HOLY CRAP, IT’S A STILL PICTURE FROM A SPIELBERG MOVIE, TRY TO CONTROL YOURSELVES! The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn (trailer here), Spielberg’s motion-capture adaptation of the über-popular Hergé comic I’d never heard of, opens December in the US, and October in Europe.  Hopefully it will be more representative of the writing team (Edgar Wright, Attack the Block director Joe Cornish, and British TV writer Steven Moffat) than it will of Spielberg, whose last two films were Indiana Jones 4 and what looks like an earnest adaptation of “Simple Jack“, or the fact that it’s motion-capture. The motion-capture FX don’t look horrible, but that seems like that’s the best you can hope for with motion-capture, which is why I don’t really see the upside.  Either animate it or don’t, dudes. Not to mention, Hergé’s drawings always had dots for eyes, which seems weird to replace with notoriously creepy mo-cap eyes. Anyway, not having read the source material, the film seems to be about a well-dressed youth who reads books to his dog.  Jeez, is that all they did in the 50s?

[Animati via ThePlaylist]

I know discussing Tintin is all the rage at discount bookstores and vegan cocktail parties, but I must confess that I’ve never seen it and know nothing about it.  There, I said it, I’m not cool.  Now that that’s off my chest, here are the Tintin movie details for those of you who care.

The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn, directed by Steven Spielberg
Written by Steven Moffat (Dr. Who), Edgar Wright (Hot Fuzz), and Joe Cornish
New castmembers: Jamie Bell as Tintin, Daniel Craig as Red Rackham
Andy Serkis (Gollum) as Captain Haddock, Simon Pegg & Nick Frost as the Thompson “Twins”
Shot in 3-D and motion-capture
Opens in 2011

Got all that?  Good.  In related news, I had a pet pig once.  He was hard to leash train.

[via Comingsoon, /Film, ONTD]

AICN today is claiming confirmation on rumors that Simon Pegg and Nick Frost would play the Thompson Twins in Steven Spielberg/Peter Jackson’s Tintin movies.  A TimesOnline article would seem to corroborate. 

…Pegg trots over to the motion-capture set for the ET director’s latest project – the first in a trilogy of Tintin movies. [Spielberg to direct the first, Peter Jackson the second]  “Steven’s smoking a stogy, cap on head, like he’s always been since I was a baby [?],” Pegg says, shaking his head in wonder. “I shook his hand and chatted about films. He gave me the motion-capture camera, and I had a play around with it. Then he said, ‘Hey, maybe you and Nick Frost could play the Thompson Twins.’ In Tintin. A Spielberg movie. To work with him is beyond .. . ” He trails off, lost for words.

I don’t know much about Tintin other than that it’s a Belgian cartoon from like a billion years ago that’s been made into a couple different TV series and everyone seems to care about it.  You might also wonder how Ginger Pegg and Fatty Frost will play twins.  The answer is that the film will be motion capture, so they’ll be sort of animated.  Also, the Thompson Twins weren’t twins either.  In fact, there were three of them.  In conclusion, the 80s were stupid.