Films seen so far this year: 262
Films seen this week: Knight & Day, Bonded By Blood, Seven Days To Noon, Ivul, Animal Kingdom, Jasper – Penguin Explorer, Psychosis

Superhero News: New Thor photos, Riddler non-story hits internets
With ComicCon kicking off this weekend, fans of superhero movies (as well as fantasy / horror / sci-fi etc) can expect to be deluged with new images and material in the next few days as it all inevitably leaks onto the internet. In the meantime, Marvel have released some new images from Kenneth Branagh's upcoming Thor movie, one of which (seems designed specifically to lure in the ladies. Or at least ladies who like mud-spattered musclemen pulling hammers out of rocks in the rain. There's also this picture of Thor (in costume this time) and Odin (Anthony Hopkins) and this photo of the Hall of Asgard, in which you can just make out Thor's evil brother Loki. Marvel's drip-feed approach to new material is certainly whetting my appetite for the film but I'm reigning in full-blown enthusiasm until I see the trailer and will be scouring the internets for illegal versions of whatever they show at ComicCon before they get taken down (like with the Iron Man 2 trailer last year).

In other superhero non-news this week, a bunch of film blogs ran a story that Joseph Gordon-Levitt “might” be playing The Riddler in Christopher Nolan's Batman 3, even though no-one has confirmed that The Riddler is going to be the villain and no-one from Warner Brothers or Gordon-Levitt's people has made any such statement. This kind of speculative non-story film journalism really infuriates me – basically, you should always disregard any story that ends in a question mark, because the answer to “Is Joseph Gordon-Levitt playing The Riddler in Batman 3?” is almost certainly “No. No, he isn't.” What's even worse is that the whole story will do the rounds again once someone actually gets round to denying it. There's a lot of great film bloggery being committed out there, but this sort of thing really has to stop. Grrrr.

Trailerwatch: Machete
I was firmly in the “Man, they should totally make that movie” camp when the spoof trailer for Machete (warning: NSFW) first played with Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror (part of the Grindhouse double-bill with Tarantino's Death Proof) back in 2007, so I was thrilled when Rodriguez announced that he was actually going to make it after all. I'm slightly concerned about the official trailer though (see below). It's like they've deliberately stripped out everything that made the original spoof trailer so much fun and turned it into a generic straight-to-DVD crapfest. The only thing in the official trailer that makes me want to see the film is the prospect of Danny Trejo going mano-a-mano with Steven Seagal and only then because it offers the tantalising prospect of Danny Trejo carving up Steven Seagal into tiny chunks. (Okay, so the bit with Jessica Alba kicking ass looks good too). Even so, the trailer seems to think that the mere presence of all the stars (Alba, De Niro, Michelle Rodriguez) plus a not very amusing gag (“introducing Don Johnson”) and lots of gunfire and explosions is enough. Well, it isn't and I've downgraded my expectations accordingly.

Well, I had, anyway, until I saw this apparently exclusive to Ain't It Cool News trailer, which seems to give a slightly better flavour of the movie, includes a great bit where he jumps out of a window and swings into another one (I'm a sucker for that particular stunt) and also gives us this delightful image of Lindsay Lohan as a nun licking a big gun. Of course, all three trailers are trumped by this awesome Lego version, which perfectly copies the original Grindhouse version, right down to the nudity and gore. I'm still looking forward to the film as I'm a huge fan of Danny Trejo (check out his brilliant Desperate Housewives episode and his work in Sherrybaby) but if the finished film doesn't include every single shot from the original trailer, I'm going to be very disappointed. Then again, wasn't that the point of Grindhouse trailers in the first place? Anyway, it opens here on October 29th.