One of the things about January-February is that it’s the time of year when studios dump all their movies no one gives a crap about, thus we have plenty of time to speculate wildly about summer movies even though they won’t be out for six months. Case in point, yesterday, I reported a Collider story based on a tip from an insider, saying Bane’s unintelligible dialog in the Dark Knight Rises prologue (note: not the trailer, in which he’s pretty easy to understand), had been remixed, lowering the background noise and making it easier to understand.  Which seemingly would’ve been in line with what director Chris Nolan had said about it, that the plan was to alter the sound slightly, but not rework it altogether.

But now Collider has recanted their original story after speaking with IMAX and Warner Bros, who both confirmed that the sound mix has not been altered in anyway. (One of my Twitter followers saw the prologue last night, and reports that Bane is still all but impossible to understand). Meaning, I guess, that someone emailed Collider a fake story to screw with them. Because people do that? Dude, I don’t even… .

Now, let’s never speak of this again.

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"Wait, you're what?"

Paramount Pictures U.K. recently invited a group of journalists and people who are easily impressed to a screening of exclusive footage from Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol so they could show off all the neat-o cameras that they used. I’m sure many a monocle shattered on the floor that night.

Director Brad Bird boasted that the fourth installment of the watch-Tom-Cruise-sprint-like-a-ninny spy franchise marked the first time that an action film like this had been made for IMAX. Then someone presented him with a shiny new trophy and a whole batch of cookies before crowning him the most amazing man in the world.

Other footage shown included a chase scene amid a desert sandstorm, Cruise’s Hunt character scaling the world’s tallest building in Dubai, the Burj Khalifa building and Cruise and Renner playing opposite Tom Wilkinson as he learns of his mission.

It is set to roll out globally Dec. 26 this year and will be seen in hand-picked large format screens in the U.K. including IMAX, VUE Xtreme, Empire Impact and Cineworld Superscreen from Dec. 21.

(Via The Hollywood Reporter)

After the jump, you can check out the extended international trailer for MI4, as it features most of these scenes and then you can high five your bro and have a push-up contest.

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Shrek Dog always resented that showboatin' Puss in Boots Baby

Whenever people bitch about movies costing 10 or 12 bucks, I’m usually not on board — 10 bucks is still cheaper than any other form of entertainment outside pigeon kickin’ or rat spottin’.  But this weekend, some theaters in Manhattan will be charging $20 for tickets to Shrek Forever After, which is one of those movies people are only Shanghai’d into seeing by their mewling brood of wiener kids anyway.

Several theaters will charge $20 per adult ticket to IMAX showings of the animated 3-D family film “Shrek Forever After”.   The theaters include the AMC theater in Manhattan’s Kips Bay neighborhood, AMC Loews 34, AMC Loews Lincoln Square and AMC Empire 42nd Street.

The increases weren’t officially announced, but were reflected in prices posted Wednesday on movie-ticketing Web sites such as Fandango.com and tracked by BTIG LLC media analyst Richard Greenfield.

While box-office revenues are up about 6% this year compared to the same period last year, attendance is slightly down—a reversal from several months of rapid expansion at the box office and a record-breaking year in 2009, when attendance was up more than 5% and revenues broke the $10 billion barrier.

Who the hell needs an IMAX screen to see Shrek?  The animation is already 3D, now you’re going to add another layer of depth to that, and blow up the whole thing on a 70-foot-screen?  How much stimulation do you need?  If I pay five more bucks, will Mike Myers sit next to me and poke me with a stick the whole time?  If I’m paying for my dumb kid to see Shrek, he’ll see it in Shut the F*ck Up-Vision™ or he’ll see it not at all.

(Eric the Irreverent Dog didn’t clean his glasses either, because Eric just doesn’t give a sh-t.)

Few things are filthier than using your own mouth to feed circulated dollar bills through a stripper’s ass crack, and thanks to James Cameron, you’ve probably already worn one of those filthier things on your face.

I’m speaking, of course, about 3-D glasses at the box office or as I prefer to call them: zit-on-bridge-of-nose goggles. With the success of Avatar, 3-D attendance has obviously boomed in recent weeks, but what the hell happens to your Paul Pfeiffer spectacles after you’ve dropped them in the return bin?

They usually get washed or recycled (that’s cool, I usually don’t return your glasses anyway. -Ed.)…Reusable glasses are generally collected in trays and then cleaned in a dishwasherlike machine. [slate.com]

Oh cool, so what you’re telling me is that generally speaking, theaters usually will have a clean pair for me to wear…usually, of course, generally speaking.
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IMAX co-CEO Richard Gelfond has issued a response to Aziz Ansari’s campaign against bullsh*t IMAX, once again using flawed logic to avoid admitting that wanting two different products to be differentiated in name is a pretty reasonable request.  (Some background here: his original defense compared the IMAX brand to BMW -  specifically their 7 series vs. their 3 series – saying “People don’t say ‘The 3 isn’t a real BMW because it’s smaller.’”  Yeah, they also don’t cost the same, and people don’t pay for a 7-series only to get a 3, dumbass. You look like a Mormon, your argument is invalid.):

“IMAX did 15% of Star Trek’s total domestic box office in the whole country on only 138 screens… This is compared to the earlier releases of Watchmen, where we did 12% of the box office and Monsters and Aliens, where we did around 10%. Clearly a lot of people are going back to IMAX theaters… The overwhelming majority of comments on [Aziz Ansari]‘s blog this morning, more than 90% of them, are vehemently disagreeing with him. And consumers are confirming this with their continued purchases of tickets.” [TheStreet via Vulture]

So… if a product is making money, that’s proof you don’t have to tell people what it is before they buy it?  That’d be like if I paid your mom for sex and half the time got a handjob. And then you used a statistic about increased handjobs to prove that sex is the same thing as handjob. Guess what, my friend, it’s not. It’s not even good foreplay.  Naturally, Aziz has already issued a response to Gelfond’s response:

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