If Walt Disney Animation Studios was ever going to adapt a Philip K. Dick story for the big screen, it was going to be The King of the Elves. Though not the only fantasy Dick wrote, it is very Disney friendly. A digital 3-D animation, King of the Elves will be the Studio’s 50^th feature. The team responsible for Brother Bear, producer Chuck Williams, and directors Aaron Blaise and Robert Walker, are helming the project. Wallace Wolodarsky wrote the screenplay (he wrote and produced some 50 episodes of The Simpsons), and David Arquette is the only cast announcement so far.

Disney describes the story as a:

...fantastic and imaginative tale about an average man living in the Mississippi Delta, whose reluctant actions to help a desperate band of elves leads them to name him their new king. Joining the innocent and endangered elves as they attempt to escape from an evil and menacing troll, their unlikely new leader finds himself caught on a journey filled with unimaginable dangers and a chance to bring real meaning back to his own life.

I've just watched Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and quite frankly I'm amazed. Firstly I'm amazed that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas could expect anyone to suspend their disbelief at such a level for so long and not either laugh out loud or scream internally. Secondly I'm amazed that a movie with so many plot holes, messy scripting and impossible action sequences is still enjoyable.

Only keep reading if you don't mind spoilers.

Here are a few things Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has taught me: if you happen to stumble onto a nuclear test site, all you have to do to survive is find a fridge, preferably a fridge with the words "Lead lined" written on the outside, pull out a few shelves, jump inside and shut the door. While the following nuclear blast will obliterate the house the fridge is in, and everything around it for miles, you'll be okay because the fridge will launch itself into the sky and rocket itself outside the danger zone entirely. The fridge will land with a titanic thud, but you'll still be able to open the door and walk away with just a few scratches. You'll even have time to watch the mushroom cloud. It's that easy. Forget fall out shelters, people should have been constructing fridges. You'll have to have a long shower afterwards though to wash away the radiation.

According to Variety, the original 1986 Highlander movie starring Christopher Lambert and Sean Connery is set to be remade by Summit Entertainment, who hope to kick start a new series of big budget Highlander movies.

"I have always dreamed of reinventing this franchise," said Patrick Wachsberger, Summit's co-chairman and president.

Featuring immortal fighters battling throughout history for a legendary "prize", director Russell Mulchay's Highlander was an excellent piece of fantasy entertainment. Immortals only die by decapitation and can only avoid battle on holy ground.

The sequence set in 1541, where Connor MacLeod (Christopher Lambert) is tutored by an older immortal, Juan Sanchez Villa-Lobos Ramírez (Sean Connery), is particularly memorable. Ramírez appoints himself MacLeod's tutor in the ways of being Immortal, their pursuit of the "Prize", the rules of the "Game", and the time of "The Gathering", when the remaining immortals will come together for one final time. If you've watched the original movie, I doubt you'll forget that "in the end, there can be only one"! You may also remember Lambert and Connery running barefoot along a beach feeling "The quickening" running through their veins.

It seems to be science fiction and fantasy remake mania lately: a new Land of the Lost movie, a Blake’s 7 TV remake, The Day the Earth Stood Still with Keanu Reeves, where will it end? Everything old is new again.

Is it my imagination or are superheroes carrying the load for Hollywood these days? Just consider the output from Marvel Studios. By my calculation they've averaged two superhero movies a year since 2000, a figure that will climb to four per year over the next four years, with an incredible five releases in 2010 alone! 

Suffering from the pointless remake syndrome and a secondary dose of serialitis, Hollywood has needed a creative shot in the arm for ages, but are these movies the cure? Marvel may appear to be a bottomless well of ideas and filmic inspiration and there’s no denying that its universe is populated by a wide range of characters in diverse settings but let’s be honest, the story lines and character development in superhero movies almost invariably follow the same tired pattern. The same can be said of DC Comics' superhero offerings.

Don’t get me wrong, there have been some excellent movies in this genre. Spiderman and the X-Men have spawned memorable movies (serialitis aside) and Batman Returns was truly outstanding, breathing new life into an ailing genre. But while some believe you can never have enough superhero movies, I’m not one of them. Yes, I am looking forward to The Dark Knight, but come on, there’s so much more interesting and original material out there to bring to the big screen! (Did someone mention Dan Simmon’s Hyperion Cantos, Michael Moorcock’s Elric, Terry Brook’s Shannara?)

Anyway, as always happens when I climb onto my high horse, I’ve been knocked off it, flat on my face, this time by the news that Marvel Comics' Thor is coming to the big screen as a live-action movie!

While George Lucas and Steven Speilberg have been trying to keep details of the new Indiana Jones film, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, close to their chests, an early negative review has appeared on Ain't it Cool news.

