For the first time since his breakout stint on In Living Color, Jim Carrey will return to TV for a starring role. The rubber-faced actor is headed to Showtime, where the actor will lead the upcoming comedy _Kidding _as the host of a children's show who must also face his personal issues. The series, ordered today, looks to feature Carrey doing what he does best -- making us laugh -- with a chance that audiences may feel something heartbreaking along the way as well.

In Kidding, Jim Carrey will play Jeff, or as he's known to the children who watch his TV program, Mr. Pickles. The story appears to balance the comedy with a few hints of drama, as Jeff is forced to maintain his beloved persona for the sake of his multimillion-dollar brand, all while his entire family is falling apart around him, from his wife and sons to his sister and father. Showtime promotes the series as a half-hour comedy in which the world will get to watch as Jeff slowly loses his sanity trying to juggle both aspects of his life, with no relief to be found in the fantastical world of Mr. Pickles.

Jim Carrey will step into Kidding with a familiar face from his past, as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind's Michel Gondry is attached to direct. The series was created by Dave Holstein, whose past writing credits include the former Showtime hit Weeds and the current Showtime hit I'm Dying Up Here, which features Carrey as an executive producer.

Kidding Season 1 is set for a ten-episode order, and once the series starts, it will hopefully get renewed for a lot more. (Assuming it's as good as we're expecting.) With Carrey and Gondry attached, it might even make enough money for Showtime to recoup whatever it lost refunding the Mayweather-McGregor fight to unhappy customers.

As mentioned, Kidding will be Jim Carrey's first regular role in a TV series since he was a cast member on In Living Color back in 1994. Carrey, of course, has appeared on television since then, but only in a guest star capacity, and he's kept most of his feature performances for the film world. Of course, many are familiar with his most recent television appearance, which featured the actor having what many would think was some sort of breakdown. Given his explanation behind the rant, one has to wonder if perhaps the actor was channeling his character Jeff and what he'll go through in Kidding. If that's the case, what a way to promote the show!

There's no release date yet for Kidding, but suffice to say we'll be keeping an eye on this series, hoping that Showtime gives it one soon. For more on Jim Carrey, be sure to read up on the interesting director the actor turned down for Ace Ventura 2, or how playing Andy Kaufman made him feel as though he was losing his mind. For more information on new and returning shows that are making their way to television this upcoming fall season, be sure to visit our fall premiere guide.

It’s been far too many years since audiences have gotten to see director Michel Gondry’s imagination make it to the screen in unfettered form, as last year’s The We and the I was centered in reality and The Green Hornet before that was not the kind of fantasy film Gondry fans want to see. Luckily, his next film Mood Indigo looks like his most visually ambitious effort yet, and U.S. audiences will soon be able to see it now that Drafthouse Films has acquired the rights. To celebrate the occasion, they also released a new still from the film, seen above, which unfortunately doesn’t involve miniature musicians or swaths of flowers.

Mood Indigo is based on the 1947 novel L’Écume des Jours from French author Boris Vian. It centers on the blossoming romance that forms between Colin (Romain Duris) and Chloé (Audrey Tautou), resulting in a big and fabulous wedding. Colin is a wealthy young man with both a manservant (Omar Sy) and the booziest musical instrument ever created, the pianocktail. He uses his wealth to assist their friends in marriage, and soon sees his life falling apart when Chloé is diagnosed with an incredibly rare condition involving a water lily growing in her lung, where the only remedy is being surrounded by flowers at all times. Rich people’s problems, right? The film also stars Gad Elmaleh, Aissa Maiga and Charlotte Le Bon.

The still really doesn’t impart even the smallest percentage of visual whimsy that Mood Indigo’s trailers are dripping with. The film has achieved a fair amount of critical acclaim over the last nine months, both domestically from its Fantastic Fest screening and internationally, where it has already been released in most markets. Normally I’d complain about being last in line to see something, but Gondry’s work is generally worth the wait.

It seemed at one point that the Alamo Drafthouse brand couldn’t get any cooler, but their distribution company has proven that assumption wrong, and Gondry is the latest filmmaker to get their special brand of promotion. While no specific dates have been set, Drafthouse will be giving the film a theatrical release at some point in 2014. I can’t wait to see Gondry’s "No Cell Phones in Theaters" ad.

Below you’ll find two trailers for Mood Indigo, though only the first has English subtitles. The second trailer is more focused on unique worldbuilding rather than dialogue anyway.

