise tosses aside the simple but successful plot template that made its predecessors so memorable and goes all “Bourne” with a hyper-complicated plot, narcissistic “hero” and a big fat wide blur between the concept of good battling evil. Yes, welcome to Hollywood’s post-Bush “Terminator,” where a militaristic Resistance demands we “Stay the course,” Terminators work through their feelings, and John Connor runs off to find himself only to end up in a numbingly dull third act that plays like a direct-to-DVD toss off.

Things open on an intriguing and hopeful note. The year is 2003 and Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) is a guilt-ridden death row inmate not far from execution. Dr. Serena Krogen (Helena Bonham Carter, who’s always interesting), approaches Wright for what we assume is the umpteenth time to convince him to donate his body to science. His coming to terms with his own death mixed with her losing battle with cancer sparks his humanity and he relents. The State gives him what he deserves and we cut to 2018.

The world as we knew it is now ravaged by a war the machines wage against mankind. Cities are reduced to rubble and those who survive are reduced to prey, living underground or constantly on the run. Some have organized into what’s called the Resistance and their spiritual leader is John Connor (Christian Bale). (more…)

In my Final Weekend Tracking column posted on Wednesday, I predicted that X-Men Origins: Wolverine (Fox) would reach $92M on opening weekend, despite soft reviews (now only 38% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes). My first fearless forecast of the 2009 summer blockbuster season appears to be close to dead-on (missed by only 5%).

Star-turned-producer Hugh Jackman has scored his second-biggest opening ever and, easily, his biggest as a solo star. Wolverine has mauled the competition with a massive $34.75M opening day (including $5M or so in Thursday midnight sales). That could translate to a 3-day of $86.8M, getting Hollywood’s most lucrative season off to a spectacular start.

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The great thing about a sequel is that it has a built-in audience. The problem with sequels is that, as the numbers after the title go up, so does the production budget. Very hard to know for sure, but sources have told me that the production budget for X-Men was in the $75M range. X-2: X-Men United may have had a budget of about $110M, while the cost of X-Men: The Last Stand was, in all likelihood, as much as $210M. Why doesn’t it make sense to just churn out X-Men 4?

Look at these numbers.

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Recording superstar Beyonce Knowles is building a bankable resume for herself as an actress with Sony Screen Gems’ Obsessed as the latest title burnishing her resume. Co-starring the excellent Idris Elba (The Wire), this low budget, PG-13 genre pic has scored a far-above-expectations $11M on Friday, and it will likely reach $27.5M for the weekend. That is the best opening yet for the former Destiny’s Child lead vocalist as an above-the-title star, topping 2003’s The Fighting Temptations and Cadillac Records from late 2008.

Beyonce does battle with the sexy Ali Larter (HEROES) in OBSESSED

OPENINGS FOR BEYONCE MOVIES
1. Austin Powers: Goldmember – $70.3M opening
2. Obsessed – $27.5M opening (projected)
3. Pink Panther (2006) – $20.2M opening
4. Dreamgirls – $14.1M wide break (after a platform start)
5. The Fighting Temptations – $11.7M opening
6. Cadillac Records – $3.4M opening

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The final weekend of April has never been Hollywood’s favorite release date. In fact, it is generally considered to be among the worst release dates on the calendar. Whatever opens on the final weekend of April gets absolutely crushed by the official start of the summer blockbuster season on the first weekend of May.

The 4 new wide releases and 1 major specialty release set to debut this weekend will face an onslaught of mega-hits over the next month. How can Obsessed (Sony), Earth (Disney), The Soloist, (Dreamworks/Paramount), Fighting (Rogue) and The Informers (Senator) possibly find an audience with X-Men Origins: Wolverine (Fox) and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (Warner Bros) arriving next weekend followed by, in successive weeks, Star Trek (Paramount), Angels & Demons (Sony), the combo of Night at the Museum 2 (Fox) and Terminator: Salvation (Fox) and Disney/Pixar’s Up?

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That is one outstanding trailer and the first footage I’ve seen.

This era’s always proved difficult for present-day filmmakers to credibly recreate.  One major exception is “L.A. Confidential” (1997), but the rest, most notably Scorsese’s ridiculously over-praised “The Aviator“ (2004), overtax your suspension of disbelief with a sense that everyone’s play-acting with clothes found in grandma’s attic. Director Michael Mann appears to have figured out that stylizing the hell out of it is the way to go. The music and atmosphere make you want to dive right in. (more…)

No matter how frustrated, disappointed, or outright disgusted Hollywood makes me, all is forgiven during that brief moment just after the trailers finish and just before the film begins. When those lights dim the chip dissolves from my shoulder and all the filmmaker need do to win me forever is tell one helluva story.

Politics shmolitics… Just take me away.

For we hopeless movie lovers, each year hope (if you’ll pardon the expression) springs eternal with a fresh offering of pull-out-the-stops-studio-balance-sheet-in-the-crosshairs slate of tent poles. And for that reason, this is my favorite part of the movie year because all I want for my ten bucks is to get lost for a couple hours, and from May 1st through the end of August filmdom at least attempts to put the political nonsense on hold to do just that. (more…)