Keep the comic book strip movies coming! It’s all the rage right now. The next one to start production is based on the 1970s DC Comic Jonah Hex. And according to Variety, Josh Brolin  is in negotiations to star in it.

He’s in a little bit of a slump right now with the terrible reviews of W, but this could be the exact thing to get Josh back on his feet.

Comic book movies have done wonders for Robert Downey Jr., Christian Bale, and Tobey Maguire.

Tags: comic book, josh brolin, movie, rage, robert downey, robert downey jr

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A new  Facebook profile created for Hollywood screenwriter Aaron Sorkin claims that he has agreed to write a movie about the invention of the popular Facebook social network.

“I understand there are a few other people using Facebook pages under my name–which I find more flattering than creepy–but this is me,” the profile notes. “I don’t know how I can prove that but feel free to test me.”

The profile notes that Sorkin, who created the “West Wing” television series, has agreed to write the movie for Sony Pictures and producer Scot Rudin. Sorkin also admits on his profile that he doesn’t yet know how Facebook works.

Sorkin goes on to urge Facebook users to send him questions and leave comments, which many have done. Sorkin has written two Broadway plays and several feature films, including “A Few Good Men”, “Malice” and “Charlie Wilson’s War.”

Some in the blogosphere questioned whether Sorkin can successfully write a compelling movie about Facebook.

Stan Schroeder, a blogger at Mashable, noted that Sorkin’s admission that he doesn’t understand Facebook doesn’t bode well for the plan. “It’s not entirely clear whether he wants to create a movie about the creators of Facebook (boring) or the actual users of the service (more boring), but neither sound like a good idea,” Schroeder said. “Well, unless you want to watch developers do their thing for an hour and a half.”

And Nick O’Neill, a blogger at AllFacebook, questioned whether Sorkin’s Facebook profile is real.

“Aaron Sorkin prompts users to test to see if he is real in the group’s description,” he noted. “The only problem with accomplishing what would otherwise be an elementary task is that there is no way to friend or send a message to Sorkin The only other person that I know of that doesn’t have a friend request in the directory is [Facebook founder and CEO] Mark Zuckerberg.”

Tags: admission, aim, ceo, feature films, films, hollywood, movie, television, television series

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“We like pre-Labor Day,” Speedway president Joie Chitwood said Saturday. “There are some things you don’t have to deal with in the sporting landscape, like football.”

This year, the NFL’s regular season will be in its second weekend when the Red Bull Indianapolis Grand Prix is held, with the professional divisions beginning at noon. The Indianapolis Colts will play at Minnesota that day.

Chitwood said the Speedway requested the August date for this year, but MotoGP couldn’t accommodate.

The event will not conflict with NHRA’s U.S. Nationals, to be held at O’Reilly Raceway Park the following week.

The MotoGP schedule, which is provisional at the moment, also shows that the Twin Ring Motegi circuit will host motorcycles in April, which likely signals that the IndyCar Series will move its annual event to the fall.

Tags: indianapolis colts, indianapolis grand prix, indycar series, joie chitwood, labor day, landscape, motogp, motogp schedule, motorcycles, nationals, nfl, o reilly raceway park, professional divisions, red bull, signals, speedway

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Clint Eastwood walked into the garage of John and Kim Lundy’s Grosse Pointe Shores house.

Dozens of people lined the street some standing, others sitting on the curb in front of the Lundys two-story Ballantyne Road house waiting to sneak a peek at the movie legend during the first day of filming of the flick “Gran Torino.”

Get ready metro Detroit. The cast and crew will spend the next six to eight weeks filming in metro Detroit, including Warren, Royal Oak and Grosse Pointe Park, location director Patrick Mignano said. While he didn’t release a lot of details about the plot or the characters, Mignano said the scenes being filmed inside the Lundy home was to be the interior of one of the characters’ homes.

“We scouted around,” he said. “This was to be a nice middle-class home.”