After interestingly taking on the subject of teenage friendships in 2012’s The We and the I, Michel Gondry – he who made both Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Green Hornet, somehow – reverted back to his French origins for an adaptation of Boris Vian’s wildly imaginative 1947 novel L’Ecume des jours, which translates to Foam of the Daze or Froth on the Daydream depending on who translates it. And beyond just having a Gondry-esque title, it seems as if the director was put on this planet specifically to bring these illusory images to life.

Somehow there are even more enchanting images here than there were in Mood Indigo’s first trailer we showed you a few months back, and this one even has subtitles, even though it’s hard to read words while stars Romain Duris and Audrey Tautou are flying around in a mini-cloud spaceship thing. You say this film is in French? What?

Beneath all the sideways stairs walking is an emotional tale of the fast-paced love life of Colin and Chloe, whose lovely – and underwater – marriage ceremony is soon followed by the diagnosis that Chloe has a water lily growing in her stomach, a condition which has only one treatment: surrounding the person with flowers. Colin soon sees his expansive wealth whittled away to nothing, which is mirrored by the relationship of his friends Chick (Gad Elmaleh) and Alise (Aissa Maiga), who experience a strange batch of problems on their own.

There is so much going on with perspectives, this actually looks a lot more like Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich than Eternal Sunshine, but it’s all in keeping with the Charlie Kaufman flavor. I wonder if Boris Vian is an anagram for Charlie Kaufman in some parallel universe.

Mood Indigo released this week in Belguim and France, but sadly doesn’t have any U.S. release dates set. But you can bet this hallucinatory film will hit VOD and tiny theaters at some point in the next few months.

When we first heard of Michel Gondry's intentions to adapt Boris Vian's novel L’ Ecume des jours --or The Foam of the Days in English—we had hoped a return to his French roots would likewise inspire a return to form, following the dismal and dull superhero misstep The Green Hornet. And the first look from the set—courtesy of Le Monde via The Playlist —definitely allays our fears, and encourages hope that Gondry is crafting something as charming and uniquely wondrous as his breakout hit Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Now titled Mood Indigo, the film unfolds the peculiar story of four lovers with curious compulsions. Heartbreaker's Romain Duris stars as Colin—seen above being pulled out of a wall by Audrey Tautou's Chloe.

He is an incredibly wealthy inventor with a generous nature and an incredible instrument called the pianocktail that blends music with smells. Once he meets Chloe, it's love at first sight, and so the pair is hastily wed. But sadly love is not all that blooms; shortly after their honeymoon Chloe discovers a water lily has taken root in her lungs. Only being surrounded by fresh flowers can provide her any relief, but this—as well as a generous gift to their friends Chick and Alise—is draining Colin's fortune fast.

See, spurred by love its glory, Colin gave a sizable chunk of his wealth to lovers Chick and Alise so that they too could marry. But Chick (Midnight in Paris's Gad Elmaleh) becomes fixated on philosopher Jean Sol-Partre and spends all they have on collecting his works. This urges Alise ( Paris, je t'aime's Aissa Maiga, seen above over Elmaleh's shoulder) to track down Sol-Partre and beg him to stop publishing his works. To avoid spoilers, let's just say, this doesn't go as planned.

Even knowing all this, it's difficult to make sense of many of the images above, which to me just makes them all the more enticing. One thing we can see is that Gondry has reinvested in his whimsical low-fi effects aesthetic, and will play the small role of Doctor Mangemanche.

Now if anyone wants to try to make sense of why a man is lodged in the drum kit above, please do so in comments.

Mood Indigo is now shooting.

Updated: We've added shots of the box art below.

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is going pretty hard when it comes to promoting 3D in the home. Its newest effort, this winter's The Green Hornet, will be hitting 3D, Blu-Ray, and DVD on May 3rd. The film follows Britt Reid, the son of a prominent newspaper mogul, as he bums around Los Angeles, behaving as a reckless idiot with no plans for his future. As irresponsible as Reid is, when his father dies under shady circumstances, he enlists his father’s genius employee, Kato, to create gadget-oriented superhero gear. Then they begin to head out and do something that is part heroism and part irresponsibility: they go out and save the day.

Seth Rogen as Reid seems an unlikely guy to commence violent action, but that’s part of the quirkiness of Michel Gondry’s first superhero flick. It’s pretty clear since Nolan’s The Dark Knight, superhero movies can’t just be mindless pieces of entertainment. They need to have some substance and ideas. Evan Goldberg has several moments of comedic gold, and Gondry tries some crazy camera tactics, but at the end of the day, The Green Hornet never pans out as a truly great film.

