Watching Battle in Seattle is like being jabbed in the belly with a police baton, and not in a good way. Written and directed rather ambitiously by the actor Stuart Townsend, who has never written or directed anything before, it uses fictional characters to tell a true story but gives us no reason to care about the people, their lives, or their political causes. The riots that occurred at the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in 1999 may well have been historically significant — but you wouldn’t know it from watching Battle in Seattle, which insists on telling us how important the issues are rather than showing us.

Townsend gives a cursory explanation of what the WTO is and tells us that many oppose it for its lax policies on human rights and labor standards. The details aren’t important to him, though. He seems to take it as a given that we already dislike the WTO, even though most viewers’ response to WTO is “WTF?” It’s a massive, complicated international organization that deals with stodgy, unsexy issues like trade and commerce, and I guarantee the vast majority of the audience isn’t nearly as interested in it as Townsend is. And if the point is that we should be interested in it, he fails to explain why.

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Even though it wasn’t necessarily my kind of movie, I can’t deny that Enchanted was a huge hit — and not just for the kiddies either. Looking to capitalize on some of that magic, Variety reports that Warner Bros. has hired Enchanted director Kevin Lima to helm the adaptation of the children’s fantasy novel, The Spook’s Apprentice (aka, The Last Apprentice: Revenge of the Witch). Note: Thankfully, Donald Trump is not involved.

The story will be based on the first book from Joseph Delaney’s The Wardstone Chronicles, and it’s centered on a young farm boy named Tom in a fictionalized Ireland known as The County. Tom is the seventh son of a seventh son, which in the world of The County means he is privy to all sorts of info about ghosts and goblins. Most of the story focuses on Tom’s introduction to a mysterious sorcerer known as The Spook, and his time as his apprentice.

Originally conceived as a project for Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, WB already has a script courtesy of Matt Greenberg. Now that Lima has signed to direct, his team of producers will be in charge of re-working the whole thing. In fact, the group has already flown to London to work on the script with Delaney. Lima made his name as an animator for Disney, but has proven that he is just as capable with flesh and blood actors. There is no word on a release date for Apprentice, but judging from the box office returns Lima has been earning for Disney, I doubt WB is going to waste much time.

Heavy Metal in Baghdad, which had its US premiere at SXSW, follows Acrassicauda, Iraq’s only (yes, only) heavy metal band, as they try to stay alive and keep making music through the fall of Saddam Hussein and the growing insurgency in the aftermath of the Iraq war. This is the kind of film that makes me tremendously grateful to live in a country where I can freely write about film, or pick up a camera and make one. I can pick up a bass and start a rock band, and I can dress how I like and wear my hair how I like without fear of being shot or arrested.

The members of Acrassicauda, before they moved out of Iraq to Syria and then Turkey, did not have those priveliges. For them, the mere wearing of at Metallica t-shirt, or growing their hair long, or even wearing a goatee, could mark them for harrasment, imprisonment, or death. Filmmakers Eddy Moretti and Suroosh Alvi follow the band from 2003-2006, capturing the band’s hopes, dreams, and attempts to keep the band together amidst mortar fire, car bombs, and the ever-growing threat of persecution for embodying Western ideals through their music.

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Entertainment Weekly has just unveiled the first two photos (second pic after the jump) of Benicio Del Toro as The Wolfman, along with a pretty sweet interview with famed makeup artist Rick Baker on how he went about updating the look 67 years after the first big-screen Wolfman hit theaters. Joe Johnston (Jurassic Park 3) directs this latest version, which also stars Anthony Hopkins, Emily Blunt and Hugo Weaving. The makeup looks absolutely insane; especially in the second photo which creeps the living hell out of me. Do we even need to tell you the story? Dude becomes a wolfman and craziness ensues. Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait all the way until February 13, 2009 to watch this sucker come to life in theaters.

Head over to EW to check out larger versions of each pic, as well as to read that Rick Baker interview.

Continue reading First Look: Benicio Del Toro as ‘The Wolfman!’