IRON SKY is apparently finished, and set to premiere, natürlich, at the Berlinale. Here’s the trailer:
I saw Timo Vuorensola in November on a panel at Futures of Entertainment and he spoke at length about how the film has been financed and put together. This was the first time I’ve seen anybody put crowd-funding and crowd-sourcing in a credible business context, and the first time I’ve contemplated the prospect of blockbuster movies being produced in this way. With all the fallout from SOPA/PIPA, I can’t think of a better time to be invading multiplexes with a film pitched as INGLORIOUS BASTARDS meets SIN CITY meets ‘old French movies’. Expect the space hun to be big in 2012.
The trailer for Ridley Scott’s PROMETHEUS broke last week. Here it is. It’s rather good.
Bleeding Cool have already exhaustedly dissected it in relation to ALIEN, of which it is clearly antecedent.
What the trailer confirms is that the connection goes further than the fact of the two films being situated in the same sprawling storyverse. Even with the poster released a couple of weeks ago (see below) it seemed evident that what’s being sold here is a reboot, albeit one with a poise and finesse that’s only possible when your director has been talking ‘transmedia’ since you were in facehuggies (note to self: might sell).
“You think this can last. There’s a storm coming Mr Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches. Because when it hits you’re all gonna wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us.”
So speaks Selina Kyle, AKA Catwoman, in this week’s trailer for The Dark Knight Rises, with a prescience promising a resolution of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy uncannily zeroed in on the Zeitgeist.
“From November 1969 to June 1971 a coalition of American Indian students and urban Indians, calling themselves ‘Indians of All Tribes’, occupied Alcatraz Island off the coast of San Francisco as a call to resistance against US domination of native peoples and land. The coalition publicized the occupation through a widely distributed newsletter and a radio show broadcast in multiple cities. This action sparked years of Native resistance, including the 1972 takeover of the Bureau of Indian Affairs Headquarters in Washington D.C. and the re-occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973.”
Released in 1988, John Carpenter’s THEY LIVE finds honest, hard-working Americans – personified in this case by the muscle-bound mullet that is ‘Rowdy’ Roddy Piper – on skid row, under the thumb of a kleptocracy of aliens masquerading as decent, clean-living human beings in cahoots with a power elite of Reagan-era Republicans doing much the same thing.
Los Angeles offers the perfect backdrop to THEY LIVE. Wall Street might be America’s financial capital, but LA is its epicentre of conspicuous consumption, the natural point of origin for the TV signal being used by these intergalactic free-enterprisers to addle and exploit the collective human consciousness.
Loving this poster, liking what I’m hearing about the movie too, the 2012 offering from Laika. Lola lost herself in Coraline, the way kids ought to disappear into fairytales. Starting to look like 2012 is going to be the year of the fairytale. Guess that’s a double-dip recession for you.
[ UPDATE 10:14 31/10/2011 ] And, just in time for Halloween, a great little teaser:
