Upcoming

I Love You, Beth Cooper is an upcoming 2009 comedy film slated to be released in the United States on July 10. It is based on a 2007 novel by Larry Doyle, which is set on graduation night at fictional Buffalo Glenn High School.

A nerdy valedictorian proclaims his love for most popular girl in school – Beth Cooper (Panettiere) – during his graduation speech. Much to his surprise, Beth shows up at his door that very night and decides to show him the best night of his life.

In early 2008 it was revealed that the novel, I Love You Beth Cooper was to be made into a film, with Heroes actress Hayden Panettiere in the title role. Filming began in 2008, with a release slated for July 10, 2009. The film was directed by Chris Columbus, with the screenplay written by Doyle.

Filming took place at Centennial Secondary School, Magee Secondary School and at St. Patrick’s Regional Secondary; which are all located in Vancouver, British Columbia.

The film’s official website was launched on February 14, 2009 with a Valentine’s Day themed “personalize your own trailer and e-card” widget that allowed for customization of the trailer and that could be sent to loved ones, friends and family.

The Hurt Locker is a 2009 American war thriller directed by Kathryn Bigelow. Shot entirely on location in Jordan, the film is based on recently declassified information about a U.S. Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) team in present day Iraq. The Hurt Locker is written by Mark Boal, a freelance writer who was embedded with a bomb squad. The Hurt Locker has been picked up by distributor Summit Entertainment. The film is scheduled for domestic release in the U.S. on June 26th, 2009 in New York and Los Angeles, going wider in July.

The Hurt Locker stars 2009 Independent Spirit Award best acting nominees Jeremy Renner and Anthony Mackie, as well as Guy Pearce, Ralph Fiennes, Brian Geraghty, and Evangeline Lilly. The script was written by first-time screenwriter Mark Boal, a freelance writer who has contributed to Playboy, The Village Voice and Rolling Stone Magazines and who also wrote the short story that inspired the film In the Valley of Elah. Boal spent time embedded with a real bomb squad, which was a source for the story.

Other members of the key filmmaking crew include cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, film editors Chris Innis and Bob Murawski, production designer Karl Júlíusson, production sound mixer Ray Beckett, and costume designer George Little. The film’s real explosions and special effects were designed by Richard Stutsman and his team. The score was composed by Academy Award nominated composer Marco Beltrami and Buck Sanders.

The Hurt Locker was shot entirely on location in the Middle East, over forty-four days from July to September 2007, during the height of the Iraq war surge. Often four or more camera crews filmed simultaneously, which resulted in nearly 200 hours of footage.

Although the filmmakers scouted locations in Morocco, director Kathryn Bigelow sought greater authenticity and wound up shooting most of the movie in Jordan because of its close proximity to Iraq. Some of the locations were less than three miles from the Iraqi border. All the Iraqi roles in the film were played by displaced Iraqi war refugees living in Jordan, many of them trained actors who had been forced to flee their country.

Lead actor Jeremy Renner, who trained with real EOD teams prior to shooting the film, says that great pains were taken to ensure the film’s authenticity. According to Renner, shooting the film in the Middle East contributed to this. “There were two by fours with nails being dropped from two-story buildings that hit me in the helmet and they were throwing rocks… we got shot at a few times while we were filming,” Renner said. “When you see it, you’re gonna feel like you’ve been in war.”

According to screenwriter Boal, “It’s the first movie about the Iraq war that purports to show the experience of the soldiers.” “We wanted to show the kinds of things that soldiers go through that you can’t see on CNN.” He adds, “Most war movies don’t come out until after the war is over. It’s really exciting for me, coming out of the world of journalism, to have a movie come out about a conflict while the conflict is still going on.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine is an upcoming superhero film based on the fictional Marvel Comics character Wolverine that will be released in most countries by May 1, 2009. The film is directed by Gavin Hood and stars Hugh Jackman as the title character. It is a prequel to the X-Men film trilogy, focusing on the mutant Wolverine and his time with Team X, before Wolverine’s skeleton was bonded with the indestructible metal adamantium. The film was mostly shot in Australia and New Zealand.

Preliminary shooting took place at Fox Studios Australia (in Sydney) during late 2007. Principal photography began on January 18, 2008 in New Zealand. Locations included Dunedin. Controversy arose as the Queenstown Lakes District Council disputed the Department of Labour’s decision to allow Fox to store explosives in the local ice skating rink. Fox moved some of the explosives to another area. The explosives were used for a shot of the exploding Hudson Farm, a scene which required four cameras. Jackman and Palermo’s Woz Productions reached an agreement with the council to allow recycling specialists on set to advise the production on being environmentally friendly.

