I've been iffy about whether or not to continue this part of the site, but there was just so much going on this week, I couldn't help but mention it in some form.
Mansell in the Shell: The live-action Ghost In The Shell project also got another +1 w/the announcement of a composer, Clint Mansell (Requiem For A Dream, The Fountain, π, et al). The music has always been an integral part of GITS in its previous movie/TV incarnations, but I never expected them to draft Kenji Kawai or Yoko Kanno back in for this job. Still, Mansell is a very, very good choice; his tracks for π in particular seem to hew reasonably close to Kanno's more techno-oriented work for the TV series, and his work for Dream and Fountain have the kind of mind-expanding, epic quality of Kawai's plangent, gamelan-centric movie scores.
Even if I don't end up liking the movie, I suspect I'll nab the soundtrack. That happened to me with Elektra, a movie with a score so good that it was hard to believe it had been saddled with such a lousy film. But anyway, having someone of Mansell's caliber on board is another positive sign. (Side note. Dream/Fountain/π director Darren Aronofsky was at one point briefly involved with a live-action Lone Wolf and Cub project that never came to fruition. What could have been.)
Now if they had nabbed Vangelis (Blade Runner), I might well have fallen off my chair and broken something.
Fullmetal trailer: Yes, this is the first teaser for that long-awaited live-action Fullmetal Alchemist movie.
Looks like what we're going to see is a stripped-down adaptation of a small portion of the original story. This really was a franchise that would have worked well if adapted in Hollywood on the scale of something like Lord of the Rings, even if it cost ...
... an arm and a leg.
I had to do it.
You can't keep a good Miyazaki down: No, this man will never retire. Hayao Miyazaki is talking about coming back out of retirement to do ONE LAST MOVIE ABSOLUTELY THE LAST TIME WE SWEAR IT. No details on what it is, but the linked article hints that he may use CGI to accelerate the production process. Most likely he's going to draw all the storyboard himself -- wouldn't exactly be a Miyazaki film if he didn't.
Spirited Away, and back again: This press release speaks for itself: "Fathom Events, GKIDS, Studio Ghibli and Hot Topic present a special 15th Anniversary Celebration of Hayao Miyazaki's Academy Award-winning SPIRITED AWAY, returning to select theaters nationwide for two days only, Sunday December 4 (In English) and Monday December 5 (In Japanese w/ English subtitles)." GETCHERTICKETZ.
(... Hot Topic?)
Yojimbo's star: Better late than never, but Japanese movie legend -- hell, movie legend, period -- Toshiro Mifune now has his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.