The special features available with the 3D and Blu-Ray copies, on the other hand, could be spectacular. DVD copies will come with filmmakers' commentary, a gag reel, and two featurettes titled “The Black Beauty: Rebirth of Cool” and “Writing The Green Hornet.” The Blu-Ray will come with the DVD features, as well as deleted scenes, a couple of Easter eggs, a segment about the cutting-room process, and four more featurettes, including one with Michel Gondry and one exclusively focusing on Kato. The 3D copies will include all of the previously mentioned extras, plus 3D animated storyboards, which sound really cool.

If Rogen, Gondry, and Goldberg are not enough to get you on board to see this film, maybe Cameron Diaz will be. Yes, she is in The Green Hornet, and yes, she is still extremely attractive.

If you hit the theater to buy a Green Hornet ticket this weekend, the biggest decision you'll face isn't when or where to see it, but how to see it. Seth Rogen's new superhero movie hits theaters in both 2D and 3D options and with 3D ticket prices now skyrocketing to as much as $30 a ticket in some areas, you'll need to be sure you're making the right choice. We're here to help.

Our “3D Or Not To 3D” series exists not to analyze the relative merits of a movie like The Green Hornet as a film. If you're interested in my review of the movie, click over to my review right here. What you'll find on this page though, is a mostly unbiased analysis of the merits of The Green Hornet's 3D on a technical level, only. To make that easy to digest, we've developed a straightforward, 7-point rating system to help you determine whether 2D or 3D is the right movie-watching choice for you. Let's roll Kato…

Does It Fit?

The frustrating thing about the current state of 3D technology is that, up till now, it hasn't really worked on live action movies. It has almost always looked best when used on computer generated images. Even Avatar is technically mostly CGI, and that's a big part of why it looked so good in the third dimension. The Green Hornet on the other hand, is an entirely live-action film. None of it is computer generated. That should make things tough. Yet the film is an action movie and, if you're going to use 3D on something, that's the kind of film you want to use it. It also helps that it's directed by Michel Gondry, an indie-film director with a flair for visual whimsy. On the surface, the melding of his eye-popping creativity and properly implemented 3D seems like it could be a good idea.

Planning & Effort

The Green Hornet uses post-converted 3D. That means the film wasn't shot in 3D, instead they shot it in 2D and then converted it to 3D after the fact. Worse they hadn't intended for the film to be displayed in 3D when it was originally shot, which means that director Michel Gondry didn't film the movie with 3D in mind. That said, it would seem that once Sony decided to convert the film into 3D, they made it a point to take the time necessary to get it right. Some of the reshoots done after the completion of filming were shot in 3D (though the vast majority of the film remains a post-conversion). The film's release was delayed several weeks, in part to allow them more leeway in completing the 3D post-conversion process. Gondry further claims he was deeply involved in the 3D conversion process. This wasn't something Sony forced on him. So while neither the studio nor Gondry really planned the film's 3D out in advance the way they probably should have, once they decided to convert it into 3D it appears as though they actually took the time to do the best they could with it. Has that paid off? Stay tuned. For now, they get another split score here.

Beyond The Window

Properly used 3D can give depth a projected image, creating the illusion that instead of looking at a picture on a flat surface, you're looking through a window into another world which exists just beyond the screen. Green Hornet pulls that off beautifully, maybe better than any other post-converted movie has before. It's easily the best use of depth we've seen in a fully live-action 3D movie. Gondry uses the depth of 3D to pull off all sorts of visual tricks. During action sequences, for instance he creates the clear illusion that debris flying in front of the heroes is literally closer to us than it is to them, maybe even in danger of flying through the imaginary window in front of us. In one particularly dizzying sequence he actually uses 3D in a complicated series of split screens in which we see dozens of separate scenes happening on screen at once, but all at different 3D levels. It's something no one else has really tried before and, while I wouldn't want to watch that particular effect for more than a minute (a headache would surely follow) it's a unique and completely new take on the way to use 3D technology. That The Green Hornet does it with live action and not computer generated images, makes it that much more impressive.

Before The Window

3D is more than just picture depth. Used right it can also be used to make it seem as though objects are actually front of the “window” box outline of the screen, even make it seem as though elements of the picture float out over the heads of the audience. Used poorly this can turn into a cheap gimmick, but it doesn't have to be. The best 3D finds a way to use all the tools of the technology as part of its storytelling device. Unfortunately The Green Hornet doesn't even try to use this element of 3D. That may be in part because the film was post-converted and hadn't been originally planned as a 3D film. Maybe we should even give them credit here for not attempting to do something that probably wouldn't have worked out very well anyway, considering the circumstances under which Green Hornet was turned into a 3D release. They get a 2 for not screwing it up by attempting something they lacked the ability to do, but ideally this film should have been planned in 3D all along, enabling them to more fully utilize the format… especially if they're charging audiences $30 a ticket.

