Fuelling the unstop­pable loco­mo­tive of Dark Knight hype, Chris­t­ian Bale has been speak­ing with Parade about his roles as Batman/Bruce Wayne.

The choice quote comes from Bale’s enthu­si­as­tic talk of a third movie:

“What Bat­man is all about is a double-sided edge; there’s a dual­ity to this char­ac­ter, which makes him still inter­est­ing to play in the sequel — I hope in a third. And I’m work­ing with peo­ple who are going to inspire but also demand that I come up with some­thing new. I do love the unknown, but there’s more to inves­ti­gate in Bruce Wayne and Batman.”

The Prox Blog were at hand to see the final day of film­ing at Prince­ton, cap­tur­ing a steamy encounter between Megan Fox and Shia as the lady rides a spruced up red and yel­low bike, most likely an Aprilia RS125.

Today was the final day of shoot­ing with most of McCosh Court­yard blocked off. We’ve got a pretty skilled pho­tog­ra­pher on our hands — here’s a shot of Megan Fox on a motor­cy­cle kiss­ing Shia LaBeouf while Direc­tor Michael Bay watches. They both play lead roles in “Trans­form­ers: Revenge of the Fallen” and their romance (obvi­ously) plays out in the film.

They also have a nicely com­posed shot of Ramon, Megan and Isabel Lucas sit­ting together, pre­sum­ably wait­ing for something:

Rolling Stone’s Peter Tra­vers has posted his review of The Dark Knight for us to dis­sect and envy; the first of the big pub­li­ca­tions to give their opin­ion on our much antic­i­pated sequel.

Describ­ing The Dark Knight as a thun­der­bolt that rips through a sum­mer of bland movies, Tra­vers heaps praise on the mad-crazy-blazing bril­liant Heath Ledger as The Joker. I’ve picked out the part I love the most:

The haunt­ing and vision­ary Dark Knight soars on the wings of untamed imag­i­na­tion. It’s full of sur­prises you don’t see com­ing. And just try to get it out of your dreams

Once again the full review comes after the break. We’ve already posted an unof­fi­cial review from a well known Spaced character.

Read the rest of this entry »

TFW2005 have pro­vided a small report from the Cin­ema Expo Inter­na­tional 2008 in Ams­ter­dam that sug­gests Gen­eral Motors will be pro­vid­ing “Trans­form­ers: Revenge of the Fallen” with a new Hum­mer H3.

Gen­eral Motors (GM) has put up a plat­form that is adorned with the Trans­form­ers movie logo and Auto­bot and Decep­ti­con insignias. On top and around the plat­form are black Hum­mer H3’s. This dis­play at the con­ven­tion seems to sug­gest that this vehi­cle will be fea­tured in Trans­form­ers: Revenge of the Fallen in some fash­ion. Whether this will be the vehi­cle mode for a Trans­form or a civil­ian vehi­cle is unknown. A mod­i­fied Hum­mer H2 was used for the vehi­cle mode for Ratchet in the first Trans­form­ers movie.

Movie Insider reader Cameron Busacca got a chance to catch up on the action and hang out with the girls this week, top­ping it with a nice set report for us.

Shia LaBeouf came on set around 8 a.m. to film what appeared to be a “move-in” day scene right next to the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Chapel. After sev­eral takes, the crew moved out onto the street to shoot a few stunt scenes on Wash­ing­ton Street. Most of the cars looked brand new (there was no futur­is­tic Chevy Camaro in sight, which was a bum­mer) but after a few takes, one of the cars had bul­let holes and a smashed wind­shield, which led me to believe they were film­ing a chase scene. Shia’s stunt dou­ble nearly got hit sev­eral times by another car, and the crew shot the scene from dif­fer­ent angles up and down Wash­ing­ton as if all of the shots were going to be pieced together later. And even though the stunt dri­vers went really fast, you could tell that they speed it up even more in the edit­ing process.

After the first stunt was over, we saw our first sight­ing of Megan Fox. They were get­ting a shot of her dri­ving from inside the car but she lost con­trol and slammed it into a curb. Don’t worry, she’s per­fectly fine. She got out of the car smil­ing and laugh­ing and walked it off. Shia, on the other hand, hadn’t stopped chain smok­ing since the end of the first scene and every time they broke from film­ing he seemed to have a really bad attitude.