"This is the Indiana Movie that you were dreading," wrote a user who calls himself ShogunMaster. "I remember seeing the two trailers and though I was excited to see the old man in action again, I was kind of worried that they seemed to be missing 'something'. That something was tension. During the whole of the movie, there was not a single moment that I thought our hero Mr. Jones (actually Colonel Jones as he was a hero in WWII now) was in any sort of peril or even significant inconvenience. In most cases, you were so many steps ahead of the characters that it was really just an arduous wait for them to get through it."

Marvel Comics, that seemingly bottomless well of ideas and filmic inspiration, has done it again with its most recent adaptation for the screen of a comic book superhero. Iron Man, directed by Jon Favreau and starring Robert Downey Jr, is superb entertainment. As long as you don’t think too hard. The hyperbolic action and special effects we’ve come to expect don’t disappoint, but it’s the wit of Downey’s performance (much like Christian Bale’s presence in Batman Returns) that reassures us that action and special effects are back where they belong, in the story teller’s tool kit: actors are reclaiming centre-stage.

The reviews have been overwhelmingly positive, with Rotten Tomatoes giving it a rating of 93%. It's no surprise that the box office too has been kind: in its opening weekend in the US Iron Man grossed US$100 million, one of only ten movies to have done so, with a further US$97 million generated elsewhere. Industry analyst Jeff Bock of Exhibitor Relations smells a franchise in the making:

"Expect to see an announcement about a three-picture deal for Iron Man any day now. Anytime a film opens in the top 10 of all-time it means you've got a hit on your hands."

Good news for the fans. And let’s face it, it’s all good fun.

The second trailer for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Indiana Jones IV) is now online. You can watch trailer number 2 on the official Indiana Jones website here. While there is no sign of the aliens suggested by the Roswell reference in the first trailer, there is plenty of the Indiana Jones style action we've come to expect: Jones is in search of an artefact (the crystal skull) in an exotic location (the jungles of Peru) and is pursued by a group who want the same artefact (cold war Russians led by Cate Blanchett).

You can watch other short videos from the movie's production on the official site too.

It won't be long before we see whether this latest Indiana Jones movie lives up to the hype and the excellent standard of its predecessors. Will they be able to top Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade with Sean Connery? Let's hope they do. 

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull stars Harrison Ford, Cate Blanchett, Karen Allen and Ray Winstone, and is due out 22 May worldwide.

USA Today reports that a comic big screen adaptation of the 1970’s TV show Land of the Lost starring Will Ferrell is being filmed by Universal Studios.

Land of the Lost is “going to be kind of hopefully Jurassic Park in terms of the quality,” Will Ferrell told ComingSoon.net "It's not going to be so much a spoof. It's going to be as real as possible and hopefully funny.”

He also joked that it's going to be like "The English Patient, but with horribly frightening realistic dinosaurs. In fact, we only survive for 12 minutes of the film. It's going to be more like a nature documentary."

Will Ferrell’s friend, Adam McKay, who directed two of Ferrell's biggest hits, Anchorman and Talladega Nights, won’t be directing this time round, unfortunately having to choose between Land of the Lost and the upcoming comedy Step Brothers in which Ferrell also stars. 

In the original Land of the Lost TV show, while on a rafting trip, an earthquake sends Rick Marshall, his son Will and daughter Holly, plummeting down a huge waterfall into the Land of the Lost. It’s a land of dinosaurs, ape-men, and best of all, the evil Sleestak, insect/lizard like humanoids.

Ferrell plays a disgraced palaeontologist in the remake, with an assistant (Anna Friel) and a macho tour guide (comedian Danny McBride).

If you’re a fan of Middle-earth, it won’t be long before there’s more to see on the big screen. Peter Jackson’s two Hobbit movies are gathering pace, with Guillermo del Toro confirmed as director of The Hobbit and its sequel.

Based on J.R.R Tolkien’s novel, The Hobbit tells the story of Bilbo Baggins’ adventures with Gandalf and a troop of dwarves, during which he discovers the Ring of Power, while The Hobbit sequel, as previously reported, will focus on the 60-year period between The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring, the first of Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Guillermo del Toro’s previous movies include the live action comic book inspired fantasy Hellboy, and the critically and commercially successful fantasy Pan’s Labyrinth. Pan’s Labyrinth was the highest grossing Spanish language film in U.S. box office history.

This seems like a great choice for Jackson, Guillermo del Toro has demonstrated with Hellboy that he can direct an effects laden production, while Pan’s Labyrinth shows that he can also create a fantasy work with critical appeal, both of which will likely serve him well on the two new Hobbit movies. What better result than a commercially successfully fantasy movie with critical clout?

It’s been 19 years since Harrison Ford, wearing his distinctive hat, galloped into the sunset with Sean Connery in Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade. Now the famous archaeologist is back in a fourth movie, Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. A recently released trailer looks fantastic, and hints that Indiana Jones is heading into uncharted territory, with a possible science fiction element added to the usual adventurous mix. If you watch carefully, half way through the trailer, you’ll see a close up of some words on the side of a jeep which read: “Roswell, New Mexico, 1947”.

