Though he was best known for playing cops and crooks, James Gandolfini - who just died very suddenly in Italy at the age of 51 - never touched my heart more than in his indisputably nerdiest role as Carol in Where the Wild Things Are. Voicing a giant, semi-scary plush creature of the imagination, he encapsulated both the unpredictable rage and the desperate neediness of a child who feels powerless against the larger world. He could eat you as easily as he'd hug you, but deep down all he needed was affirmation.

I'm pretty sure the actor who played him so well had it. Rest in peace.

UPDATE: Via Mental Floss, some more Gandolfini/Sendak goodness.

I think the reason Anchorman remains the most avidly cult-followed of Will Ferrell's movies is that, more than any other, it lets him be extremely weird and take the story in whatever direction his muse led him. As such, the ostensible premise and story became almost irrelevant.

So aside from its taking of Ron Burgundy and his team into the '80s, I'm not sure the story here in the sequel is really the point. Indeed, I hope it isn't, because I'm a little burned out on "ironic" racism as a cheap taboo gag. I will grant that it probably better befits a clueless newsman in the '80s than, say, Sarah Silverman today. The scene at the end of this clip makes me wince more than laugh, but I'm hoping that the R-rated version will go in a more interesting direction.

Watch after the jump and see what you think.

Lego movies get made every day by fans. But this one is actually coming to theaters, and you might say it's the Avengers of Lego Movies.

I'm guessing that with this being a WB movie, we'll only be seeing DC superhero minifigs and not Marvel, but who knows? If this truly does play like a Roger Rabbit of construction bricks, I think it'll prove that Lego can do anything.

Watch after the jump.

Remember how great that first Ice Age trailer was? No, I don't mean just for the Vanilla Ice song, although much bowing is due for that, indeed (yes it is, and you know it). Skrat and the acorn was some classic cartoon zaniness...but mostly unrelated to the tale of a mammoth, a sabretooth and a sloth finding a human baby and carrying it home.

Disney's Frozen - as opposed to Adam Green's Frozen, in which people trapped on a ski-lift wait forever to exercise their only viable options - is a retelling of The Snow Queen, but you'd never know it from the teaser, which features some funny business between a reindeer and a snowman, whom I assume will be comic-relief characters.

The final film may end up a typical fairy tale...but the teaser ain't that. Check it out after the jump, and tell me that snow dude was not made in the image of the Mad Hatter.

On May 7th of this year, Warner Bros. announced that they had acquired the rights to make a new Dungeons & Dragons film. Initially, there were minor cheers throughout D&D fandom. Warner's claim hinted that they were going to make a feature film, and this was a significant step up from the past two made-for-TV films that had been broadcast on SyFy. It wasn't until people read deeper into the Deadline.com article that the collective groan of D&D fans could be heard across the multiverse.

Wikipedia

The article was filled with conceptual landmines that set off the "it's going to suck" sensors of RPGers everywhere. Phrases like "the film will be produced by... producer Roy Lee and Courtney Solomon...[who] directed a 2000 Dungeons & Dragons feature," and "The studio...will use a script by Wrath Of The Titans and Red Riding Hood scribe...David Leslie Johnson. That script, Chainmail, was acquired last year as a free-standing project, based on an obscure game that was also hatched by D&D designer Gary Gygax before he and Dave Arneson launched D&D" were of particular concern. In the minds of many fans, any connection with Courtney Solomon automatically induces one to write the project off as a potential nightmare. Add to that the fact that the PR staff at Warner didn't know enough about the property to know that Chainmail is more than "an obscure game also hatched by" Gygax, it was the original combat system for D&D. The current combat system was referred to as the "optional system" in the original white box set.

Given that Chainmail also happens to be the name of a trademarked miniature skirmish game published by Wizards of the Coast (read: HASBRO) that had rules designed by Chris Pramas which had been released in the early 2000s, and that the past two D&D films were direct-to-TV affairs, it is not surprising that Hasbro almost immediately filed a legal complaint asking for an injunction preventing any development of a D&D film by Warner Brothers or by Sweet Pea Entertainment (Courtney Solomon's company).

Copyright Wizards of the Coast 2000

Hasbro claims that Solomon's license with Hasbro for the D&D film and TV rights expired when Sweet Pea Entertainment paid Hasbro $20,000 in fees for the broadcast of Dungeons & Dragons: The Book of Vile Darkness. It is quite certain that Solomon will file a counterclaim asserting his rights, and a mass melee will ensue in which all parties will attempt to use Vorpal Blades or maybe even Blackrazor to settle the issue. You can read the initial lawsuit at The Hollywood Reporter.