Brightness

Watch a movie wearing a pair of sunglasses and the picture will become too dim. 3D glasses are no different. The lenses in front of your eyes are filters which, invariably block some of the visible light emanating from the screen in front of you. There may be ways to compensate for this using the theater's projector, but ideally 3D should only be used on movies which create images using crisp, sharp colors which can fight their way through the 3D fog. Green Hornet does that with lots of sharply contrasting colors. The Black Beauty may be a black car, but it gleams in the light as Kato drives it through the streets. Night scenes aren't quite as successful, but even those are remarkably clear for a post-converted live action film. Michel Gondry goes out of his way to make sure that every action scene is staged in a way that you know what's going on, and he least attempts to make everything bright enough to survive the light devouring power of 3D. Again, it's especially impressive that he's pulled this off with a live-action film. In the real world, without computers to control them, shadows are often less forgiving.

Audience Health

The simple truth is that 3D makes a lot of people sick. There's always a chance that you could walk out of the theater with a ringing headache or worse, end up spending half the film throwing up in the handicapped stall of the theater's bathroom. 3D has even been known to cause seizures. There's no way to guarantee that won't happen whenever you see any 3D movie, but the odds that it will happen decrease when the movie's uses 3D the right way. The Green Hornet uses crisply constructed 3D images and avoids pushing the technology beyond the limits of what their post-converted movie is capable of supporting. However Gondry does get pretty creative with how he uses it and there's a chance that sequences, like the aforementioned split-screen sequence, may have an unexpectedly negative effect on more sensitive 3D viewers. Luckily moments like that one are pretty brief and the majority of the film is unlikely to present any serious risk to the average 3D viewer's well-being.

The Glasses Off Test

Take your glasses off while watching a good 3D movie, and more often than not you'll find yourself looking at a blurry mess. You may even notice that during the most 3D intensive parts of the film, the picture on screen becomes even blurrier. The simplest way to explain this is to say that the blurrier the image on screen appears without glasses, the more depth is created on screen by the picture's 3D effects. The best 3D movies vary depth levels to play tricks with your eyes and pull off impressive special effects. Gondry's no different, he spends a lot of time playing with different levels of 3D throughout the film and, nearly every time I took my glasses off I saw a different level of distortion in the images being projected. It's a sure sign that, even though the movie was post-converted after the fact, the creative people behind the film had a lot of input into how it should be used to tell their story.

Final Verdict: The Green Hornet is almost without a doubt a new high-water mark in post-converted, live-action 3D. No other movie pushed into the format this way has ever worked quite as well. There's every reason to believe that this is just the first of many improved post-conversions headed towards theaters. Word from experts in the industry is that post-conversion technology is rapidly improving and may soon even reach the point where shooting in 3D isn't necessary. Yet even though Green Hornet does post-conversion better than just about any movie before it, since the film wasn't written or shot with 3D in mind there are real limits to how much could conceivably be accomplished. The Green Hornet makes the best effort possible under the circumstances, but Avatar this isn't.

When you think of Michel Gondry, you think of the director of films such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Be Kind Rewind. He’s the guy behind all of those really cool music videos by The White Stripes and The Chemical Brothers. What you don’t think of his superheroes, martial arts and giant explosions. But how good a director can you be if you don’t keep your audience on its toes and expecting something new?

Both Katey Rich and I had the incredible opportunity to sit down with the eclectic director one-on-one this year, Katey speaking with Gondry as he promoted the film at Comic Con, while I interviewed him this past weekend. Read on below for our combined conversation in which the filmmaker discusses what it was like working with an international cast, balancing the film’s tone, working with the super car known as The Black Beauty and the development of his newest effect, known as Kato Vision.

You as a director, perfectly exemplified by your work on this film, don’t seem to be tied down to any specific genre.

I like my contribution to be not on the outside but on the inside. So it might mean that the outside may change may change as much as possible, but the inside stays consistent. And on the inside, I shoot people in a way that makes the audience feel equal to them. And it’s hard to express and it’s hard to execute but I think it works on every level - the choice of the material the choice of the actor, my relationship with the actor, and so on. I think I’ve tried that on every movie and sometimes it comes across.