The Lundys said their home was selected because of the open layout of the kitchen and family room area. Throughout the day, they watched actors sit in director’s chairs in front of the stone and brick house as equipment and a rack of clothes filled their driveway.

They also got t eat breakfast with the crew, watch a little filming inside their house and shake hands with the movie star legend.

The Lundys said their house was selected after they and several others received fliers in their doors about their homes possibly being good for a movie. The Luindys were the lucky ones selected. Abbey said they were compensated for the use of their house.

But their and their neighbors got to share in enjoying the activity that filled their blocked streets with vans and large trucks and the movie stars, including Brian Healey, who talked with residents and signed autographs.

Tags: cast and crew, clint eastwood, flick, hbo, movie, rage

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There’s a beautiful high-angle shot, early in The Dark Knight, that looks down on Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) in full Batman regalia as he perches atop a Gotham skyscraper, surveying the city he lives to protect, then leaping off and spreading his majestic bat wings to swoop down into the night. Bruce’s trajectory is also the film’s. It traces a descent into moral anarchy, and each of its major characters will hit bottom. Some will never recover, broken by the touch of evil or by finding it, like a fatal infection, in themselves.

The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan’s second chapter in his revival of the DC Comics franchise, will hit theaters with all the hoopla and fanboy avidity of the summer season’s earlier movies based on comic books. It’s the fifth, and three of the first four have been terrific or just short of it.It’s been one of the best summers in memory for flat-out blockbuster entertainment, and in the wow category, the Nolan film doesn’t disappoint. True to format, it has a crusading hero, a sneering villain in Heath Ledger’s Joker, spectacular chases including one with Batman on a stripped-down Batmobile that becomes a motorcycle with monster-truck wheels and lots of stuff blowing up. Even the tie-in action figures with Reese’s Pieces suggest this is a fast-food movie.

But Nolan has a more subversive agenda. He wants viewers to stick their hands down the rat hole of evil and see if they get bitten. With little humor to break the tension, The Dark Knight is beyond dark. It’s as black and teeming and toxic as the mind of the Joker. Batman Begins, the 2005 film that launched Nolan’s series, was a mere five finger exercise. This is the full symphony.

No, really. This villain, as conceived by Nolan and his scriptwriter brother Jonathan and incarnated with chilling authority by Ledger, is not the elegant sadist of so many action films, nor the strutting showman played by Jack Nicholson in Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman. He isn’t a father figure or a macho man. And though he invents several stories about how he got his (facial and psychic) scars, he’s not presented as the sum of injustices done to him. This Joker is simply one of the most twisted and mesmerizing creeps in movie history.

Tags: blockbuster, comic book, dark knight, films, franchise, launch, movie, theaters

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Currently ubiquitous is the latest and fullest trailer for the new Batman instalment, “The Dark Knight.” Advertising for the film has been scrutinized following the death of Heath Ledger, who plays the Joker.

But the ad campaign by Warner Bros. which heavily features Ledger has largely drawn raves. Even the staunchest art-house filmgoer would have to remark that the new Batman motorcycle looks, well, totally rad.

The Golden Trailer Awards recently gave “The Dark Knight” the award for best action trailer.

A funny little tradition in its ninth year, the awards come complete with a Los Angeles banquet and golden trophies that look like actual trailers.

The “Dark Knight” trailer is a moody mini masterpiece, though it may show too many of the movie’s cards. That’s not the case for the latest heavyweight film to release a trailer: the new James Bond flick “Quantum of Solace.”

The two minute teaser will play before the newly opened “Hancock,” but has already this week bounced around the Internet. More than half a million have watched it on YouTube.

The Coen Brothers last year had a handsome trailer for “No Country For Old Men.” Their follow-up, “Burn After Reading,” returns the Coens to their screwball roots. Starring Pitt and George Clooney, the trailer is a quirky montage that leaves the viewer as a good trailer should with only the slightest understanding of what the movie’s about.

The importance of a good trailer isn’t lost on filmmakers. Last year, while discussing his “There Will Be Blood,” director Paul Thomas Anderson told The Associated Press that the only disagreement he had with the studio was over what he called “the YouTube incident of 2007.”