In Roswell, New Mexico, on 7 July 1947, conspiracy theorists believe the US Government retrieved and then hid an alien spacecraft that had crash-landed in a farmer’s field. The US Government has always maintained it was merely a weather balloon that had fallen to Earth and broken apart.

You can watch the trailer here on Indiana Jones' official website.

The movie reunites Harrison Ford with executive producer George Lucas and director Steven Spielberg. Whether or not Indiana Jones battles aliens, Lucas revealed there will definitely be some science fiction content.

“We’re doing a B Science fiction movie from the ‘50s,” he said in a recent article in Vanity Fair. “The ones I’m talking about are, like, ‘The Creature from the Black Lagoon,’ ‘The Blob’, ‘The Thing’.

Reviews of Marcus Nispel's Pathfinder are almost invariably bad. Of the 71 reviews counted on Rotten Tomatoes, 63 are negative, giving it a very poor rating of 11%. It is sledged as being adolescent, mindless, boring, gory, witless and uninspired (just as a warm up), and with such a weight of negative opinion behind it I suspected I'd be panning it too: where there's smoke, there's fire. Usually.

But not always.

I missed seeing Pathfinder at the cinema - I blinked and it was gone - and have only just seen the unrated edition on DVD, and there's no denying that some of the criticism the movie has garnered is justified. It is not for the faint hearted. Gore abounds. It is somewhat simplistic, with characterisation so remarkably shallow that it's surprising the one-dimensional cardboard cut-outs stand up at all. Worst of all, the historical foundation of the plot begins and ends with the arrival of Vikings in North America circa 1000 AD. There is no historical justification for the wanton carnage that Pathfinder's Vikings visit on the Indians and if our Scandinavian brethren are not scandalised by the depiction of their ancestors in this movie, I'd be most surprised.

For all the differences with the Old English epic on which it is based, Robert Zemeckis’ 3D Beowulf is superb cinematic entertainment. Changes have been introduced, but they are fewer than you might think and more than the core of the epic finds its way on to the big screen. There’s no denying that some of the changes alter the nature of the story in significant ways, and yet there is, I believe, no serious injustice done to the poem.

That, of course, is a matter of opinion and it is one with which some reviewers clearly disagree. One of my favourites dismisses the movie as a "bulked-up and dumbed-down 3-D screen version of the Old English epic … aimed at the shiver-me and scare-me crowd", to which some bright spark made the one truly appropriate response:

I thought Beowulf was a story intended for the "shiver-me and scare-me crowd". Epic poems weren't necessarily intended for English majors and snooty film critics.

That Beowulf has become a cultural icon and is considered high art is testimony to the greatness of the work, but this doesn't change the fact that it was composed to thrill, scare and move the listener. In short, to entertain. Clearly the poem still entertains many people, but there are good reasons why an adaptation might justify changes to entertain a modern movie audience.

As we reported earlier, rumours of a 3D Hobbit movie directed by Peter Jackson have been doing the rounds on the web. While we had every expectation that New Line would see sense and ensure Jackson’s involvement in the project we weren’t holding our breath until an official announcement was made. Well the good news is that New Line and Peter Jackson have settled their differences over the calculation of box office receipts for The Fellowship of the Ring and Jackson has signed on for not one but two movies. Where rumour and fact part company is that rather than directing Jackson will be serving as executive producer and there's no word yet on whether either movie will be released in 3D.

So how closely will the Hobbit films follow J.R.R. Tolkien's book? And why two rather than one?

At first glance, conservative Christians appear justified in their concerns about the release of The Golden Compass, a movie based on the first novel of Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, The Northern Lights.

An outspoken atheist, Pullman has been quoted in The Washington Post saying, "I'm trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief."

Pullman's grandfather was an Anglican priest, but Phillip stopped believing in God as a teenager.

"My books are about killing God,” he told The Sydney Morning Herald in 2003.

Conservative British columnist Peter Hitchens in The Mail on Sunday described him as "The most dangerous author in Britain," adding that Pullman is "the one the atheists would have been praying for, if atheists prayed."

Jesus doesn't get a mention in the trilogy, but Pullman has hinted that he might appear in a forthcoming sequel with the ominous sounding title "The Book of Dust".

So if you happen to be a conservative Christian, is it time to start protesting outside movie theatres? Should Christians start burning Pullman's books? Or is the Christian lobby, so dominant in the US, hypocritically denouncing a movie simply because it dares to question its beliefs?

