Hot on the heels of the domestic trailer that came out yesterday, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter now has an international trailer. Whereas the American version was mostly slow-motion and fire, this one provides more plot and voiceover and Dominic Cooper (though it still has plenty of slow-motion and fire, don’t you worry about that). Cooper plays Henry Sturgess (to Ben Walker’s Lincoln), who’s apparently a vampire who gives Lincoln’s secret vampire diary to the book’s narrator.
Seth Grahame-Smith’s Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter was a gloriously silly idea combining the history of Abraham Lincoln with a bloody fight against vampires, a kitschy-cute premise, even if he’d already sort of beaten the joke to death in his first book. Or as the book description put it:
While Abraham Lincoln is widely lauded for saving a Union and freeing millions of slaves, his valiant fight against the forces of the undead has remained in the shadows for hundreds of years. That is, until Seth Grahame-Smith stumbled upon The Secret Journal of Abraham Lincoln, and became the first living person to lay eyes on it in more than 140 years. Using the journal as his guide and writing in the grand biographical style of Doris Kearns Goodwin and David McCullough, Seth has reconstructed the true life story of our greatest president for the first time-all while revealing the hidden history behind the Civil War and uncovering the role vampires played in the birth, growth, and near-death of our nation…
So what do you get when you let the Kazakhstani director of Wanted make a movie adaptation of what was basically a 300-page mash-up of prose styles? Judging by the trailer, you get Blade with top hats, basically.
IGN just debuted a new pair of posters (full versions below) for Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, the adaptation of the book by Seth Grahame-Smith (the guy who wrote Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and War and Peace and Lesbians or whatever) from Wanted director Timur Bekmambetov (the hardest working Kazakhstani in Hollywood).
Scheduled to hit theaters on June 22, 2012, stars Benjamin Walker [as Lincoln], Dominic Cooper, Anthony Mackie, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Jimmi Simpson, Robin McLeavy, Alan Tudyk and Rufus Sewell. [IGN]
All year I’ve been sitting through movies like I Am Number Four, Cowboys and Aliens, Super 8, Monsters, Skyline, Transformers 3, Battleship, Battle: Los Angeles, Green Lantern, Attack the Block, Thor… thinking, “Jeez, when is someone finally going to make a movie about an alien invasion?”
It looks like director Chris Gorak and producer Timur Bekmambetov (Wanted) have finally answered my prayers, with The Darkest Hour, from Summit Entertainment, starring Emile Hirsch and Olivia Thirlby (or as I like to call her, OLIVIA THRILLBY!). This time around, the aliens attack Moscow (they’re trying to steal our expensive whores!). The twist is, this time, the aliens are invisible! And they can see us with infrared heat vision! This new wrinkle really turns the idea on its head, doesn’t it? I mean, I’ve never seen something like that before. Except in Predator. Which they remade last year.
“ALIENS! CHICK SCIENTIST! ‘SPLOSIONS! THE MILITARY!” -Every movie for the last five years.
[HD Trailer at Apple]
As we learned from his recent open letter to Vladimir Putin asking for the Russian Prime Minister to support immortality research, Steven Seagal is a great friend to the Russian people, and even “considers himself Russian,” despite being an Irish Jew from Fullerton who wears kimonos. Seagal was recently in neighboring Astana, Kazakhstan to attend a star-studded International Action Film Festival whose other luminaries included poetry superstar Michael Madsen. During the press conference, Seagal brought up his idea for a Genghis Khan epic, which he’s apparently been talking about since 1998. In fairness, if there’s one thing we know about Steven Seagal, it’s that he doesn’t keep track of space and time too well. Here’s my favorite badly-translated account of the event:
This year such famous Hollywood stars as Steven Seagal and Michael Madsen have become the guests of the festival. Such actors as Sergey Svetlakov, Marat Basharov, Viktor Verzhbitsky, Yekaterina Strizhenova, Yevgeny Stychkin and Dmitry Nagiyev were among the guests. At the festival Dmitry will present the “Two pistols. Evasive brilliant” film, where he is in the lead cast. [CaspioNet]
That movie sounds awesome. Here’s a more coherent account of Seagal discussing his Khan epic.
As Steven Seagal said at a press conference on Saturday in the capital of Kazakhstan, where the 2nd International Action Film Festival ASTANA-2011 is taking place, he would like to play the role of the Mongolian khan.
“I really want to make a movie about Genghis Khan. I get lots of offers, but I want to shoot not just a film, but a big epic. Probably, my friend – the mayor of Astana (Imangali Tasmaganbetov) – will help me” – the actor hopes.
At the same time Steven Seagal admitted that because of the crisis the American film industry is in the doldrums. Therefore he intends to work on the film about Genghis Khan together with Russian and Kazakhstan cinematographers.
“Now I am also in the process of developing joint projects with Russian film directors. We are not only working on the plot, but also settling financial issues. I hope very much for working with Timur Bekmambetov, since I consider him a great and hardworking film director”- he added. [RussiaIC]
“Because of America’s financial issues, I hope to work somewhere where capital is stable, like the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan. I would even consider working with Timur Bekmambetov, the most famous person Kazakhstan has ever produced.” As much as the Seagal jokes are endless here, I fell down a bit of a Kazakhstan rabbit hole while writing this post, and it was just too good not to share. For instance, would you like to see photos from Kazakhstan’s Fashion Week? (Yes, you would). Or how about learn more about the traditional Kazakh sport of “Girl Chasing?”
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