Movie news for Monday

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To start off the new week, here's a collection of recent posts that I've written for new South African cinephiles site The Movies, as well as other miscellaneous bits of news related to recent blog posts here.
  • First up, here are all the freshly announced results from the 69th Annual Golden Globes last night. The Globes are normally a good indicator for the Academy Award results, and although no one film dominated at the Globes this year - the awards were surprisingly widely spread - family drama The Descendants (2 wins) and Silent Movie era romance The Artist (3 wins), are looking good for Oscar gold. Meanwhile, I think it's fairly safe to say that 2012's Academy Awards won't be captivating the public imagination much - this year there are few popular crowd-pleasers, or controversial star-saturated flicks, for ordinary moviegoers to rally behind.

  • Star-studded male strippers movie Magic Mike is one of my Top 25 movie picks of the next 6 months. New photos from the film were released this past week, while comments from shirtless stars Channing Tatum and Matt Bomer elaborate a bit more on what audiences should expect from the quirky comedy-drama. Read the post here.

  • Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, another of my Top 25 Picks, was originally going to be the first fairy tale movie out the gates for the great Fairy Tale Film Deluge of 2012-13. Now, however, the steampunk-y supernatural actioner has been pushed back to 11 January 2013. Paramount's argument is they're waiting for lead Jeremy Renner to explode as a big box office draw this year. However, with no trailer, poster or official site unveiled less than 2 months before Witch Hunters' planned release date of 2 March this year, I suspect they don't think the film is ready for public consumption. Frankly though, a 10 month delay as opposed to, say, a 6 month hold-up, really hurts the movie's reputation...

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