Tag: MOVIES

Once upon a time, there was a well respected series of games called 'Doom.' The pioneering first-person shooters were so popular that they spawned a 2005 film staring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. It was unwatchable. Now Hollywood plans to reboot the franchise. No director or screen writers have been hired, but we do know one thing -- it will be in 3-D. Clearly Universal knows what really makes ...

Overdue Reviews takes a critical look at tech-centric films that are well-loved, well-loathed or eye-rollingly obscure. For better or worse, they love Dick in Hollywood: 'Blade Runner,' 'Total Recall,' 'Impostor,' 'A Scanner Darkly,' 'Paycheck' and 'Next' all have roots in the notorious paranoiac Philip K. Dick's fiction. Last week, in fact, saw the release of the latest adaptation, 'The ...

Netflix has a reasonable selection of independent films, but it only represents just a tiny fraction of the indie movies that get made every year. Many more may draw critical acclaim or wow audiences at festivals, but there are only so many distribution deals to be signed. A site called Fandor is interested in those movies that don't get picked up by studios or shown in theaters around the ...

Fans of 'The Dark Knight' can now rent the film on Facebook through a new program that Warner Bros. began testing today. Users who "like" the film's page can rent it for 30 Facebook credits ($3), giving them a 48-hour window to stream it. During that rental period, fans can leave comments on the movie, or pause and resume it as many times as they like, simply by logging into Facebook. Warner ...

It's no secret that Team Switched is a big fan of Roger Ebert: his witty Tweets, on-point reviews and fascinating blog posts are both entertaining and thoughtful (even if he once bemoaned the idea of art in video games). And, as a Chicagoan, your author was often lulled to sleep by late-night airings of 'At the Movies,' during which Ebert's know-it-all voice often overpowered the measured calm ...

February 10, 2012. Mark that day on your calendars, and make sure to be nowhere near a movie theater. On that fateful Friday, 'Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace' will once again violate theaters (and your childhood memories), only this time it will be doing it in 3-D. The rest of the franchise will get the 3-D treatment in annual installments. ...

The era has come wherein movie makers are no longer content exploring shared cultural events, or mining moments in history for inspiration. Instead, they have started turning to stories that, in many ways, haven't even been finished. The award-winning film 'The Social Network' is about a website that we continue to use daily, and one that still occupies our headlines. And now DreamWorks, the ...

Jon Heder, of 'Napoleon Dynamite' fame, is working on a new project with writer and director Nick Peterson. The short film, tentatively titled 'Drained,' will combine live actors and stop-motion animation, and sounds like it's about how men are dirty, rotten bastards. (That, or it's about sewage.) What's interesting here, though, is that Heder and Peterson have turned to the Internet to help ...

In case you missed it, 'The King's Speech' took home top honors at the Academy Awards last night, beating out 'The Social Network,' 'Black Swan' and good taste to win the award for Best Picture. Colin Firth's ability to stutter and be British earned him the Best Actor award he should've won for 'A Single Man,' while 'King's Speech' director Tom Hooper (inexplicably) won the award for Best ...

'The Bodyguard,' a piece of '90s schlock best known for turning the excellent Dolly Parton song 'I Will Always Love You' into a histrionics lesson from Whitney Houston, is slated for a 21st century update. The new version will weave social networking and Internet stalking into the thin, haphazard plot. If there is any justice in the world, this film -- along with 'The Chronicles of Rick Roll' -- ...

You might have seen the teaser for 'The Chronicles of Rick Roll' already, and thought to yourself, "This is a really bad joke." But you'd be wrong! The creator of the clip, Andrew Fischer of Nurv.com, told Business Insider he is very serious about making a feature-length film. He assured the publication that "the movie is not a prank," and said he's hoping for a theatrical release. Even ...

And the Academy Award goes to... Apple. Hollywood, that beacon of liberal elitism, seems to also embrace tech snobbery, so it's no surprise that Apple showed up in 30-percent of the 33 movies that hit number one at the box office in 2010. Impressive, unless you consider that this number has fallen from 2008, when Apple was in 50-percent of number one hits. (Perhaps its cachet was greater ...

In honor of the upcoming movie 'Transformers: Dark of the Moon,' Hasbro will release something called the Transformers CineMask 3D -- a plastic mask that includes RealD 3-D lenses. That's right. You can watch 'Transformers' in 3-D while dressed up as a 3-D Transformer. The film won't hit theaters until July 1st, but these $10 glasses will be available as of May 16th -- meaning that, until July, ...

Amazon has now opened its long-rumored, unlimited video-streaming service to paying Prime members. Anyone coughing up the $79 annual fee for Amazon Prime can now stream 5,000 movies and TV shows, either via the Amazon website or a Roku. The new service is a direct challenge to Netflix, the current king of subscription-based streaming video. ...

It sounds like a story line straight out of 'The Simpsons.' For the first time in years, a movie director will soon adapt 'The Great Gatsby' to the silver screen. Except this Gatsby will be in 3-D. And in Australia. Let's just hope that director Baz Lurhmann goes ahead, fully embraces absurdity, and writes in a few car chases. ...