Filming continued at Fox (where most of the shooting was done) and New Orleans, Louisiana. Cockatoo Island was used for Stryker’s facility; the enormous buildings there saved money on digitally expanding a set. Production of the film was predicted to generate $60 million in Sydney’s economy. Principal photography ended by May 23. The second unit continued filming in New Zealand until March 23, and were scheduled to continue filming for two weeks following the first unit’s wrap. This included a flashback to Logan during the Normandy Landings, which was shot at Blacksmiths, New South Wales.

Hood and Fox disputed on the film’s direction. The studio had two replacements lined up before Richard Donner, husband of producer Lauren Shuler Donner, flew to Australia to ease on-set tensions. Hood remarked, “Out of healthy and sometimes very rigorous debate, things get better. I hope the film’s better because of the debates. If nobody were talking about us, we’d be in trouble!” Hood added he and Thomas Rothman were both “forceful” personalities in creative meetings but they had never had a “stand-up” argument. Two weeks of pick-ups began on January 12, 2009, in Vancouver. These included finishing scenes with Ryan Reynolds, who had been working on two other films during principal photography. Shots were filmed at the University of British Columbia.

Inglourious Basterds  is an upcoming ensemble war film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. The director has repeatedly stressed that despite it being a war film, the movie will be a “spaghetti-western but with World War II iconography”. It has the largest cast of characters (with speaking roles) of any Tarantino film to date and was filmed in several locations, among them Germany and France. He plans to complete production of Inglourious Basterds in time for release at the 62nd Cannes Film Festival in May 2009. Filming began in October 2008. The title (and partial premise) of the upcoming film is inspired by Italian director Enzo Castellari’s 1978 movie Inglorious Bastards. The Weinstein Company has slated August 21, 2009, as the tentative U.S. release date. In addition to spaghetti-westerns, the film also pays homage to the WWII “macaroni-combat” sub-genre (itself influenced by spaghetti-westerns) as well as films by Jean-Luc Godard.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, “two story lines converge: One follows a group of Jewish-American soldiers whose mission is to take down a group of Nazis, and the other follows a young Jewish woman who seeks to avenge the death of her parents by this Nazi group”.

The film will be divided into five chapters:

* Chapter One: Once Upon a Time in Nazi Occupied France
* Chapter Two: Inglourious Basterds
* Chapter Three: German Night in Paris (filmed in “French New Wave Black and White”)
* Chapter Four: Operation Kino
* Chapter Five: Revenge of the Giant Face

In German-occupied France, Shosanna Dreyfus witnesses the execution of her family at the hand of Nazi Colonel Hans Landa. Shosanna narrowly escapes and flees to Paris, where she forges a new identity as the owner and operator of a cinema.

Elsewhere in Europe, Lieutenant Aldo Raine organizes a group of Jewish soldiers to engage in targeted acts of retribution. Known to their enemy as “The Basterds,” Raine’s squad eventually joins German actress and undercover agent Bridget Von Hammersmark on a mission to take down the leaders of The Third Reich. Fates converge under a cinema marquee, where Shosanna is poised to carry out a revenge plan of her own.

The first trailer for the film, a teaser, premiered on Entertainment Tonight on the 10th February, and was shown in American theaters the following week attached to Friday the 13th. The trailer features excerpts of Lt. Aldo Raine talking to the rest of ‘the basterds’, informing them of the plan to kill, torture, and scalp Nazis, intercut with various other scenes from the movie. It also features the spaghetti-westernesque kickers Once Upon A Time In Nazi Occupied France and A Basterd’s Work is Never Done, a line spoken in the film.

The film will be released on August 19 in France, two days earlier than the US release.

Taking Woodstock is an upcoming 2009 comedy-drama film about the Woodstock Festival of 1969. It is directed by Ang Lee and written by James Schamus based on the autobiography Taking Woodstock: A True Story of a Riot, a Concert, and a Life by Elliot Tiber and Tom Monte. It is scheduled to be released on August 14, 2009.The film, based upon the book of the same name, follows the true life story of Elliot Tiber (Demetri Martin), an aspiring Greenwich Village interior designer whose parents owned a small motel in Upstate New York and at the time held the only musical festival permit in the entire town of Bethel, New York. Tiber offered both the Catskills motel and the permit to the Woodstock Festival’s organizers.

The film also focuses on Tiber’s life as a closeted gay man hiding his marijuana as well as sexual orientation from his family, and his self-discovery following the Stonewall Riots.