While editing the movie last summer, Anderson decided to enliven things by cutting a trailer, which he posted on YouTube. The simplicity of the process not dealing with the studio or the Motion Picture Association of America was “like a filmmaker’s fantasy.”

Of course, online video promotion can take many forms. Advertising for the upcoming “Hellboy II” includes a smart parody of “Inside the Actor’s Studio.” James Lipton finds himself interviewing the armed demon warrior of the film, played by Ron Perlman.

With a summer full of such trailers, all that’s left is to find out if the movies are as good.

Tags: amp, coen brothers, dark knight, elf, filmmakers, flick, motion picture, motion picture association of america, movie, warner bros, youtube

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It looks like John Travolta and Kelly Preston will have a holiday bash in Ocala this November. Only instead of turkey, there will be a serving of Travolta’s upcoming animated movie about a dog named Bolt.

Travolta supplies the voice to Bolt the title character in the Disney film, which also features the voice of teenage star Miley Cyrus.

Travolta and his wife, actress Kelly Preston, and their two children live in Anthony.

“John and Kelly live here, love it here and want to do something to help Marion County,” Ewers said Thursday. He stressed that nothing has been finalized but added that Travolta told him he is interested in helping the cause for the Boys and Girls Clubs.

Ewers said the event would be held “sometime in November,” in conjunction with the release of “Bolt.”

The Star-Banner in Ocala is part of the New York Times Regional Media Group.

Tags: disney, movie, movie premiere, new york times, title character

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Stolen electronics, a repossessed truck, perhaps even a drug dealer’s bling can now be yours with the click of a mouse button.

Thousands of dollars of stolen and forfeited property that used to languish in Maryland’s police agency warehouses - from equipment used to grow marijuana plants to power generators - is being auctioned online to the highest bidder.

Jurisdictions across Maryland are joining about 1,300 others nationwide on PropertyRoom.com, an eBay-style auction house that specializes in selling seized contraband for local governments.

The Maryland State Police announced a partnership this month with the site; Anne Arundel police recently sent off their first batch of valuables to a Long Island, N.Y., warehouse.

Baltimore and Howard counties and Annapolis are among the 13 other jurisdictions in Maryland that have hopped on board, in hopes of making police work more efficient.

“It has freed up our evidence room,” said Bill Toohey, a spokesman for the Baltimore County Police Department, which moved its cache of valuables online in 2004. “They come once a month and take our inventory off our hands, and that saves us time and saves us space.”

The events, which occurred several times a year in some jurisdictions, attracted a few hundred people, auctioneers said.

“The reality is a lot more Maryland citizens will bid online as opposed getting in their car, driving down to a local auction and raising a paddle to bid,” Bellomo said. “The Internet increases public access to the goods, and it lowers the cost of doing the auction for the police department at the same time.”

Auctioneers, who collected a much smaller cut of the take about 10 percent are less than enthusiastic about the shift to the Web.

John Gasparini, chief operating officer of Isennock Auction Services Inc, a White Hall-based auctioneer that conducted the state police’s annual auction in Jessup, said online auctions could put local auction companies out of business.

“The online auction process, while certainly effective, does redirect a lot of revenue outside the state of Maryland,” Gasparini said. “This does not help us keep revenue coming in and auction jobs within the state. … It’s harder for us to be economically viable.”

Gladys Ridge, executive secretary of the 121-member Auctioneers Association of Maryland, agreed, but she said online competition is nothing new, and auction companies must learn to compete in the digital age.

“Every auctioneer in the world is already fighting eBay. You just have to adjust the way you do business,” she said, adding that many auction houses have started selling their products on the popular Web site.

The change means more of the public will get to bid on a host of oddball items collected by police.

Bellomo said among his best customers are commercial plant nurseries who are looking to buy grow lamps and hydroponic supplies on the cheap. PropertyRoom.com has a selection, confiscated from marijuana plant growers.