One aspect in the making of this film that’s very interesting is the internationality of the cast and yourself, Christoph Waltz being Austrian, Jay Chou being Taiwanese and yourself being from France. How did that affect the production and did it make things difficult?

I think it works because we all have a similar sense of humor. When I speak most people don’t have a clue what I’m saying. It’s very funny when I look at the dailies because I don’t call cut between the takes – it’s my way to help the actor keep focused. As soon as you say “cut” you have 10 people jumping on them and everybody’s trying to do a great job, and they do, but sometimes they forget that the more important thing is the performance, creating the performance. When I play those dailies, I hear my direction between the takes, so I hear “[covering his mouth and mumbling]” So then I see they’re look toward the camera, toward me and toward each other, and I hear, “I think he asked you to speak a little louder. I’m not sure.” There’s a certain amount of confusion that makes them unsure what to do and I think it keeps them in the moment. Not that I do it on purpose, because if I wanted to do a good accent I could not.

So that’s one thing, and the fact that we’re coming from all different horizons, I like the way Neal [Moritz] put it in the table interview. It was not a recipe that was a given, but at the end we all fought for each other and that’s why the movie works, in my opinion. Sometimes it’s interesting. You don’t take the obvious and it works.

One thing that I think is going to blow everybody away is what you call Kato Vision. It feels like something you think of in a dream and wake up saying, “Eureka!” How did you come up with the idea to shoot the action scenes that way?

It’s a lot of little things. For instance, I imagined what people felt when they saw slow motion shot for the first time. I think it happened in 1905, and I know, for instance, a magical trick of somebody disappearing. By chance they were shooting in front of the opera in Paris and the undertaker car was parked there. The camera got blocked, and by the time it started again the car had gone, and as a result, on the screen, you saw it disappear. And that was the first example of something disappearing. On the same thing, the first dolly track was somebody who had the idea to put the camera on a boat on a canal. So the boat would move very slowly but steadily. So they would see all that surrounds you and you’d see the landscape changing slowly. So that was the first time.

And I was trying to figure out what it would be like the first time you see in slow motion, because now you’ve seen a slow motion scene and you’ve seen that a million times in every fight sequence in many movies. So I was thinking what can I do to get back to that feeling now. And I thought of many different things. One thing was to change the speed during the take at a different time for each character. So one goes fast and one goes slow and then it’s reversed, but it’s the same take, and to make everything more complicated, everything’s moving. Everything seems to be of a rare world because the camera moves all at once and Kato is going much faster than those guys, who are barely moving and then it’s reversed.

And this way is very unsettling because we don’t know how it’s made and I think it’s by combining effects. And there is the effect of repetition, which came from when I met Missy Elliot for a video years ago and she told me she wanted me to direct her video. I ended up not doing it, but she told me, “Michel, I want you to make a 3D effect that you can see without the glasses on television.” “That’s impossible! You need the glasses!” And then I thought, “Maybe I can do something that makes you feel like it’s popping out like in 3D, and you don’t need the glasses to see.” And I came up with this effect, which I actually couldn’t use for her video and I did it for the Chemical Brothers where everything multiplies, like a video effect, but then it becomes real. I think I used some of that for Kato Vision.

And there are other effects as well, but I think every time… I remember one effect that I invented for the Rolling Stone video. I never did drugs, so I don’t have this thing that a lot of people, like my son’s friend, they always convince me that they’re a drug addict from the video effects I make. So I asked a friend, it was a video that somebody had arranged called “Like A Rolling Stone,” a cover of the Bob Dylan song, and it was about some girl, it was actually Edie Sedgwick, the girl from the Warhol Factory who died of an overdose. And I wanted to see her vision when she was on drugs. So I asked my friend who did acid and stuff like that, “How did it look?” And he’s like, “It’s hard to describe. I think you see the world as when you drink your tea and the surface gets cold. There’s a bit of fragment that starts to separate in blocks” and that was his description and I had that in mind. And I thought, “Okay, I’m going to take still images and I’m going to keep the action moving, but the background is going to get stuck to it, because by morphing the image one to the image two, I’m going to morph the body of the main character to be smooth and make it feel like it’s walking through the landscape. But then the landscape is going to get stuck to his leg because he can’t move everything through the morph. So we created this effect. So that’s how I came up with the idea and I tried to come up with a prospective that’s not the result, but the reason. That doesn’t mean it’s going to look like this or like that, but something that means something. It’s how I came up with Kato Vision.

