yep, they're very different movies and all.. but at end of day, TDK is a much bigger phenomenon than Ironman.

Funny, Robert Downey Jr looked just like Don Cheadle in Tropic Thunder.

And by that post Harry, it sounds like your ready to quietly push this issue under the carpet to help the film move forward.

Well I'll say this. Some of the fans won't stop talking about it, until the real answer is given. And as fans I think we are entitled to those real answers.

Fav and Howard need to say it in the same room or over a phone.

Yeah it could get nasty, but the lies won't hide anymore.

The Maggie replacment in TDK- was Katies choice to leave. Cause the bitch is fucking nuts. OK, we could accept that.

We can't accept this, and the fact that certain rumors are flying about. Dealing wiht the real reason Howard ain't coming back, and you are in the know, and the rest of the world isn't allowed to be privileged. Fuck man Hollywood is like the social structure of popularity in high school. The fucking bullshit amazes me!!!!! It really does. Everyone stands over their own private toilet bowl inhaling their brand smiling. thinking it, and them are better than the rest. Sometimes someone needs to glove up a hand, reaches in, and smears that shit in that self absorbed fuckers face!

Luke had gotten a crash course in the Jedi arts (I wonder if he did saber training with Yoda....maybe in the Ultra-Hyper-Special Edition haha) and was probably still more comfortable with a blaster.

Also, in the Dagobah cave he used his lightsaber and when it came time to confront Vader on Bespin he used his lightsaber as well. Luke was always on the back foot during that duel, getting in a couple of lucky shots here and there but it was clear that he wasn't entirely comfortable with the lightsaber.

In Return of the Jedi, he tried to use a blaster to kill Jabba though that was all part of a ridiculously elaborate plan. Once he got his lightsaber from Artoo he looked more comfortable and was clearly a more experienced Jedi though it should be noted that Obi-Wan used a blaster to kill General Grevious so it's not unheard of for Jedi to use them in extreme circumstances.

I wouldn't be too hard on Luke though as there is a clear progression from the blaster toting farmboy in A New Hope to the confident, saber-wielding Jedi in Return Of The Jedi.

I could listen to Favs talk for another 2 hrs. He loves what he does and we're lucky to have him overseeing The Avengers.

I am dying to know how the hell they're going to approach THOR...script, tone etc. and how they're going to blend it seamlessly with the more 'reality' based films. Anyone got any clue on this? Harry? Mori? Favs...jump in here and give us a heads up!

Los Angeles (E! Online) – Rough month for Terrence Howard. First he's bounced from Iron Man 2. And now he has been tagged with a $5 million lawsuit.

The onetime Oscar nominee is facing allegations of assault from Tex Allen, the composer of the Broadway revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof that Howard headlined last winter. Allen, a jazz pianist and brother of Cat's director, Debbie Allen, claims he was punched in the kisser by Howard during a rehearsal back in January.

Neither Tex Allen nor a rep for the show could be reached for comment on the suit, which was first reported in the New York Post. But Howard's publicist, Michelle Benson, says the flap is much ado about nothing.

"We are aware of the allegations and expect this frivolous suit to be dismissed," she tells E! News.

Howard has been making the rounds promoting his debut pop album, Shine Through It, which hit stores in September.

Most Jedi were training in lightsaber combat from childhood onward. Luke had, at best, a couple years of self-training, interspersed with a couple hours of training from the living Obi-Wan, and a couple months (at most. The Dagobah time frame is unclear) from Yoda. We can speculate that Luke was getting training tips from Obi-Wan's spirit, but ultimately, all Luke's lightsaber skills in the movie were self-taught or just natural ability.

Considering that he's probably well-trained on the use of a blaster (protecting a moisture farm from Tusken Raiders, Rogue Banthas, moisture rustlers, and Krayt Dragons will do that), I can't say I'd blame him for doubting his ability with an ancient weapon he'd never even seen before he was 20 years old, let alone relied upon it to save his life.

Up until his first battle with Vader, Luke uses the lightsaber as a tool, rather than as a weapon. He's completely unsure of his skills, and then once Vader KICKS HIS ASS in Cloud City, he probably goes back to his room, listens for Obi-Wan, and trains like crazy until such time as they can arrange the rescue of Han.

Even with that training, if you compare his lightsaber skill with that of Jedi from the Republic era, he looks haphazard and a bit wild. He's all instinct.