Tags: amp, auction companies, auction house, auction services inc, baltimore county police, baltimore county police department, bill toohey, ebay, ebay style auction, evidence room, gasparini, gover, howard counties, isennock auction services, jobs, marijuana plants, maryland citizens, maryland state police, online auction, online auctions, petition, power generators, several times, time auctioneers

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Movie buffs never had it so good. The rapidly-growing movie rentals on one hand and the competitive direct-to-home (DTH) market on the other, promise to take home entertainment market to a new high. While four DTH players are betting big on movies-on-demand, biggies such as Reliance and Nimbus have entered the movie-rental business even as the existing players ramp up their operations.

While Seventymm has been in the industry for a couple of years, Reliance’s BigFlix and Nimbus’ Showtime are the new entrants. Add to them several other online DVD rental services in India such as Clixflix, Cinebox, CineSprite and CatchFlix, who galvanised into action.

Dish TV marketing vice-president Anjali Malhotra Nanda believes that while the paid movie service might not be a big revenue earner for them presently, there is a huge scope for growth. “It’s the convenience of getting to watch the movie you like, instantaneously that’ll drive it,” she says. “Although movie-on demand is an expensive business to run and globally, there is only about 10% usage of the service, there’s great scope in movie-crazy India.”

Meanwhile, Seventymm has recently changed its strategy and approach. The company has tied up with Microsoft Xbox to offer console games on rent. “Xbox felt the gaming market will receive a boost with the option of taking games on rent available,” says Subhanker Sarkar, COO, Seventymm. “It made perfect sense for us to join hands with them.” The company sees tremendous potential in renting out television serials, both Hindi and English and short films.

DVD rental companies realise that online stores would be more popular than physical stores in future. “Once the customer buys from the store, he is introduced to the benefits of online service as that is where they would gradually move to,” says BigFlix.com COO Kamal Gianchandani.

“The physical stores would have a market only as long as the broadband penetration is low in India. Even now, almost 70% of the members prefer using the online store.” As the market gets increasingly competitive, the existing players are using service as the key for differentiator. BigFlix plans to start a call center for any queries or issues that the customers may have.

Tags: amp, biggies, broadband penetration, coo, dish tv, dth, films, gaming market, home entertainment market, kamal, microsoft xbox, movie, movie buffs, nanda, nimbus, perfect sense, rental business, sarkar, seventymm, short films, taking games, television, television serials, tv marketing

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Christopher Bell is confused. In “Bigger, Stronger, Faster,” his documentary on steroid use in the United States, we first see Bell and his two brothers as children, aping their heroes, Hulk Hogan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone. Look at them now: in their 30s, unfamous, struggling to get by as we all do. None of them ever realized their dream of pro wrestling, yet did everything their heroes told them to do, from praying to eating well and working out.

Perhaps, Bell wonders, nothing. “Bigger, Stronger, Faster” is less a story of steroids, and more a story of America’s obsession with victory. Unlike Michael Moore, Bell’s obvious influence, he approaches his subject with genuine bewilderment, and one really gets a sense that his agenda is to simply and honestly explore this issue. Bell’s eagerness to expose uncomfortable truths, even within himself and his family, makes this the most brutally honest film I’ve seen in many years.

First, we meet his brothers: Mike (Mad Dog) Bell, the self-destructive older brother who dreams of being famous (and whose steroid use seems to be the least of his problems), and Mark (Smelly) Bell, the youngest, who uses steroids to help his weightlifting, but who also has a happy family life and a great job as a high school football coach. Then there are the parents, who have tried to impart kindness and wisdom to their children and who watch in utter disbelief as they grow into troubled giants.

Tags: arnold schwarzenegger, bewilderment, christopher bell, dth, eagerness, elf, happy family, high school football, honest film, hulk, hulk hogan, michael moore, movie, movie review, pro wrestling, steroid use, steroids, sylvester stallone, two brothers, uncomfortable truths, utter disbelief, weightlifting

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