Fresh

News, announcements and other observations from across the entertainment industry

Cannes lineup announced, strongest competition in years

The preliminary lineup for this year’s Cannes Film Festival was announced today and it’s the strongest slate in years. The big contender from the US of A is obviously Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, which is to this movie nerd’s knowledge the first time Anderson has gone to the world’s most prestigious film festival. Also competing are new films from David Cronenberg, John Hillcoat (The Proposition), Andrew Dominik (The Assassination of Jesse James…), Lee Daniels (Precious) and past Palme d’Or winners Michael Haneke, Abbas Kiarostami, Ken Loach and Cristian Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days).

It’s worth noting that all of these heavyweights are competing at Cannes. More often that not, big world premieres by internationally-acclaimed geniuses at Cannes are screened out of competition to protect them from bad buzz and embarrassing losses (look at what happened to poor Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales after its disastrous Cannes debut).

Everything that’s wrong with The Avengers poster

Movie poster design is the one small corner of the universe where my love of movies and my profession of graphic design intersect, and so it’s always a pleasure to see them done well. Unfortunately, when they’re ho-hum efforts like the latest poster for The Avengers, as Nigel Druitt posits, one can only wish for more illustrative approaches like those seen in the ’80s:

And while posters like these are now fewer and farther between, here’s the thing I really don’t get about comic book movies: They are films based on graphic novels, a visual medium that starts with a film-like script and a flesh-and-blood human being putting pencil to paper. Why on earth have I never seen a comic book movie advertised with comic-book-style art for its posters?

I can’t think of a single one.

More at Flickchart: The Blog

Keeping track of your Blu-rays just got easier

Speaking of which, Blu-ray.com has released its My Movies app for iPhone to help you catalog your discs in conjunction with the site’s built-in collection feature. It requires an account with the site (free) and can even scan barcodes to make adding titles easy.

If you’re a home video nerd like me, then this should come in super handy when assessing just what you’ve got on your shelves (and what you need to buy) while on the go.

via Blu-ray.com

SOUND THE YAZZ FLUTES! Anchorman 2 finally greenlit

In news that is bound to bring about world peace, Anchorman 2 has finally been greenlit. A modest success when it was first released, Anchorman has since become one of the biggest cult hits of the 2000′s. The cast and creative team tried several times to get a sequel financed, but ambivalent studio heads combined with the difficulties of getting the now-famous trifecta of Ferrell, Carell and Rudd to find space in their schedules killed the project. But by the beard of Zeus, the mighty Ron Burgundy shall anchor once more.