This week’s short film will be the trailer/preview for a short film, “Alternator,” directed by the Chilean-born local artist Rodrigo Valenzuela. The film is a part of a dance/film project curated by Adam Sekuler for Dances Made To Order (the other filmmakers in the project are Tracy Rector of Longhouse Media and Sekuler, who this week announced he is stepping down from his postion, Program Director, at Northwest Film Forum).

Like all of Rodrigo Valenzuela’s art installations, “The Alternator,” which features Molly Sides, is visually bold and striking.

Last year, Slog was highly skeptical about the Superman reboot movie, Man of Steel. Now, as the release date approaches, a new, more coherent, less mopey trailer has emerged:

What do you think now?

Here's the first trailer for the Hunger Games sequel, which is apparently titled The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.

Something that Africa Is A Country posted on Facebook:

Roger Ebert in 1967: "One of these days maybe the Africans will get to be in a movie where they hunt the hero down and catch him. I wonder if that one will be filmed in South Africa, too."

Yeah, The Hangover Part III. John Goodman is in it:

Yup. Looks like a trailer, all right!

This morning, I told you about a very special screening of The Shining. Just now, I read this terrible piece of news, revealed exclusively by Deadline Hollywood:

Glen Mazzara, who ran AMC’s smash hit series The Walking Dead for the past several seasons, will now focus on ghosts. He’s in talks to write The Overlook Hotel, a prequel to the Stanley Kubrick-directed The Shining, based on the Stephen King novel.

Finally! Paul W. S. Anderson can collaborate through the decades with Stanley Kubrick, as God intended. Perhaps this prequel can be a precursor to a Shining Babies cartoon, too.

Of course, Stephen King is publishing a sequel to The Shining this fall. And the Deadline article doesn't mention if this movie prequel is being done with King's blessing or not. I know King doesn't like Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining, and he's not afraid to take his displeasure public, so this could get entertaining real soon.

(This post has plenty of photos of the Shining: Forward and Backward experiment, to give you a better idea of what I'm talking about.)

• The Shining's structure makes it a uniquely good candidate for this kind of treatment. The movie begins with a series of very calm scenes, with slightly uncomfortable people trying to convince each other that everything is going to be all right. When you reverse the ending of the movie and lay it over these scenes, you've got shadowy figures with axes and knives, howling in pain and anger as they stagger around, depicting all the frustration that lies just under the surface of the opening scenes. When Wendy talks about how Jack abused Danny, the scenes of Jack chasing Danny through the maze seem to be haunting Wendy as she speaks, like memories that can't be put to rest.

• The reversed scenes work best when the characters in them are restricted to the three family members at the center of the film. When the Torrances are happy, they're haunted by unhappy visions of the future. When they're unhappy, they're haunted by the happy moments of the past. It feels like some grandiose—or maybe just florid—statement about the American nuclear family. And the experiment falls apart when other characters enter the film. Just about every scene with Scatman Crothers doesn't really work in this format, for instance, because he's an outsider from this family unit.

• The one outsider character who really works as a superimposed spirit: The naked woman Jack embraces, at the exact same moment that Jack takes his first drink of liquor in five months. That scene is so literal it's almost too perfect.

• I thought The Shining played over The Shining would be more of a confusing mess, but it was pretty easy to follow. The reason for this was the soundtrack, which always played forward. Turns out, it's relatively easy pick the important signal out of a jumble of images if there is a clear audio message to guide you. I imagine the fact that I've seen The Shining before helped, too, not to mention the fact that humans are hard-wired for narrative pattern recognition: We want to find the story in something, to make sense of it for ourselves.

• The last twenty minutes of the movie are deflated by the experiment, if just because the last scenes of The Shining are so dimly lit that they're subsumed by the movie's bright early scenes. We've already seen these scenes haunted by the future, and there's not really much of a point in seeing the terrible present haunted by a stiff, mannered past.

• So, was The Shining: Forward and Backward an essential experience? Of course not. But I do feel like I came away with a better understanding of The Shining, and of Kubrick's strong grasp of structure. I'd recommend a viewing to screenwriters, editors, and directors. If nothing else, it's proof of The Shining's quality: You know a film has a strong authorial voice behind it when you completely readjust the context of the movie and the will of its creator is still up there on the screen, plain as day.

