After the jump I’ve got the English subtitled trailer for The Battle of Red Cliff, supposedly directed by John Woo, though no one fires two pistols at once and there aren’t any white doves.  The film is the first of two parts, telling the story of the Three Kingdoms period in Ancient China, and is the most expensive Asian-financed film ever made. 

Pay special attention to the guy shoulder charging the horse at around the 1:22 mark because violence against horses is awesome.  Every time I see a horse I want to punch it in its big, stupid horse face and yell "This one’s for Christopher Reeve!"

Also note that these aren’t the final subtitles.  You can tell because everyone in the trailer speaks a stilted, slightly ingrammatical form of English.  However, it seems more authentic that way because I’m incredibly racist.

After the jump I’ve got the trailer for Bolt, Disney’s first non-Pixar produced animated film since John Lasseter took over as Chief Creative Officer in 2006. It features John Travolta, who believes the world is controlled by alien spirits, and Miley Cyrus (Smiley Virus?), who appears to have been raised by marketing execs and is now a registered trademark of the Disney Corporation.

The story is about Bolt, a white German Shepherd [a pure white Aryan shepherd, if you will...] who has lived all his life on the set of a TV show in which he portrays a superhero dog, and as a result thinks that his superpowers are real. Later, he gets accidentally separated from the studio. He then meets a female cat named Mittens and a hamster who never leaves his exercise ball, and eventually he discovers that all of his powers are fake.

The film was originally titled "American Dog", and was originally to be written and directed by Chris Sanders (director of Lilo & Stitch), but he has since left the project and been replaced by Chris Williams and Byron Howard. The film’s previous plot told the story of a dog named Henry, a famous TV star, who one day finds himself stranded in the Nevada desert with a testy, one-eyed cat and an oversized, radioactive rabbit who are themselves searching for new homes, all the while believing he is still on television.

Yeah, my dog has superpowers too.  He humps anything he wants, craps in the street whenever he has to go, and licks his balls in public if he feels like it.  And everywhere he goes, people want nothing more than to massage him.  Sure, he can’t fly, but who needs to fly when you’ve got someone to clean up your crap with a plastic bag? 

Higher res also available at Empire

After the jump, I’ve got the trailer for Repo! The Genetic Opera.  It’s set in the future and concerns GeneCo, a company who offers organ transplants for a price, but who will repossess their merchandise if you miss a payment.  The trailer quotes several glowing reviews that call it everything from “Stunning and original” to “A cult classic”.  But here’s what I took away:

- From the producers of Saw
- It’s a musical
- Stars Paris Hilton

I’d say that’s three strikes, but it’s more like nine strikes because any one of those is a dealbreaker.  If a movie were a girl you’d consider dating, Paris Hilton starring in it is like finding out she has a penis.  Except worse.

So the big news yesterday was that Peter Travers of Rolling Stone had reviewed The Dark Knight.  I would’ve covered that if Travers hadn’t lost all credibility in the last year by giving Atonement and 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days four stars each.  I saw both of those and let me tell you, I’d rather get ass raped by a rhinoceros with my head in a clogged toilet than watch either of them again.  Okay, that was a bit of an overstatement.  But in all seriousness, I’d rather… eat… a strawberry… that wasn’t ripe yet! Ew, it’s tart!  That’s the opposite of what I was expecting! The horror!

Anyway, today IESB has a big batch of new pictures from the movie (only 22 days away!!!11!), a few of which I’ve included here.  They also have an entire page of "production notes" that include stuff like this:

THEN WHAT ABOUT THE BATCAVE?
Crowley notes that as long as his home was in the city, Batman needed a new headquarters. “He can’t go to his Batcave, so we came up with the idea of a bunker that ties back to the architectural theme of the penthouse in that it’s vast but very plain. It is essentially a large concrete box where everything comes out of the walls and then goes back. But it still had to be visually interesting. It was all about proportion and perspective, which was actually great fun to do.”

…Yeeeaaahh….  I think I’ll wait for the actual movie, thanks.  Reading this shit’s like going to a strip club with a guy who spends the whole time yammering about what the stripper’s g-string’s are made out of and where they get the fabric.  I guess what I’m trying to say is that I just want Christian Bale to show me his vagina already. 

The folks at Film1 have the latest poster for Ghost Town from the Cinema Expo in Amsterdam.  Why you’d attend that when there’s legal pot and prostitutes on every corner is anyone’s guess.

A misanthropic dentist gains the ability to see ghosts after a near-death experience in which he dies for seven minutes during a colonoscopy and is then miraculously revived. All of these ghosts now want something from him, particularly Frank Herlihy who wants him to break up the impending marriage of his widow Gwen, putting him in the middle of a supernatural love triangle.

Ahh, a colonoscopy, that would explain why he’s so happy to be putting on those latex gloves.  Dentists don’t usually get that excited, unless they’re putting you under.  That’s exciting because you can put silly hats on people and then take pictures.  And yeah, I guess you can grope them too.  Sicko. - [Source]