Iron Man Finishes Shooting

Iron Man director Jon Favreau on June 25 announced the end of shooting on his MySpace.com blog; the final scenes were shot in Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas.

Into the Wild Trailer

The movie based on John Krakauer's compelling book about a young man who braves living on his own in the wild now has a trailer.

Transformers History

From Yahoo.com:

In a classic bit of movie trivia, the little-seen 1986 animated film "Transformers: The Movie" was Orson Welles' last film. Yes, that Orson Welles.

The filmmaking legend who remade cinema with "Citizen Kane" (which just again topped AFI's list of 100 greatest movies), directed "Touch of Evil," starred in "The Third Man," impeccably adapted Shakespeare to the screen and panicked the nation with his infamous radio broadcast of "War of the Worlds" — concluded his career by playing Unicron, an evil shape-shifting planet moon.

Welles was 70 at the time and in poor health. His last released film was 1987's "Someone to Love," but that was shot before Welles lent his voice to "Transformers." Late in his career, Welles often took to commercials and narration work as a source of income.

Author Barbara Leaming spent many days with Welles in his last three years for her book, "Orson Welles: A Biography." She recalls Welles telling her shortly before he died that he had spent the day "playing a toy."

Thank You for Smoking/Fast Food Nation

We rented Thank You for Smoking recently. It's a great satire of the while lobbyist thing, where big companies use politics and PR to smooth out public dissent. Aaron Eckhart did an excellent job playing a bad guy who you actually love. I haven't seen such conversational articulation since Nathan Thurm.

On the flip side, Fast Food Nation is a gritty realistic and depressing look at how big companies operate. The author of the book collaborated with the movie production. He made an interesting comment about the state of fast food in a special feature documentary. Something like "I don't think fast food is unsafe- in fact I like it. I just don't like how it gets made."