Deadline Hollywood gave movie theater owners some bad news:

Bond analysis firm Fitch Ratings offers its bracing analysis of the movie exhibition industry a week ahead of theater owners’ annual CinemaCon trade show in Las Vegas. The company forecasts a “modest” decline in 2013 ticket sales and long-term challenges that should “cause concern” for lenders.

The comment thread to that post is your traditional boring movie-theater comment thread—blah blah HIGH PRICES blah blah KIDS WITH PHONES blah blah I'VE GOT A BIG SCREEN AT HOME blah blah—but none of those address the fact that sometimes people like to go out to see movies with other people. We're not all antisocial Deadline Hollywood commenters complaining about "the sounds of people eating popcorn" and comparing the price of a movie ticket to the price of a book "that will provide me with 8-9 hours of entertainment." (I obviously love books, but if you judge your entertainment on a pure cents-to-seconds basis, you're not a person I want to spend any time with.) We're not all sociopathic shut-ins, and we're willing to randomize an experience by including other people, in the hopes that we'll be pleasantly surprised every once in a while.

Here's the thing: I'm tired of people complaining about the things they hate about movie theaters. I'm interested in ways that movie theaters can do things differently. Chains that take the moviegoing experience seriously, like the Alamo Drafthouse, seem to be doing really well. There are services like Tugg that will allow people to choose the movies showing at their local theaters. As someone who has watched record stores, video rental places, and then bookstores go through terrible ordeals after being confronted by new technology, I'm not looking forward to seeing whole crops of movie theaters wilt and die. But for movie theaters to survive, they have to be re-imagined. I hope some of CinemaCon is devoted to remaking the industry, rather than just forecasting its demise.

It's the new sci-fi movie from Neill Blomkamp, the director of District 9, and once you get past the Inception-riffic "BWAAAAAAAOWWs" in the trailer, it looks pretty interesting:

Slog tipper Stinkbug asked why I haven't already posted the Carrie trailer on Slog:

The truth is, I'm having a really hard time giving a shit. Julianne Moore and Chloe Moretz both look like they kick ass, but I've seen this movie before. It's been a terrible year for movies, and the fact that what looks like a revisitation of Carrie is coming in October doesn't make me feel any more hopeful about 2013. Plus, they give the whole goddamned movie away in the trailer! Unless they add something new to the Carrie story, there's not much else to see. But then I saw a trailer that made me feel another kind of apathy: The special sort of apathy that I reserve for car racing movies. Here's Rush:

I have been enjoying Chris Hemsworth's career so far. And this movie looks like it's technically proficient. But unless we're talking about Viva Las Vegas, I just can't bring myself to give a shit about auto racing movies. I don't care about either of these films, for completely different reasons. But what do you think?

This week’s film is “Surveyor,” an “anti-Western” by the local director Scott Blake. Everything about “Surveyor,” which is set in the Western frontier at the end of the American-Mexican war (1848) and runs for 25 minutes, is just great—the cast (David Kulcsar, Jay Hill, Nathan Fisher, Tom Brophy), the photography (Clyde Garrido), the music (Charles Henri-Avelange), the sound design (Jason Alberts), and the story (which is by the director). The thing that raises this work above so many other films is the director has a great grasp of film thinking. Meaning, he thinks in moving images and not pictures or words or plot. The scene with the wasp is permanently fixed in my mind.

It's the new crazy-violent trailer from the Drive boys:

Brendon Connelly at Bleeding Cool says that Transformers 4 (which I'm sure at some point is going to be renamed Trans4mers) is going global:

Paramount have officially announced that they’ll be co-producing the film with China Movie Channel and Jiaflix Enterprises. As a result, some of the film will be shot in China, and some of the cast will be Chinese.

Between this and last week's announcement that Marvel will release a special edition of Iron Man 3 in China with more Chinese content, it's pretty obvious which way Hollywood's gigantic blockbusters are going. I wonder if there will be some sort of a jingoistic backlash to these American/Chinese coproductions. I also wonder if the quality of blockbusters will decline even further as the films are produced for a global audience. Movies are already losing viewers in America because of Hollywood's insistence on producing "four-quadrant" event movies that wishy-washily appeal to every demographic*. When those quadrants expand to include a heavily censored nation, will America look elsewhere for the cheap and dirty thrills that movies used to provide?

* Although to be fair, Looper was a joint America-China production, and Looper was fantastic. But I'm going to go out on a limb, here, and predict that Trans4mers will not be as good as Looper.