In fact, ALL of the Winter Guard are jerks to Iron Man AND War Machine, with the exception of Ursa Major, who questions why they have to be such assholes whenever an American superhero shows up.

Also, the opening scene was Howards' characters' birthday party and he refused to do it.

Now you know.

I guess it could have been worse - at least it ain't Will Smith!

Seriously, tho, there are so many other black actors out there in the same pay scale and with the same level of recognition - and at least as much respect - as Howard (or Cheadle for that matter) who could have been cast for this.

Don't get me wrong - Cheadle gotta eat - but I just don't see him fitting into this role comfortably.

We'll see...

Quint you idiot! I liked the rest of the interview and thanks for pwning fools like Nuked who are so damn lazy not only do they not read the TB but they don't even read the very start of the interview!

Anyway, the tightrope walking comment was moronic in light of the biggest criticism of the film - made by many many AICN readers on these boards - that we'd already seen the best bits of the movie and there were no real surprises because we saw all the major beats in the MANY trailers.

Tightrope my arse.

A great example of the limitations of mocap is Polar Express. Hanks may be a good actor, and may have been playing his grown-up character as a child, but when you just mocap it and bolt it onto a virtual kid, the body language, sense of mass and even facial expressions (especially a child's involuntary movements) are wrong wrong wrong and give that creepy feel (I didn't even GET to eyes!).

So don't misunderstand and think I'm anti mocap or CG or that I put traditional on a subjective pedestal. I don't. But I don't know that you guys realise just how much of those fave performances/animation was NOT motion-capture. Sure keyframing can smooth things if you don't pa attention, but that also depends on the direction. And as for being here to stay, it's just a 3d extension of rotoscoping, although it could be argued that more stylised designs in 2d vs less stylised movement through rotoscoping created more of a dichotomy than mocap does with 3d cg...

Not to mention the catch-22 with all this stuff that fx will NEVER seem 'real' as long as we dream up situations and characters that don't and CAN'T happen in real-life! James Cameron stuff included.

With Spiderman, having him strike the famous poses from the comic mid-swing isn't 'believable' either, but at least it was a conscious decision by the director. Same with Lee and the hopping Hulk. Another one is Jacksons CG-o-riffic (I know there were miniatures in the shot but stay with me) dive down into the goblin mines. I don't like that sort of whizzy-cam business, but appreciate that he thought it was appropriate that you feel an unpleasant dizzy/sickening feeling at our ride through the bowels of that perverted world that culminates in an unholy birth. Not my style, but at least it's not because he doesn't know any better.

Yep, even if you get the Spidey swinging and Spidey landing bits right in and of themselves, I don't know that they'll EVER seem 'right' because there's an intrinsic dichotomy between the two parts. If a human (which is our subconscious barometer of everything) was swinging like that, they'd go splat, and conversely if a human DIDN'T go splat, they'd never swing like that (yep things are getting silly semantics-wise but anyway) to land that way. Catch-22, and no amount of realistic rendering or clever animation (and mocap would never be able to do this anyway, hence the FX in the first place) can overcome that misfire between what our brains naturally expect to happen.

The thing that comes in then is accepting that we bloody go to see a Spiderman movie BECAUSE we can't see that in real-life. The greatest irony borne out by these TBs is that Fanboys continuously seem to want their suspension of disbelief in movies like this WITHOUT actually having to suspend their disbelief!! They're the WORST at it! And the examples are misguided. They continuously hold up stuff like the first JP as a paragon of realism & believability when the very subject matter makes the argument flawed. It uses every trick in the book to disguise the cg (I'm not knocking it, or the masterful staging), in addition to the fact that we buy into the mass and movement more easily because our only examples of that sort of behaviour are separated by millions of years and different species... Know what I mean? Before that movie everyone thought a T-Rex walked upright! Aaaanyway...

And I'm not excusing anything. I can be the world's worst pedant when it comes to traditional OR cg shots, especially when it comes to the most important stuff - character, and eyes. Hell, there are even shots in the awesome Benjamin Button trailer that look wrong wrong wrong to me, because it seems the character doesn't blink right, and for the right character reason. Obviously I'd NEVER try to teach Fincher how to suck eggs or the animation directors he hires, but it brings us neatly back to the whole subjectivity thing and the inescapable fact that if the very premise is 'beyond belief', then the shots at some point will be too...

