The only good thing about those annoying Dark Knight sequel rumors is that it forces the actors on the receiving end to comment about the possibility in the inevitable denial. Our friends at Comic Book Cynic send over word that Johnny Depp has publicly denied rumors that he would be playing The Riddler, while appearing on a radio show. You can listen to the recording on YouTube or read the transcript below:

Host: Hey Johnny, a listener called in earlier said you have to ask about the rumors on the internet of you doing the Riddler.
Depp: Oh yeah, I heard about that. Not that I know of.
Host: You’d be a good choice.
Depp: It seems like it’d be a fun gig for a while, yeah.

So there you have it, Depp confirms he is not the Riddler, but doesn’t rule out the possibility. Christopher Nolan, did you hear that?

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The Dark Knight surpassed the $500 million mark early Sunday morning, which is a new record, as no film has ever accomplished this particular feat in just 45 days. It probably helps that only one other film has even accomplished that feat. Titanic hit $500 million in 91 days. Industry Analysts still predict a $520-$535 million domestic total, which would be $60 plus million shy of Titanic’s $600.8 million record.

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Disaster Movie has been voted the worst movie of all time by the users of the Internet Movie Database. The film is currently getting a 1.3 out of 10 rating with 4,066 votes.

Earlier this year, Paris Hilton’s The Hottie and the Nottie hit the dreaded #1 spot after only one week of release (the film currently sits at #14). Unlike the Top 250, IMDb’s bottom 100 is always in flux, probably because the amount of votes is a much smaller sample. However, being voted one of the worst films of all time is not an easy achievement to accomplishment. The only other 2008 American film that currently places on IMDb’s bottom 100 is Larry the Cable Guy’s Witless Protection, #80 on the list.

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Sunday has been dark and dreary at the 35th Telluride Film Festival. The rain stops for a few minutes, and only a few minutes.  For the most part, festival-goers can be seen hiding under umbrellas or the make-shift tents set up outside the festival venues. It’s one of those days where you can see everyone would just rather be in their beds, sleeping in. I mention the mood because this is the feeling I have after my first two screenings of the day. It’s not that they were bad films, they just weren’t for me. And you will notice a theme, both movies contained notable cinematography, both for elegance and annoyance.

Steve McQueen’s (no relation to THE Steve McQueen) Hunger won the Golden Camera prize for first-time filmmakers at the 61st Cannes Film Festival. The film tells the story of Bobby Sands, an Irish republican maze prison hunger striker. The film is grueling to watch. You should probably know that Requiem for a Dream is one of my favorite films, and I have watched it many times. But watching Hunger is a lesson in depression. Prisoners are tortured, humiliated, and beaten bloody. One of the prison guards regularly washes his bloody bruised knuckles in a sink of water.

The center piece of the film is a 20-or-so minute dialogue scene between Sands and a Priest (seen in the photo above), which takes place in one complete wide shot, with no camera movement or cuts. And if Funny Games taught us anything, it is that if you don’t move the camera during an extended film sequence, it’s all of a sudden considered artsy. And the conversation is followed up a few minutes later with a five minute long shot of a prison worker sweeping a hallway in another non-moving wide shot. Don’t get me wrong, the one strongpoint of the film was the cinematography. But to me, it is the complete opposite of cinematic and screaming “look at me, I’m not moving the camera”. Michael Fassbender’s transformation during the six-week hunger strike is extremely hard to watch. Fassbender lost 35 pounds over the two months which lead up to the hard to watch final sequences.

And the other film was Helen, the feature film debut by Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor. 18-year-old Joy has disappeared, and was last scene walking into the woods. Joy’s coat and personal items were found in the forrest, but the police are hopeful that she might still be alive. They plan a television reenactment of the disappearance in hopes that it might help someone remember more details. But Helen is not about the mystery, and you should know going in not to expect a conclusion. Helen is about Helen, an 18-year-old classmate of Joy’s who volunteers to be Joy’s stand-in for the reenactment. She was picked in a volunteer casting session because she has a strong physical resemblance to Joy.

Helen has been living in the custody of the state since a young child, and currently works at a hotel a few days a week in between school hours. She’s never had a boyfriend, or friends for that matter. Joy convinces herself that she might be able to uncover the mystery of Joy’s disappearance by integrating herself into Joy’s former life. She has dinner with Joy’s parents, kisses Joy’s boyfriend, and so on. And in the process of pretending to be someone else, Helen finds out who she really is, or at least was.  Like Hunger, the most interesting and annoying part of Joy is the cinematography. Malloy and Lawlor love to use simple slow extended dolly shots in almost every sequence. They are done for tonal reasons, rather than for dramatic effect. The shots are both beautiful and elegant but will test the patience of almost any audience.

