Fan Rants

Warren Ellis is one of my favorite modern-day comic book writers. He has a style that is intense but with enough humor thrown in to not be morbid.

This October a film based on his comic book mini-series ‘Red’ will be in theaters. Red revolves around what happens when a trained ‘Company man’ assassin retires. The book is, like most of Warrens work, intense. The film trailer…well not quite intense. But it has a great cast with Bruce Willis, Helen Mirren, John Malkovich and Mary-Louise Parker (swoon!).

Here is the trailer!

The good folk over at Warner Pictures are pretty pumped about a live action version of the classic anime film Akira. In fact, they have such confidence in it they are looking at it as a franchise.

The original animated version, which came out in the 80′s, is still considered to be (in my opinion also) a masterpiece in visual styling. But the story was only partially told in that film as the original manga (Japanese comics) ran the story through a much wider arch. Taking over as writer/adapter for the property is Albert Torres, and working with him is director Albert Hughes (“From Hell,” “The Book of Eli”).

The plan is to have the first film cover the first three manga volumes and a sequel cover the next three. Now these ‘volumes’ are just that, HUGE comics…think something akin to a small phone book. That’s how they roll in Japan, when it comes to comics they are quite serious.

I hope they pull this off well and don’t muck with the story too much. And lets also hope that Warner will actually hire the proper ethnic actors unlike what we have seen for The Last Airbender adaptation.

So I am still kind of mixed on what I should expect from the new Green Hornet movie coming out in 2011. Nothing against Seth Rogen, as generally he plays characters that I like and can even identify with. But this a character that has a lot of powerful history to it.

Watch the trailer and tell us what you think, really interested to see people’s reactions who do not know the character that well.

Any self-respecting fan of the Twilight series (is that even possible?) will be at the opening weekend of Twilight Eclipse come June 30th. But everyone knows those tickets will sell out well in advance.

With that in mind the two big online movie ticket hubs, movietickets.com and fandango.com, will start selling tickets at Midnight EST, Thursday May 13th (Friday morning). So get your glitter on and stake your claim to the big faux Vampire movie of 2010!

I can still remember the first time I saw Fritz Lang’s iconic film Metropolis. It was a VHS version that was about 90 minutes long. This film, one of the first sci-fi films of all time, taught me to appreciate the story telling capability of the silent film. This week the New York Times released an excellent article on the film and its newly restored version.

Around 10 years ago a special restored version came out that brought the film up to 2 hours in length. But film archivists really wanted to find the original 2.5 hour version that Lang released in 1927. And in 2008 one was uncovered in Argentina.

So after over 80 years, “The Complete Metropolis” is being released in a limited theatrical run this fall. This will be followed shortly afterward with the DVD release.

It is fairly obvious as to what parts have been added since the missing 30 minutes are very grainy (even after thorough digital cleanup). But I am still very interested to see this restored masterpiece.