Babes, Bombs, and Blockbusters Movie News Report 01.06.09

Posted by Mike Gorman on 01.06.2009

This week's 3B's News Report is loaded with news including the sale of Rogue Pictures, the death of Commissioner Gordon, and the Producer's Guild nominees. Underworld: Rise of the Lycans babe Rhona Mitra makes a pictorial appearance and Mike Gorman travels to the future to bring you the Top Ten Bombs of 2009.

Welcome to the first 3B's News Report of 2009. Let's get right into things as there is a lot of news, a hot babe, and the results of some time traveling movie viewing waiting for you!







Born in England, Rhona Mitra is an actress known for her roles on television and on film. She is perhaps best known from her season three appearances on FX's Nip/Tuck where she played Kit McGraw, an investigator who turned out to be one half of the brother-sister duo perpetrating the "Carver" attacks. Mitra will next be seen in the Underworld pre-quel, Underworld: Rise of the Lycans.



























Check out these latest Hollywood news bombs!

The Producer's Guild announces its nominees
The PGA has announced the following nominations for its annual awards.

Best Film:
Slumdog Millionaire
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Milk
Frost/Nixon
The Dark Knight

Animated Film:
Wall-E
Bolt
Kung-Fu Panda

Documentary:
Man on Wire
Trouble the Water
Standard Operating Procedure

Overlooked in the opinion of many by the Golden Globes, The Dark Knight makes a welcomed appearance on this list.

His Bat Signal has dimmed.
Actor Pat Hingle passed away this weekend after a battle with leukemia. Hingle is perhaps best known for his role as Commissioner Gordon in Tim Burton's Batman and the franchise's three sequels, passed away at his home in Carolina Beach, North Carolina on Saturday. He is the only actor alongside Michael Gough, who played Bruce Wayne's butler Alfred. to star in all four of the original Batman movies.


Art imitates life for actor in Italian mafia film.
Italian actor Giovanni Venosa, the star of new Italian movie Gomorrah, has been arrested on suspicion of actual mafia related activities. He is accused of extortion. Venosa is the third actor from the film to be arrested for such mob related crimes.

Stallone's The Expendables's cast beefs up.
Forrest Whitaker will be allegedly joining the film's cast. Stallone has already cast Jason Statham, Jet Li and Dolph Lundgren in this action thriller that he penned himself and is set to direct. Whitaker would play the CIA liaison to a group of mercenaries tasked with overthrowing a South American dictator.

Relativity Media acquires Rogue Pictures in $150 million deal
After two month's of negotiations, Relativity has bought Rogue Pictures from Universal Pictures. The horror franchise will add approximately 30 films including the summer hit, The Strangers, to the Relativity stable. Relativity will also take ownership of several in production pieces, like The Strangers sequel and development deals with talents including Wes Craven. The first film to be released after this deal was made is this this week's thriller The Unborn.















Believe it or not I already know how the year 2009 will play out film wise. That's right, I got into my handy dandy time machine and watched hundreds of this year's upcoming releases just so I could save you the trouble of wasting your hard earned cash. After recovering from the many side effects of my travels, I have compiled a list for you of ten highly anticipated (some not so highly) films of '09 that turned out to be duds instead of box office blowouts.


10. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
While this title seems to imply a return by Megatron after getting his butt whupped in the franchise's first film, this is an incorrect assumption. Instead this film follows a series of elderly senior citizens who fall repeatedly and rely too often on the assistance of the medic-alert neck chains. After years of abuse the medic-alert transponders are in advertently brought to life by Shia LaBeouf, how is not important, and they proceed to wreck havoc in nursing homes all over Southern California. It is as boring as it sounds. Skip this one if you want my advice.


9. Star Trek
Now this one came as a total surprise to me! They let the guy that made the WB's "Felicity" remake the Star Trek universe. Captain Kirk and Spock fight throughout the whole thing just so they can make up often. Uhura is not even that slutty and Scotty is skinny. Up is down, left is right, it is a conundrum. This film ends up doing so poorly at the box office that all of Hollywood begs Shatner to come back and fix the damage. He is successful and not too expensive as his services were procured using priceline.com.

8. Fast & Furious
If you are wondering where Vin Diesel disappeared to, apparently this was it. And he took a lot of other relatively talented actors along with him for the ride. I was entertained by the film until I was leaving the theater and decided to ask why they misspelled the film's title for the re-release. I was then told that this was not a re-release of Fast and the Furious but was a sequel. I then assumed I was on a redo of Ashton Kutcher's "Punk'd" but that also was sadly not the truth.


7. Terminator: Salvation
A Terminator film without Arnold is like a day without sunshine. Also, this one is directed by the auteur who brought us Charlie's Angels: Full Throtle. Starting to see how this one starts to add up. Interestingly Christian Bale appeared at every theater showing the film to offer immediate refunds. That was very nice of him.


6. G-Force
My initial thoughts: Yay! They are making a live action film of one of my favorite childhood cartoons. The reality of the film: A specially trained squad of guinea pigs is dispatched to stop a diabolical billionaire from taking over the world. I killed an usher on my way out of this one. Not in rage, he was just in my way.


5. Pink Panther 2
One of the most depressing films I saw during my journey through time. Mostly it made me sad for Steve Martin that someone convinced him that this film was a viable idea.


4. Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
This film changed release dates so many times this year that I eventually gave up on finding it and just went far enough ahead in time to rent the DVD. Aside from the important story elements that the director had to toss aside in order to squeeze such a long story into 90minutes, this was not that bad of a film. It apparently tanked at the box office because the creators of Twilight through together a sock puppet sequel in time to compete with Harry, and those trendy vampire teens kicked his butt. Apparently tweenies are already camping out for the next Twilight sequel which allegedly will just be a re-packaged release of the Jimmy Fallon-Queen Latifah hit Taxi with a filter over the screen to make it look dreary.

3. X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Turns out that the writers added so many other Weapon X mutants to this film, like Gambit, Deadpool, Wraith, Emma Frost and the Blob, that there ended up being only 5 minutes of screen time for Wolverine. But I was not disappointed yet, until that five minutes turned out to a song and dance number Hugh Jackman demanded they included. No one wants to see Wolverine pirouette and sing about his heartache at having metal put on his bones. No one.

2. Underworld: Rise of the Lycans
Again, this one was not that bad to watch. Lots of great kick ass scenes of battle between the werewolves and vampires. It was a box office flop because they forgot to add the one element that ensured the success of the first two films: Kate Beckinsale in skin tight latex and leather. It was that simple and heart breaking.

1. Revolutionary Road
This was perhaps the greatest disappointment of my trip. I looked at it and thought it would be a smashing success; Kate, Leo, and even Kathy Bates together again. How could it not be a blockbuster? I will tell you how. It seems that this is the most deceptive film of the year. It was clearly set up for an easy win with that cast reuniting. However, the film takes a huge left turn and you do not see it coming. SPOILER WARNING AHEAD... YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. It is almost impossible to believe but this film is NOT at all a sequel to Titanic! I had heard it featured a zombie Leo reanimated by the big blue diamond who goes after Kate to seek revenge on her for letting him slip away into the icy waters at the end of the first film when there was clearly enough room for him next to her on her makeshift raft. Now that would have been a kick ass flick to rock 2009!

The future is grim my fellow movie lovers much like our economy. There is a bright note however, The Watchmen is eventually released... in 2109.






















Welcome to 2009!



(All information and gossip gathered from Fark.com, Aintitcoolnews.com, Hollywoodreporter.com, Hollywood.com, Reuters.com, Variety.com, MTV.com, IMDB.com)