When I started working on this post, it was intended as a sort of think-piece regarding Uwe Boll’s Darfur and how its serious, self-important trailer pitches a genocide drama leavened here and there with gunplay and the attempted revival of Edward Furlong’s career. The thing was coming together just fine -- if a bit drably, I think -- until a quick e-jaunt over to Sci Fi Wire turned up a photograph that totally derailed me. It is, as title of this piece promises, a picture of Carrie Fisher and her body double, sunbathing on the "Tatooine" set of Return of the Jedi. Uwe Boll will have to wait.

In Roland Emmerich’s baroque apocalypse-fantasy, 2012, you’ll see lots of famous and iconic landmarks (the White House, the Sistine Chapel, Christ the Redeemer, etc.) being destroyed, but one significant monument wont get touched. Emmerich had initially planned to include the annihilation of the Kaaba -- the cuboidal building in Mecca that’s the center of Islamic prayer -- but got cold feet for fear of reprisal from fundamentalists. Wuss!

The current owner of the Terminator franchise, the Halcyon Company, recently filed Chapter 11 (after having ponied up $25 million for the rights just a few years ago!) and today announced that the rights will be up for auction in January. Having grossed over a billion dollars worldwide over the course of four films, there are LOTS of interested parties. Over at HitFix, Gregory Ellwood does a thoroughgoing rundown of all the likely candidates, but the most interesting offer has already been put on the table by Buffy-creator Joss Whedon. In an open letter to Halcyon, Whedon proposes that they sell him the whole shebang for the princely sum of ten grand, in exchange for which, he promises that the movies will “stop getting less cool.” The whole letter after the jump.

Though it’s not exactly gritty, it’s hard to imagine Pedro Almodóvar making a darker film than Broken Embraces. Leaving behind the intimately personal flavor of Volver, his latest leans in the direction of neo-noir, inflecting both his rich, deep color palette and narrative strategy. It’s a genuine thrill to see him stretch like this.

A little over a month ago, the word coming out of the Toronto Film Festival was that Chris Smith’s new documentary, Collapse, was consistently scaring the shit out of people with its nightmarish predictions of a pending global apocalypse. The film’s since been picked up and is slated for release on Friday -- as luck would have it, one week before Roland Emmerich’s baroque apocalypse-fantasy 2012. The inevitable mashup of their respective trailers might have been put together in jest, but it touches on a serious question. At a time when a real world catastrophe seems scarily plausible, why this continued appetite to see ourselves blown up on screen?

After lots of teases, a full-blooded trailer for James Cameron’s sci-fi extravaganza Avatar is now up on the web. If the plot seemed a little inscrutable before, everything is pretty much explained this time around. In search of valuable minerals, a mercenary corporation (embodied by Giovanni Ribisi, of all people) is looking to displace the population of humanoid Na’vi (the blue folks) from their village on the edenic planet Pandora. Sam Worthington plays a paralyzed marine who goes undercover (in a simulated, "Avatar" body of a Na’vi) to infiltrate the natives. Trouble is, he falls in love with one of them, and gets stuck between conflicting interests. Of course, a pitched battle ensues. Look closely at the fight scenes here between the hi-tech humans and the lo-tech Na’vi and ask yourself if it doesn’t look a lot like something we’ve all seen before.

If you aren’t already familiar with critic and filmmaker Matt Zoller Seitz’ video essays, then now’s the perfect time to get acquainted. He’s delivered two this week, both of which make for ideal Halloween viewing. The first, Zombie 101, traces the history of the zombie genre, from Jacques Tourneur’s classic voodoo parable I Walked With a Zombie up to more recent, neo-zombie inventions like Shaun of the Dead and 28 Days Later. The second, Unreal Estate, is a poetic survey of some of cinema’s eeriest establishing shots. The fun here is seeing just how many you can identify. Sure, Psycho is an easy one, but Event Horizon? Both essays after the jump.

Although it has yet to screen for critics, Clint Eastwood’s new drama Invictus already has my spidey-sense tingling in an unfortunate way. Based on a true story, the pic takes a look at Nelson Mandela after the fall of apartheid, detailing his release from prison, election as president, and subsequent effort to unite a divided South Africa behind its national rugby team. To this end he enlists the help of team captain Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon), who successfully leads the squad to a World Cup victory over New Zealand. It’s inspirational stuff, I’m sure, and many are speculating that the film will be an easy frontrunner in several top Oscar categories for 2009. What galls me is that it looks, at least from a prima facie perspective, like yet another film in which filmmakers feel obliged to counterpoise an historical black protagonist with a lesser known (or in some cases fictional) white one.

Just because everyone’s ostensibly famous for 15 minutes, does it follow that everyone can direct for 15 seconds? That’s the logic behind Star Wars: Uncut, a full length, user-generated remake of Episode IV:A New Hope begun by web developer Casey Pugh. The idea is that would-be Lucases can visit the site, select a favorite 15-second morsel of the film (only 3 per person!), and in 30 days or less deliver their own unique rendering of that sequence. When all of the scene-lettes have been given their due, Pugh will string together his favorites into one gloriously schizophrenic whole. It’s not only a new kind of crowd-sourced, fanboy wet dream, but as IFC blogger Vadim Rizov points out: “an inadvertent summary of every internet YouTube/meme trend of 2009.” You have to see it to believe it -- trailer after the jump!

It’s officially fall, which means all the talk right now in movieland is about awards season. How will Academy voters fill this year’s five extra slots for Best Picture? Is Lee Daniels’ Precious too grim for them? Will Kathryn Bigelow’s Hurt Locker get the love it deserves? This kind of conjecture will go on for months yet, so I thought it might be nice to step back from it for a moment and look to the horizon of 2010. A clutch of trailers is already out for next year’s big movies, none of which -- with the possible exception of Shutter Island -- looks to be gunning for any kind of laurels other than boffo box office returns. Call it a little taste of summer on what (on the east coast anyway) is a pretty grim, autumnal day.