And I'll lay bets now that even if Button is the best thing ever, the FX will look 'wrong' on the character's more extreme shots just by virtue of the whole "CAN'T be real" brain/eye thing. But what we DO get is the sort of thing that opens our intellect and imagination. The book may give us that in an intellectual/more abstract sense, but the projected vision of it gives us a compelling visceral and uh, 'literal' illumination even while the experience-based brain tries to reject it. Ironically the very mismatches that stop us from completely accepting such imagery simultaneously burn it into our heads like an iconification.

Back to 2003 Hulk though, the Hulkdog sequence that everybody despise so much used both hard and softbody physics for the interaction, and to be fair, everybody hated the IDEA of Hulkdogs (which is fanboys splitting fantasy hairs, but that's another story), but they didn't really trash the execution. You can also see a lot of physics/procedurally-based stuff in what they call "secondary animation" on characters. Cloth simulation for clothes, automatically bulging muscles and skin sliding over them, not to mention weighted to jiggle and react like say, a 25-foot-tall Kong or big green hulk (which is another reason a man in a suit or a performer doing mocap will NEVER be right as is - they don't WEIGH as much or deal with the resistance of either their own bodies or gravity the way a huge (or tiny) creature would. So having mocap supplemented by this stuff in addition to keyframing is definitely the way to go to balance both the high movement demands of a photoreal character (the more stylised the look, the more you can styllise the movement). In the first JP they had to animates skin jiggles by hand (I think Casper was the first film to have auto-jiggle from memory)! And enveloping wasn't great and you'd still get skin mesh 'tearing', even on Dragonheart you can see the skin still was sort of 'elastic' in parts and didn't expand, contract and slide properly. It also takes a PERSON to say well, the bits between these more pebble-like scales can contract, but not the scales themselves. The computer will never 'know' that stuff by itself. There was some crappy gas-like particle simulation in that too. It looked like they did one pass of the canned stuff from Maya and didn't tweak it at all, hence it looked super-digital, all single-sized particles, no clump or micro-eddies...

One example I use all the time is Jumanji. Sure Jurassic Park fooled us because they SORT OF moved like animals we know, but in Jumanji you're dealing with actual animals doing things animals don't really do. The scene where the lion comes down the steps is a great textbook case. Sure, fur rendering was still in its infancy, but even if that thing LOOKED completely real, with everything moving and looking like perfection, it would still seem fake, and ALWAYS will no matter how great the tech. Because the PERFORMANCE was all wrong. It's a wild lion, right? It's never been in a house before, right? Never moved over something as alien as a staircase. So how does that affect it? Everything changes - its body language is wary but also stop/start, hesitant then too hyper when reacting. Base instincts for protection. So it doesn't stroll leisurely down the staircase then measuredly turn and growl. It slips a bit on polished surfaces, overcorrects, the head and eyes are jittery, it could well attack someone. And a computer can never 'know' that unless you feed it so much stuff you could have just animated it yourself to start with. And you know what else? Apart from supplemental proprietary stuff, EVERYONE these days uses the same programs to do it. But it's still the old guard like Phil Tippet and Dennis Muren that do the BEST digital stuff. Because they know performance, and also think laterally to achieve the desired result. Whether that's traditional OR digital. So it all gets back to subjectivity again.

As for money, no I still think more R&D comes from film than Games, broadly speaking. Although things are more muddy now with crossover, shared assets and all. TIME is a big thing though. Mummy 2 didn't suck because ILM were incapable, it sucked because they had no TIME due to some marketing idiot thinking it was of the utmost importance that the film be released on the anniversary of the first one, ready or not. I bet that person also loves to see their trip-meter turn over to a big number, too. Actually you know what, Mummy 2 was shit regardless.

Sorry it took me a while to get back to you dude. Super busy.

I loved the film, but this bullshit about not showing your cards/Christmas presents is revisionist history garbage. When I finally DID see the film the only disappointment I had (besides the Fury bit which squanders the tight ending) was "Fuck! That's IT?!" and wishing I could revise my own history and un-see the trailers I kept playing beforehand. You out there Favs? Quint?

One thing I meant to say in that other post - even in your brave new world of amazing computer-physics, show me a simulation where a human can FLY (of their own volition as opposed to being thrown)! It will NEVER be 'solved', because it's INHERENTLY unsolvable. You know... if God had meant us to fly he would have given us wings/he wouldn't have invented aeroplanes. Huh?! Huh?! ;)