'Pacific' Producer Making Big 3-D Midway Movie

I suppose there are some practical applications to this. After all, Steven Spielberg basically shut down the technological advancements in war films with the opening of Saving Private Ryan, an unforgettable sequence that never gets enough credit for changing the language of film.

After that, war movies needed to reinvent themselves. By and large, that hasn't happened; if memory serves, the best WWII film since (if we're just talking motion pictures and not including miniseries), is Letters from Iwo Jima, which is not as much about the front lines. But here comes something: Bruce C. McKenna, a producer and writer of The Pacific, has been working on a film about the Battle of Midway, one of the pivotal moments in US military history, and a battle that rocked Japan back on its heels. McKenna says the way to portray the action is, you guessed it, in 3-D.

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John Woo's WWII Air Combat Film Heading to IMAX

This is the sort of thing IMAX can do more of to avoid just delivering movies shot in standard format on larger screens with a better but not optimal presentation. Not that it's not cool from time to time, but it's the same kind of argument we make against upconverted 3-D: If you don't shoot it that way, it's not going to be the end result you're after from a technical standpoint, and people won't always spend more on the tickets just to see a bigger version of the same film.

Anyway, this is slightly different, because it's not a ready-made blockbuster. John Woo will begin work on Flying Tigers, an aerial battle film he's had cooking for a while, and CAA and IMAX are working together to help make the project fit the IMAX screens, although I'm not certain any sequences will be shot in IMAX. That would be great news. I'm a sucker for aerial or naval battles in movies, so that's got me interested in this already, and with CAA and IMAX stepping up, it's more likely than ever that American financing will come together for this bilingual effort depicting an Army Air Corps lieutenant general who trains the first Chinese fighter pilots in World War II.

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Disney Dismisses Bruckheimer's 'Killing Rommel'

While it's not exactly a reason to sound the fire alarm, Jerry Bruckheimer's adaptation of Killing Rommel has been officially dumped by Disney, according to Beyond Hollywood.

The one reason you might think Disney is reticent is the $200 million it spent on making Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, pushing it back a year, and then watching it completely stiff in the US. Internationally, it's fared better, but it is probably the big bomb of the summer season so far. That or Robin Hood, depending on marketing expenses and distribution costs. But apparently, that has nothing to do with it. Bruck has made films at Disney for ages and not all of them have been massive. Plus, he's still got The Sorcerer's Apprentice this summer (and I don't see the studio shrinking its efforts on that one) and next year's Pirates appendage, so it's not a case of Disney, in effect, canceling Bruckheimer's carte blanche.

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Radcliffe to Star in 'All Quiet on the Western Front'

A film that is long overdue for a remake, Daniel Radcliffe will reportedly star in All Quiet on the Western Front, one of the greatest (anti-)war stories ever published as well as a former Best Picture winner.

You might ask why I believe a remake is overdue. I think all the great literary classics are immune from the ravages of age. The only thing that can kill them is being avoided. I'd rather see this movie come back every 25 or 30 years than see generation upon generation go through life without knowing it exists. And increasingly, movies are the way you introduce kids to old material. Western Front's themes aren't any less relevant, and depending on how close to the source material this adaptation is, the case can be made that Erich Maria Remarque's writing is even more relevant, given the circumstances around the world, particularly in Afghanistan, which has become America's longest entanglement.

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Watanabe Making Directorial Debut With WWII Film?

Pajiba says Ken Watanabe may soon make his directorial debut; they also say he's a bad ass, so no matter what happens with 442nd, they're at least half right. Watanabe sprang to America's attention by completely showing up Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai, to the point that it crystallized for me what's wrong with every earnest Tom Cruise Oscar-hungry performance: He's trying way too hard to act. Watch Watanabe in that thing...man, he's smooth.

And then in Memoirs of a Geisha, which was a pretty average movie, he again stole the show, and in Eastwood's Letters to Iwo Jima, we just had to admit that this guy pretty much knows what he's doing, and he always does more with less. So whatever he's up to next, I'm always ready to give it a look. That, conveniently, includes Inception, which I would have seen, anyway. Now, this 442nd: Pajiba describes it as "the true story of an American-Japanese military unit assembled during World War II and sent on virtual suicide missions in the European theater. For their efforts against the Nazis, that unit go on to become the most decorated unit in American military history."

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