Today In News I Don't Know How to Feel About:

I woke up this morning with the inexplicable feeling of getting fucked in the ass by a mouse. It was non too surprising then to bring up the trusty Hollywood Reporter who reported that Disney CEO Bob Iger has announced that they have tapped both Lawrence Kasdan and Simon Kinberg to work on stand-alone films in addition to the newly planned trilogy of sequels to one of filmdoms most beloved Kurosawa rip offs, Star Wars.

Wait, what?

So let me get this straight. Within a 6 year period, starting in 2015, the world will not be getting three new Star Wars films, but actually five from the Mouse House? The two in question will apparently stand outside of the new trilogy and revolve around lesser known characters from the Star Wars universe, one of which I hope will be this girl:

Back on track...

Editorial rant on market over saturation aside, the choice to have Kasdan's name associated with a new Star Wars film is intriguing. His first screenplay credit after all was on a little film you may have heard of called The Empire Strikes Back, which he then followed up with Raiders of the Lost Ark. He also took a writing credit on Return of the Jedi, making him associated with 2/3s of the original trilogy. This guy is no slouch, although yes, I do recognize that he's been in a bit of a decade long cinematic limbo.

Kinberg's name does not inspire similar enthusiasm. His credits include xXx 2, X-Men 3, Jumper, Mr & Mrs. Smith and This Means War. Maybe in his Star Wars film Boba Fett will get caught up in an intergalactic romantic triangle with a fellow bounty hunter? Did I mention this girl?

Right, back on track...

Although there aren't many more details on the subject, it seems there's an interesting dichotomy going on here. On one hand is Kasdan, a man of a bygone era of Hollywood entertainment and one of, at the time anyway, Hollywood's best screenwriters and Kinberg a man who once wrote one of the most poetic lines in Samuel L. Jackson's career: "I HATE JUMPERS!"

You and me both Sam.

So the question begs to be asked: how do you feel about this Star Wars fans? Do you consider these to be promising new developments or is this simply the beginning stages of the Star Wars Saga's continued Dark Ages? They can't be worse than the Clone Wars movie...can they?    

Something`s Fishy in Wonderland

New Tim Burton films don't excite me. He's done some good work but, to be honest, I don`t think the man is a very good filmmaker. He`s an excellent decorator but a second rate storyteller, which means his films always end up feeling like hollow exercises in special effects and set design while the emotional crux of the stories take the back seat. His approach to macabre subject matter doesn't much interest me either. I get that he is making films about outsiders cast away from society, but his satiric vision of the everyday life which he juxtaposes his characters against is, in and of itself, so over-the-top that he's not so much making a statement as making a misguided spectacle. It should be no surprise then that, whether it's good or not, I'm not really excited about Burton's upcoming live-action-with-animation take of Alice in Wonderland, which is set for release on March 5th in both 2D and 3D formats. What does interest me though is that Hollywood Reporter is saying that Disney is planning on taking an experimental approach to releasing the movie. Apparently Disney has been toying with different ideas on how to release movies and now it is time to put one into practice. So the idea is that Disney is approaching exhibitors about shortening Alice's run from roughly 16 weeks in first run theaters to around 13 or under. The reason for this is because Disney feels the film will be a big hit on DVD and ondemand services, so the quicker they can get it there the better. What's unclear at this moment is, if studio's plan on adopting this method of distribution, how they plan on compensating theaters for shortening the runs of big films like Alice in Wonderland in order to push them onto DVD quicker. For theaters, shortened runs means less actual return from the studio on the film's actual business and less physical traffic through the theater as people may be encouraged to simply wait for the DVD, which translates into less traffic to the theater's concession stands; the place where most of an operation's profits come from. Disney CEO Bob Iger has said that truncated runs could be a way to maximize the Disney's bottom line, but I don't quite buy it. Is this simply a sign that Disney has lost faith in Burton's project and doesn't believe it will perform much beyond the opening weekend? I can't imagine the studio pulling something like this with one of their big projects like a Pixar or Pirates of the Caribbean film. Or is this one last desperate attempt by studios in hard times to keep people going out to the movies before everything except tentpole pictures and arthouse fare go more or less straight to video and ondemand? It will be interesting to see how Burton, who began his career as an animator at Disney, will respond to his movie being the lab rat in such an experiment.