[…]

Shia had turned us down when we asked for a pic­ture ear­lier, but after see­ing Megan take a pic­ture with another for­tu­nate group of guys, we walked up to her. Her peo­ple imme­di­ately shot down the request, but she very gra­ciously and kindly agreed to take one more. We took a pic­ture with her and pro­ceeded to ask her a few ques­tions about the movie. Shia was also there but added noth­ing to the conversation.

The Joker sent out another round of pic­ture mes­sages to the lucky hold­ers of the prize phones,

To find the next sideshow, share these with your fel­low goons. There’s no sub­sti­tu­tion for fun.

The pic­tures looked like this and were labelled 1A, 3B, etc. to form a larger grid:

In this grid there are 21 dis­tinct shapes, each of which can be assigned a let­ter. From this pat­tern of 21 let­ters, a sub­sti­tu­tion cypher (as hinted in the text mes­sage) can be applied to reveal the message:

Color me impressed. Just use the sec­ond let­ter of the fourth word to the right of each cir­cled five-letter word to find out where to go from here

This applies to the new Ha Ha Ha Times, reveal­ing “Red Bal­loons” and hence:

WhySoSe​ri​ous​.com/​R​e​d​B​a​l​l​o​ons

This presents us with another flash game with the appar­ent aim of inflat­ing and burst­ing bal­loons to get points. At a cer­tain point of infla­tion the clown eyes turn blue — when they are all blue a ticket pops out which links to “Inept Lack­eys”.

Hired goons are so unre­li­able these days. That’s why I only employ the ones that grad­u­ated from the top of their class at Clown Col­lege (and being opera-lovers didn’t hurt, either). But Maroni’s got his hands full with inept lack­eys like lit­tle Ste­vie and Romeo, Romeo, where­fore art thou, Romeo? I’ll tell you where they are: sit­tin’ pretty with a smile on their face. They tried to resched­ule their pick up ser­vice at Pasquale’s, but things didn’t go accord­ing to plan.

HAHAHAHA.

Pasquale’s has a tele­phone num­ber for which the pass­code is “Verdi” (83734).

Thanks for the heads up Pierre!

This playlist of videos from Rus­sell shows the Sat­urn Astra, that we have now seen a num­ber of times, trav­el­ling very fast up and down the same road with a Go Kart closely fol­low­ing to film the action — nip­ping between cars to get some great shots. You can also clearly see the whole in the wind­shield which was seen in the Frenzy attack video.

These videos show some more of Shia stretch­ing and what looks like a scene of Shia LaBoeuf walk­ing across cam­pus. It may coin­cide with a set report from Mark:

The TF2 crew was shoot­ing at Holder Hall this morn­ing until about 1:30. The scene they were shoot­ing today ended with Shia, Megan, and Ramon run­ning out of the build­ing into the court­yard, which they shot sev­eral times. Once, they ran out into the court­yard, hooked each oth­ers’ arms at the elbow, and did a lit­tle dance (clearly try­ing to alle­vi­ate some of the bore­dom of doing the exact same thing over and over). Isabel Lucas was vis­i­ble at one point, but I couldn’t tell if she was involved in the shot.

Once the prin­ci­pals were done, the crew shot a group of about 20–30 stu­dent extras run­ning into and out of the dorm’s west­ern entry­way (the same one that Shia, Megan, and Ramon had run out of). It was pretty funny to watch the extras run, because they were being fun­neled in and out of the door­way in a big cir­cle, so the kids that had just run out of the build­ing would cir­cle around and run back in until the shot was over. In both cases the crew used a smoke machine in the dorm’s south­west hall­way, which was vis­i­ble from one of the windows.

Videos thanks to the WPRB Blog!

In an inter­view with Hol­ly­wood Reporter, Bran­don Routh says that the Jus­tice League movie is almost cer­tainly dead and buried, how­ever, he goes on to tell us that the Man of Steel script is in the works and that they plan to start early next year:

“It’s just ‘Man of Steel’ now, I know, they’re busy writ­ing a script and then I trust we’ll be start­ing next year, early next year. That’s my time­line anyway.”