SFFMedia, in association with Roadshow Entertainment, has five Golden Compass prize packs to give away. Along with Philip Pullman's novel, The Golden Compass, the pack includes the DVD, Beyond the Golden Compass. This documentary by Jean-Pierre Isbouts examines Philip Pullman’s trilogy His Dark Materials, in particular the first novel in the sequence, The Golden Compass, or Northern Lights as it’s known in the UK.

Released in time for Chris Weitz’s new movie The Golden Compass, starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, the documentary investigates various aspects of Pullman’s work from character to plot, religion to metaphysics, science to magic, building a comprehensive understanding of Pullman’s parallel universe. Includes interviews with Philip Pullman, academics, and subject experts.

If you’re expecting a faithful rendition of the Old English poem, Beowulf, you will quickly discover that Robert Zemeckis’ movie is probably more concerned with demonstrating what wonders can be achieved with the technology of performance capture. The film retains some key elements of the tale of course, but what we’re taken on is a spectacular CGI romp rather than an accurate retelling of the hero’s journey.

And when it comes to getting boom for your action packed CGI buck, Zemeckis’ Beowulf does deliver.

Having treated ourselves to the 3D version of the movie my companions and I found ourselves discussing which scenes were clearly created to exploit the 3D effect and how effective they did so, as much as we discussed the merits of the writing, direction and production. The technology used to create Beowulf is to be marvelled at and is, without a doubt, the most impressive aspect of the film.

Hard and fast on the bloody trail of Beowulf in 3D comes the rumour of a 3D version of The Hobbit, in two parts to be directed by Peter Jackson. Wow... Peter Jackson IS Directing The Hobbit - In 3D! is the headline over at Screen Rant.

The ease with which this latest rumour about The Hobbit movie has proliferated on the web proves once again how poor journalistic standards on the web are, how easy it is to believe anything so long as it is written, and how hungry many of us are for news about The Hobbit, especially if it mentions Peter Jackson.
In the end though there is only one source for this story – Jim Dorey over at Marketsaw. And let’s be frank, it’s unsubstantiated. Which is not to say that it might not in fact prove to be true. We certainly hope it is, and as we’ve said before, we’d be surprised if Peter Jackson doesn’t end up directing The Hobbit; given his achievement with the Lord of the Rings movies, he is the obvious (and as far as we’re concerned, the only) choice. But as Quint over at Ain’t it cool news points out Jackson’s schedule with Tintin and Lovely Bones has him tied up for the foreseeable future. Quint followed up this rumour by contacting “Jackson’s camp” for confirmation and got a “resounding no”. Ironically, of course, this proves nothing as we’d expect them to say no until they’re ready to make an official announcement.

Will Peter Jackson direct The Hobbit movie or won’t he? That is the question.

For those wondering why on middle earth there would be any question about Jackson directing a movie version of The Hobbit given his achievement with the Lord of the Rings, here’s a little background to what must be a public relations nightmare for New Line studios.

In August 2005 Peter Jackson initiated legal proceedings against New Line over purported financial anomalies in accounting for the first movie of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Fellowship of the Ring.

The war of words got ugly in January this year when a miffed Bob Shaye, head of New Line, declared that Jackson would not be directing The Hobbit movie “during my watch”. From which, one can deduce, Bob Shaye has been spending a little too much time in movie world. Hopefully someone has now put him straight that no one outside of the movies (saving George Dubya of course) really speaks like that...

Beowulf, directed by Robert Zemeckis, will hack a bloody swathe through our cinemas this November. The latest in a long and otherwise uninspiring string of adaptations of the epic Anglo Saxon poem, Zemeckis’s version does have several things going for it, most notably the incredible talent of Neil Gaiman as co-writer with Roger Avary.

Fantasy as a genre, from the high fantasy of Tolkien to the heroic fantasy of Robert E. Howard, owes a huge debt to Beowulf, the earliest written Anglo Saxon poem. The epic concerns the exploits of Beowulf, a warrior from Geat (and the super hero of his day) who answers the call for help from Hrothgar, the Danish King, whose kingdom is being terrorised by Grendel, a monster from Hell. To cut a long story short, Beowulf defeats Grendel and then Grendel’s even more fearsome mother. The hero’s final adventure, as an aged king, pits him against a dragon, roused by the theft of a cup from its treasury...

Although he doesn't look particularly old in the trailer (55 tops), Dustin Hoffman is 243 in the new fantasy film Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium (yes, that's exactly what I thought). Hoffman plays Mr. Magorium, the eccentric storeowner with a mysterious past, fluffy hair, bushy eyebrows, and no fashion sense. I guess this is what we should expect from 243-year-old men?

Natalie Portman also stars as Molly Mahoney, an up-and-coming pianist. She's not 243 though, probably about 23.The last time I saw Natalie she was spouting banal dialogue in slow and painful love scenes with Hayden Christensen in Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith, so I still find it hard to take her seriously. Which is just as well: Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium is as lightweight as you can get.