And this morning I decided to record another quick video blog, again with Alex from FirstShowing, on our gondola ride over the mountain. We talk about Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, Alex shares his opinion on Flame and Citron, and we go over the Benjamin Button controversy.

Click Here to Watch the Video

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Questionable Internet/playground slang alert: A Bollywood family film entitled Hari Puttar: A Comedy of Terrors is the target of a Warner Bros. lawsuit. The point of contention lies in the title’s similarity to the studio’s multi-billion Harry Potter franchise. Sillier still, Hari Puttar is described online as a blatant Home Alone knockoff. So the robber on the left is Bollywood’s version of Joe Pesci? Serious algebra. As you’d expect, Puttar’s producers and crew are claiming innocence…

“Hari is a very common Indian name and Puttar stands for son in English,” the film’s music director Aadesh Shrivastav said at the music release of the film earlier.

This is true, and I don’t think the lawsuit holds much weight, but c’mon, the general approach of “Whaa? Harry Potter? Ours is Hari P-u-t-t-a-r” is straight out of This is Spinal Tap (or Bollywood’s knockoff, Tiger Sandwich). Judging from this 2007 event flyer, the similarity didn’t elude Duke University’s South Asian Student Association. And if you’re curious, here’s the logline…

The film revolves around a ten year old boy, Hari Prasad Dhoonda (nicknamed Hari Puttar) who has recently moved from India to the United Kingdom. Left home alone with his cousin Tuk Tuk  when his parents go on vacation, Hari must deal with two burglars who hope steal a secret formula Hari’s father had created.

Discuss: Who do you side with, Puttar or Potter or Daniel Stern? Do you think Warner Bros. has a case? Should American kids see Hari Puttar?

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When we last talked to Chuck Palahniuk at Sundance, he told us that a big screen adaptation of Lullaby was set up with a Swedish director he met named Rolf Johansson, who had one more year to get the film into production. Now according to our friends at Film School Rejects who recently spoke to Chuck, Johansson has since secured funding and is currently in the casting stage.

Not much else is known at this time. I’m assuming that the film will be another low budget production like Choke. Actually, I’m not even sure if this Rolf Johansson guy exists. I can’t seem to find any information about the guy outside of the few times Chuck has dropped his name in interviews. Does anyone have any concrete information on this director or the development of this project? Please email us.

At one point Fight Club director David Fincher admitted to MTV that he was “pretty interested in Lullaby” but that it would have to “be dumbed down a bit to work as a movie.” Haven’t read Lullaby? Here is the official plot description:

“Ever heard of a culling song? It’s a lullaby sung in Africa to give a painless death to the old or infirm. The lyrics of a culling song kill, whether spoken or even just thought. You can find one on page 27 of Poems and Rhymes from Around the World, an anthology that is sitting on the shelves of libraries across the country, waiting to be picked up by unsuspecting readers.

Reporter Carl Streator discovers the song’s lethal nature while researching Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, and before he knows it, he’s reciting the poem to anyone who bothers him. As the body count rises, Streator glimpses the potential catastrophe if someone truly malicious finds out about the song. The only answer is to find and destroy every copy of the book in the country. Accompanied by a shady real-estate agent, her Wiccan assistant, and the assistant’s truly annoying ecoterrorist boyfriend, Streator begins a desperate cross-country quest to put the culling song to rest.

On one level, Lullaby is a chillingly pertinent parable about the dangers of psychic infection and control in an era of wildly overproliferated information: “Imagine a plague you catch through your ears… imagine an idea that occupies your mind like a city.” But it is also a tightly wound thriller with an intriguing premise and a suspenseful plot full of surprising twists and turns. Finally, because it is a Chuck Palahniuk novel, it is a blackly comic tour de force that reinforces his stature as our funniest nihilist and a contemporary seer.”

I’m really hoping for a  Survivor movie, but for now I’d be more than willing to settle for Lullaby.

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When a orphan named Jamal Malik, from the slums of Mumbai, makes it to the final question on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, his credibility is put into question. Did he cheat? The police arrest and torture the 18-year-old, hoping to uncover some kind of illegal motivation, but instead they get the heartwarming story of his life so far. And that’s why Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire is really clever. The film is not really about winning 10 or 20 million rupees on Millionaire, it’s a love story, told through flashbacks.

There are three different types of people: Those who know a little about everything, those who know a lot about one or two things, and those who just know what they have been exposed to over the course of their life. Jamal fits neatly into the third category. Every answer Jamal got right on the game show, leading up to the final question, was the result of an important moment from his childhood living on the streets of India. And of course there is Latika, a girl who serves as a through-line for Jamal’s adventures. She is the love of his life, the love he lost. In fact, Jamal only tried out to be on Millionaire with the hope that Latika might see it and that they could be reunited.

