While your quaint little Iraq documentaries and mumblecore movies were unspooling at South by Southwest, the big guns of the movie industry were gathering for ShoWest in Las Vegas. The annual exhibitors convention is all about putting butts in the seats – and making sure the seats are available for said butts by flying in superstars to grin and glad hand with theater owners and show a few clips from their upcoming product. None of your faithful Screengrab scribes were able to attend this year, but fortunately Entertainment Weekly was on hand to run down the highlights for us.
3-D Animation: Two upcoming 3-D animated features were previewed. The Belgian-made (but English language) Fly Me to the Moon “follows three adorable house flies who hitch a ride on Apollo 11 during the first moon landing in 1969…Even ordinarily mundane things — e.g. shards of glass flying through weightless space or dust being kicked up under Neil Armstrong's boots — appear remarkably realistic when seen through those plastic 3-D specs.” EW was even more impressed with the “Ultimate 3-D” footage from Dreamworks Animation’s Monsters vs. Aliens, “which has the effect of bringing the viewer into the world of the movie, rather than having stuff pop off the screen. (Really, you have to see it to believe it.)”
The Dark Knight: Both director Christopher Nolan and star Christian Bale are interviewed. Nolan talked about raising the bar for the Batman Begins follow-up: “I'd never done a sequel — kind of never imagined I would; it's not something I had really seen myself doing. Even, on completing the first one, it has a great tease for the Joker, but I just wanted to send the audience out with a sense of possibility for what we might see, not specifically as a sequel. It took me a long time to come around, talking to [Batman Begins cowriter] David Goyer and Jonathan, my brother [and frequent collaborator], to figure out that, actually, there's something very compelling there. So what I've tried to do with this film, the only reason was to try and make the best film in the first place. And the great sequels that I've enjoyed and looked up to over the years have managed to do that — there aren't many of them. You know, whether you're looking at The Godfather Part II or The Empire Strikes Back — those are sequels that I think built on what the first ones did really amazingly well. And that's what we're aspiring to with this film.” Meanwhile, Bale is ready for more: “I would, knowing the Dark Knight story, I would like very much to complete a trilogy. And I think that knowing the story of The Dark Knight, it leaves you anticipating something that really can get very, very interesting for a third.”
The Clone Wars: A George Lucas interview finds the Star Wars maven anticipating the upcoming animated Clone Wars feature and series, as well as a separate live-action TV serial set between episodes three and four of the movies. “Some of the characters from the features find their way in there, so it's not completely divorced. It's as if we just went down the street and told a different story. You know, we were doing, I don't know, 24, and now we're going to move down the street here and do The Wire. Same thing, it's just different people doing the same thing in the same city.” George Lucas’s The Wire? We’ll believe it when we see it.