Newsbites: Trailers! Tintin! Shazam!

Last updated on: April 14, 2006 at 1:26 pm by Peter T. Chattaway

Newsbites: Trailers! Tintin! Shazam! 2006-04-14T13:26:00-07:00 Peter T. Chattaway

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Time for another round of heads-ups.

1. The Hollywood Reporter‘s Kirk Honeycutt reviews Coming Attractions, “a one-of-a-kind documentary about the history and methodology of making trailers, produced by the Andrew J. Kuehn Jr. Foundation. Strictly speaking, this is an archival and educational film. Legal clearance makes showing the film in theaters or on television far too expensive. Which is a pity since the movie’s entertainment value is every bit as high as its instructional value.” I wonder what its own trailer would be like?

2. IndieWIRE reports that PBS will broadcast Tintin and Me (2003) on July 11 as part of a documentary series running every Tuesday night between June and October. I saw the film at the local film festival in 2004 and had this to say at the time:

Thundering typhoons! With Tintin and Me (Denmark, 76 min.) Anders Hogsbro Østergaard has crafted a fascinating and intriguing documentary about Hergé, the Belgian artist who invented Tintin (and Captain Haddock, and Professor Calculus, and the Thomson/Thompson duo, etc.) for a Catholic magazine in 1929 and wrote adventures for his youthful hero right up until the 1970s. I used to read these comics all the time when I was a kid — and my dad seized the opportunity to educate me by explaining all the references the characters made to things like Sing Sing, etc. — and watching this film made me want to go back and read them all over again. Scott McCloud notes in his book Understanding Comics that Hergé used a fascinating combination of iconic art (in the ultra-simple, ultra-cartoonish faces he gave his characters) and realistic art (in the ultra-detailed environments in which he put those characters), but I hadn’t realized until I saw this film just how out of his way Hergé went to ensure that he was depicting authentic settings as accurately and realistically as possible. The film gets into some interesting political and biographical territory as it explores the influence that a certain right-wing Catholic minister had over Hergé’s life, hiring him to create a cartoon in which a strapping young hero would defeat Communists around the world, etc., and even marrying Hergé off to his secretary; when Hergé left his wife for another woman many, many years later, he apparently felt a great deal of guilt over this, until he evidently set aside certain ideas about “sin” with which he had been raised. Hergé’s association with this minister, and with a newspaper that the Nazis had assumed control of at the beginning of WW2, also led to him being arrested as a “collaborator” at the end of the war, even though he had written anti-fascist stories before the war (one story takes place in a country overseen by a dictator named Musstler — half Mussolini, half Hitler) and had kept his Tintin adventures strictly neutral during the war (lots of buried-treasure stories!). One of the film’s sadder subplots concerns a Chinese man whose advice on The Blue Lotus helped Hergé to move out of the stereotypical and propagandistic mode of the earliest Tintin stories; this man disappeared early on, and Hergé apparently spent his entire life looking for him, even going so far as to base an entire story, Tintin in Tibet, on the character’s search for this Chinese man’s comic-book namesake; and what’s really kinda bittersweet is the way this man was ultimately found just a very, very short time before Hergé died, and the way the reunion of these two men was treated like a major media event — you can’t help wondering if Hergé had really meant as much to Tchang as the idealized quest for Tchang had meant to Hergé. Amazingly, Hergé, who was interviewed by the director (or by one of the interviewees, it wasn’t clear to me which) at some length in the early ’70s, professes to be happy with only two panels in his entire ouevre; they are good panels, to be sure, but man, there’s a lot more than just those!

3. Reuters reports that Peter Segal, who has directed a few Adam Sandler movies including 50 First Dates (2004; my comments), is now developing the superhero movie Shazam!, of all things.

4. I have heard of The Celestine Prophecy, but know nothing about it or the new film adaptation, so I’m not sure what to make of FilmStew.com‘s report that lead actor Matthew Settle is “the son of a Baptist preacher” and “was at a resonant personal crossroads in his own life, looking to broaden his outlook with other beliefs.”

Although the film doesn’t open until April 21st, there have already been some 800 preview screenings held for church groups and other organizations across the United States and Canada, as part of a campaign similar to the manner in which both What the Bleep Do We Know? and The Passion of the Christ were initially rolled out. And although it may seem to be part of some providential plan, Redfield says the circa Easter and Passover 2006 release date for his film is purely coincidental. As such, it arrives in theaters just one month before another spiritually themed blockbuster, Ron Howard’s The Da Vinci Code.

“We couldn’t be more fortunate, it couldn’t be more synchronistic,” Redfield says of the adjacent release of the two films. “It’s going to be a summer of spiritual movies. And with The Gospel of Judas, all these things are hitting the airwaves to explore not just the deeper nature of religion, but man’s overall spiritual nature.”

5. Reuters reports that Elton John’s Gnomeo & Juliet, which Disney dropped under its new Pixar management, has been picked up by Miramax — which is owned by Disney. Hmmm.

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