Featuring an electrifying score by AR Rehman, Boyle presents India as it has never been seen before, from the slums to the Taj Mahal. Vivid visuals combined with this City of God-like tale of a few orphan kids trying to survive in a gang-infested city. Based on the bestselling Vikas Swarup novel Q and A, Slumdog Millionaire was scripted by Simon Beaufoy, who had also written the script for The Full Monty, one of Boyle’s favorite films. My only complaint is that the torture sequence that begins the film felt unnecessary to the story, and out of place in this film. But it’s only a minor issue.

/Film Rating: 8.5 out of 10

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With Wanted being a huge success this summer, it’s no surprise that Mark Millar is already talking plans for more sequels to the film. What’s interesting is that Millar has pretty much given up the comic book continuity of the series. In an interview with Newsarama, Millar discusses his complete disinterest in a comic follow-up to his original books:

“I’ve got this reputation of being a total whore, and even when I’m adamant about something like this, people don’t believe me, but there is nothing else coming from Wanted,” Millar said. “That six issues was the end. I love doing new stuff anyway – I get bored so quickly.”

Since Timur Bekmambetov’s film adaptation of Wanted differed in many ways from Millar’s original comic, I suppose Millar just isn’t interested in juggling two different universes. Personally though, I’m a fan of what Millar did with the superhero genre in the comics, and I’d really like to see more of that. The transformation of the Fraternity—from a secret society of super villains in the comics, to merely a secret society of assassins in the film—significantly altered the tone of the film adaptation for me. And while I found it a fun action film, a straight-up translation of the comic would have been infinitely more interesting.

But while we won’t be seeing more Wanted comic work from Millar, he will be contributing to some story elements in the Wanted 2 film:

“What I will be doing is providing them with a very small amount of stuff for a story, and that will be used as a basic story that they can build from. It will be a small outline that can possibly be picked apart and not used – but it will be something exclusively for the second film, and no one will ever really see it.”

“…It will be some of the stuff that we didn’t utilize from the first book for the movie – like chapters three and four – there will be some stuff from that, so in the loosest sense it will be based on the book, but only very little.”

I’m certainly excited to see more Wanted films, but it looks like the series is going to be moving even further away from Millar’s original books, and perhaps even further away from Millar’s influence. 

Discuss: Are you excited for Wanted 2? Do you wish the first Wanted was more like the comic books?

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The Alamo Drafthouse has yet another cool limited edition poster print. Pearl Jam poster artist Brad Klausen has created a 24×36 9-color glow in the dark poster for Tron. Click on the image below to see the poster in high resolution.

The Drafthouse is holding a special screening to celebrate the grand opening on Arcade UFO in Austin. The poster will also be hand signed by the artist. You might be wondering why we’re posting a Cool Stuff on the weekend. The reason is that the Tron posters will only be on sale until noon on Monday (due to quantities required for the event itself), and I didn’t want interested /Film readers to miss out.  Available for $45 on Mondotees.com.

Cool Stuff is a daily feature of slashfilm.com. Know of any geekarific creations or cool products which should be featured on Cool Stuff? E-Mail us at orfilms@gmail.com.

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Flash of Genius is one of the surprise films that is being shown at this year’s Telluride Film Festival. Based on a true story, Flash of Genius follows Doctor Robert Kearns (Greg Kinnear), a Detroit-based inventor and engineer professor, who decided to take on the automotive industry, and more specifically Ford Motor Company, who he claimed stole his patented idea for the intermittent windshield wiper.

Yeah, it doesn’t immediately sound like a compelling narrative for a feature film, but Philip Railsback’s screenplay brings the story home, resulting in a fascinating family drama. The battle over inventor-ship lasted many years and at what cost? His wife, his family, his job and even his mental stability. Kearns wasn’t after a huge out of court settlement, he just wanted credit for the invention that he believed he created.

I’ve enjoyed Kinnear’s many performances over the years, but I’ve always believed that his range was somewhat limited. In Flash of Genius, Kinnear takes it to the next level, disappearing into the role and showing a transformation which might rival Benjamin Button on a micro level. Co-stars Dermot Mulroney, Alan Alda and Lauren Graham also turned in notable performances, but Kinear stole the show.

Marc Abraham has been producing films since 1991’s The Commitments. He has been involved in various types of films over the last 17 years, everything from The Babysitters Club to Children of Men. Flash of Genius is Abraham’s directorial debut, and a passion project that he has been developing for almost a decade.

The film will ask questions of yourself. Would you, could you, sell your legacy for $30 million or even $100 million? When is it time to give up on something, even if you know/believe it to be right?

/Film Rating: 7.5 out of 10

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