3...2...1...Letdown!

Sorry, Europa Report, but you were trying so hard to make the science believable (and a geek friend of mine insists it still isn't, though it should be sufficient for most audience members), that you forgot to make the fiction any good. The ambitions behind this movie - to make a realistic sci-fi film - are noble, but the execution is terrible from a story perspective.

Greedo!

Entertainment Earth is gradually revealing images of all the reference materials used by Hasbro sculptures (including some I've never seen before), one day at a time. Because unlike the Special Edition Greedo, you don't want to jump the gun on this.

Please note: there will be SPOILERS in this review. Probably nothing a fan couldn't guess, but I have to touch on the ending a little bit just to encapsulate the general experience.

When the lights came up at the end of the world premiere of My Little Pony Equestria Girls, following a brief in-credits easter egg for fans, my screening companion (whom regular commenters will know as Kyle "SlyDante" LeClair) turned to me and said, "On behalf of all Friendship is Magic fans, I would like to apologize to you for the preceding movie" (this was what he meant by taking a bullet yesterday). Considering the zeal with which the little-girl audience responded to the film's musical numbers with well-prompted clapping led by festival volunteers, I suspect the official target audience won't mind too much. But when it comes to Bronies, the adult male fans of the cartoon who insist it's a well-written show...I predict there may be some gnashing of teeth. Whatever clever concepts the show may have - and I cannot claim to be especially familiar with it - the movie does not do very much with (there is a funny parody of political attack ads, but that's about it). And for a TV cartoon turned movie (think of how Simpsons did it, or Beavis and Butt-head), there was no extra expenditure to make things look better on the big screen. Given the relatively simple nature of the drawings, you could probably watch this on your phone and not lose much visual detail, if any. I wouldn't suggest paying to watch it, but if you held a gun to my head and told me I had to see it again, I'd say, "Sure, fine whatevs." It's far from the worst movie based on a TV cartoon I've ever seen. If you can really call it a movie at all.

Of course He'll Be Back...

Wikimedia Commons

An Arnold fan site recently got this quote from the man himself:

In fact, I'm very happy that the studios want me to be in Terminator 5 and to star AS the Terminator, which we start shooting in January and I'm also going to do King Conan - to play that role and also to do another Twins movie. So I feel very proud of that. I feel very happy and I'm looking forward to doing those films.

My initial reaction was that this was silly. How can they keep casting an obviously aging man as part of Cyberdyne Series 101, which is presumably an assembly line of cyborgs?

Then I thought some more, and it actually totally makes sense. Bear with me.

I'm afraid we're going to have to assume that all Terminator movies are canon. I know you don't like to, but there's no indication anywhere that they should not be. So, proceeding with that in mind - it makes sense that the look of an endoskeleton would never change. But Terminators are covered with human flesh and blood. Human skin ages, and would do so much faster without internal organs like lungs oxygenating them. Since the robots also don't eat, the organic cells would not be powered the natural way. And we know they don't have internal organs because Marcus Wright was unique in Salvation in that he had a human heart.

Well, you could say, maybe there's some kind of nanite swarm in there repairing the cells in a more complex way. Maybe - but then Salvation established that Skynet was kidnapping humans en masse to basically take their skins off and give to its robots for clothing. This means the organic tissue is a transplant rather than spontaneous generation, and I think it's this story element, rather than hilariously bad dubbing, that got the infamous "Sergeant Candy" scene cut from T3 - it would have established that T-800s use one template and all resemble Arnold at a single point in time...

So basically - yes, the organic shell on a T-800 would absolutely age. We could also - now that Sgt. Candy isn't canon by virtue of being a deleted scene - easily have Arnold play an older human character, but his actual words say he'll be the Terminator.

However, I live in California, and we all know better than to take Arnold at his word. If they must do this, would you rather see him be cyborg, or human? And who wins a fight between him and Christian Bale?

via Latino Review

A lot of this stuff in the new trailer was shown at the presentation for the media in April, and they've finally decided everyone else was worthy too.

Something to bear in mind: Neill Blomkamp himself thinks the trailers are giving too much away. With that said, when you have an unknown property at a huge budget, many fence-sitters will want to know more details before making up their minds. The politics of the movie - which I suspect are mostly window-dressing - may turn off some, but do remember that Blomkamp is probably not thinking in terms of Republican versus Democrat, but apartheid South Africa, where the class separation was on a scale we probably can't imagine seeing here, with legalized racism, shanty towns and the like.

This and Pacific Rim are the last big movies of the season I'm still pumped for. Trailer after the jump.