movie news: Red Lights, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 and Abduction

I’m playing catch up here…

Anyway, like I mentioned in the first “movie news” post… I do a weekly film news spot on Cinerama – the movie show on Phantom 105.2 – and I thought, since I’m actually researching movie news every week, I should probably put it on the site.

There are a multitude of ways you can catch the show… you can listen to the show live online on the Phantom 105.2 website or through the iPhone or Android apps. Or, if you’re in the Dublin area, you can stick with traditional media and just use ye olden radiomaphone and tune to 105.2. Oh, and if you have UPC you can go to channel 935. Or of course, you can read it here. In more detail.

Here’s what I decided to highlight on the show on 15th September 2011.

planned release date: TBA

If you remember, last year one of my favourite films of the year was Rodrigo Cortés’s high-concept psychological thriller, Buried. It was his first English language feature and somehow he’d managed to get Ryan Reynolds on board. To be buried in a box for weeks. If you haven’t seen it I urge you to go out and rent it. Now.

Well, Cortés is currently in post production on his next film and this time he’s acting as director and writer. The film is called Red Light, and it appears I wasn’t the only one impressed with Buried. He’s got more than a few names together for this one, Cillian Murphy, Elisabeth Olson, Toby Jones, Joely Richardson and, at the helm, Robert De Niro and Sigourney Weaver.

Or so it would appear. There hasn’t been much officially released about the film yet beyond a short summary saying that it centers on a psychologist (Weaver), and her assistant (Olsen), whose study of paranormal activity leads them to investigate a world-renowned psychic (De Niro). Sounds good to me.

The reason I’m highlighting it is that this week the first teaser trailer was released. Naturally, it being a teaser, it tells you nothing… but I’m still excited. How about you?

planned release date: 18 Nov 2011

The “big news” this week was that the first trailer for The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 (That’s right, a “:” and a “-“) was released out into the wild. There was a teaser trailer a little while ago but now we’ve got the full 2 and a half minute whack to have a look at.

For those of you who know nothing about The Twilight saga, it’s a “vampire-themed fantasy romance” series (description courtesy of Wikipedia). It started life as a set of 4 novels but it’s managed to spawn a series of popular films… I guess those last two sentences were for no-one. It’s been near impossible to ignore the Twilight series, certainly if you live in the UK or Ireland.

Anyway, if, like me, you don’t know what happens after the last movie, this trailer is heavy on the spoilers. They seem to have gone on a different tack from the last two Harry Potter – they seemed to mostly try to avoid showing anything obviously significant in the trailers. Twilight has just gone whoomp, there it is. Fair enough but you probably shouldn’t look at the trailer below if you’re trying to stay spoiler free.

If you avoided the trailer then skip on down to the next news piece but if you don’t care about spoilers then read on.

Like I implied, what I don’t know about Twilight could fill a book so I was quite surprised to see both a wedding and a pregnancy in the trailer, they seem like a lot to be showing straight up in a trailer, but I guess they figure you should know what’s going on by now. And who knows, maybe the situation in the film is way more complicated than what we see in the trailer.

For what it’s worth, it looks like a beautiful wedding.

planned release date: 30 Sep 2011

If you can’t wait till November to see the boys of Twilight then you’re in luck. Taylor Lautner makes is debut as a leading man in Abduction next week.

The film is a thriller centered on a young man (Lautner) who sets out to uncover the truth about his life after finding his baby photo on a missing persons website. Next thing you know, all sorts of shady types are after him while the government are trying to keep him alive – it seems to turns into a Bourne style action flick.

In the last week or so a few new clips from the film have been released. Personally, I think Lautner is a little young to try and wear the action hero mantle but bless ‘im for trying. Robert Pattinson really has the romantic lead on a plate if he wants it so I guess Lautner decided to try a different direction.

The latest clips from Abduction are below – do you think he has a chance being the new Arnold Schwartznegger? What about the new Vin Diesel?