The Rainbow Screen

Pixar's new movie Wall-E came out on Friday, which took me a few days to realize, but I am ever so excited to see it.  I recently read an interview with the Wall-E sound designer via the Pixar blog, which confirmed that maybe someday sound design is what I would like to do.  

The coming weeks also contain new releases I am excited about, with Hancock opening next weekend [optimistic/excited], the new Hellboy the next week [skeptical yet hopeful], and finally the Dark Knight [super excited].  Not only is Batman my favourite superhero, but this is rumoured to be the most kick-ass movie since Iron Man.   I hope they are taking some cues from The Long Halloween Batman story, by Jeph Loeb, which follows the events of Frank Miller's Batman: Year One, and tells the story of, among other things, the creation of Two-Face, which I believe will appear in The Dark Knight as well, though probably in a different form, just as Batman Begins and Batman: Year One differed dramatically.  

And of course, speaking of Iron Man, let's consider the post-credits scene with Samuel L. Jackson a.k.a Nick Fury, who speaks of the Avenger Initiative.  This led me to vague thoughts of an Avengers movie in the works, but when I heard that Tony Stark shows up in the new Hulk movie {which I've heard mixed things about, as I expected} to talk of forming a team, my interest was tapped.  This could be an amazing set-up for the Avengers, but was Hulk even on the team?

To answer this, I turned of course to Wikipedia.  Turns out Hulk {as well as Iron Man} was an original member, but left in the first handful of issues.  Captain America joined as Hulk left, and soon after was the only early member remaining among a cast of new faces.  Further reading reveals two Avengers movies in the works: "The First Avenger: Captain America (working title) is scheduled for May 6, 2011, followed by The Avengers, scheduled for July 2011."  

Zac Penn is listed as a screenwriter for the Avengers material.  Wikipedia-hopping led me to discover that this guy not only wrote X2 {yay} and X3 {eh} and more, but also penned PCU after attending Wesleyan University, from whence I graduated just over a year ago.  But, he also wrote/directed two movies with Werner Herzog as an actor in them!  This blew me away.  The two movies are The Grand and The Incident at Loch Ness.  The Grand was much improvised, much in the style of Christopher Guest, including the final poker game, which was an actual game played out while being filmed.  Incident at Loch Ness is like a several layer mockumentary.  These movies have been added to my need-to-see list.  

Herzog, should you not know, has directed such movies as [recently] Grizzly Man {my introduction} and Rescue Dawn, [classic-ly] Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre: The Wrath of God, and [hilariously titled] How much Wood would a Woodchuck chuck... .  He's a pretty crazy director from what I know, and there was a great piece in the NYTimes magazine a year or so ago about his battles with his film crew during the filming of Rescue Dawn - a conflict of one man's specific vision against those trained in the industry standard, or one of idealism against pragmatism.  Anyway, I highly recommend anything he's done, though I myself have seen only a few titles.  I am that confident in him.  

Bonus Video