For this film you worked with two of the best comedic screenwriters working today in Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, but The Green Hornet is also very much an action movie. Both in production and in post, when and where was your mindset in terms of balancing the tone?

All the time. Basically, no matter what movie I shoot you have to work on the tone. Especially in my situation, it’s not like somebody who does a play and they rehearse for months before they start to act, to really produce something. They come from such different horizons, each of them. So you have to experiment, you have to walk on the talk, basically, because everybody has a different movie in their mind. I have to talk to them separately and, it’s not manipulating them, but I have to make sure there’s something consistent, and that’s the tone of the film. But it’s not a given. It’s not something that’s clear in the beginning, but we knew that we wanted the action to be hyper real and feel the danger and the stakes must be high, the collision, the explosions, all of that. But I wanted the character to drive, to be seen as the main driving force within all of this chaos.

When we were shooting, I kept asking Seth, “So you don’t say much here. You need to come up with a joke or something,” and he said, “Don’t worry, we’re going to do that later.” And it just came at the very end of the process, it all came together. We knew we didn’t want to make a spoof, because it would have narrowed the potential of the film so much. In order to make an action/comedy, like, at worst, a buddy movie – but still I like buddy movies – but something between action, and comedy and buddy movie. Some type of genre that sort of disappeared through the years when CGI took over, where the world is overtaking the individual a little bit.

The budget on this film is much higher than what you are typically used to working with and operates on a higher scale. Was there any particular aspect of the production that you found to be a challenge?

Yeah, it’s been a challenge for every movie I’ve directed, but with this one is was the challenge to understand that it was teamwork. Everybody would have different opinions and I didn’t have the potential to say okay. I decided that it was going to be like that. Maybe Seth had a little more in this production, but nobody had it. It just comes how it is by multiple bombardment of ideas and argument and agreement. So that was a challenge. I just did an episode of Flight of the Conchords for TV before, and it was a very good experience because I noticed that the producer was the writer and was talking with the actor who was the writer too – all of this cycle of connections that I was not a part of and I had to jump in to be a part of it. It was a very good experience and I think the relationship between the producer, the writer and the actor, which doesn’t necessarily include the director, and I wanted to be part of that. So I’ve learned how to understand it.

It’s different and it’s very interesting, as well, the way they really take care of their jobs the really listen to audience reaction through test screening and they respond to their reactions to make the film an exhilarating experience. Sometimes we would be hearing people laugh and we had no idea. Like when you see the seven dead people in green dead on the floor, and Christoph talks to his right hand man and he screams at him, we had no idea why people were laughing. And he’s called Popeye. And then we changed the word “Popeye” and put it in another part of the movie just before, when he tells him to go and kill the Green Hornet, and he calls him Popeye and people laughed there. And we realized that it was the word “Popeye” that made people laugh because he had one eye missing. We had no clue. We were taking bets. “Oh, it’s because the guy has a green shirt with a baseball team that’s famous for being green, that’s what’s funny.” Or the other one, “It’s the tone that’s funny.” Nobody understood until we changed the placement of the word “Popeye.” This part of the work I had no idea about, but it was really fun to learn that.

There's so much going on to promote the movie. Does it feel kind of overwhelming to see all this big stuff for your own movie?

I don't think it's my movie. It's a movie of many people. It's not like they took The Science of Sleep and put babes in cardboard outfits. [Though] that would be fun. I would not mind actually. What's funny is actually the Black Beauty was the cheapest car by far. To buy a Chrysler from this year is probably $10,000. Which was great because we could do whatever we wanted with the car. When we decided to keep the same car it was such a relief for everybody. Before we had tried to make deals with companies to make a modern version, and it would have been dated so fast. We decided to stay with Chrysler. That was actually the first thing my son told me when I told him I was doing The Green Hornet again. He said, "You'd better keep the car from the 60s."

When you have the cheap car, what's the stuff you can do with it you wouldn't be able to do otherwise?

At some point I think we had 25 of them. Because at every stage it becomes completely destroyed. It's like Duel a little bit, the first Spielberg movie. It's its own character. The car gets split in half and keeps going, and at the end it flies off [a building]. Everything happens with the car.

Have you been a car enthusiast before?

No, in fact I learned to drive when I was 35. I'm driving like an old lady and very close to the wheel. I don't take many risks, and when people yell at me I say "sorry, sorry, sorry!" I don't have road rage yet. I like cars as toys. Since Britt has this huge house, i wanted at some point, since his father is dead, that he put a huge racing track for a little car in his house. But we didn't do it.

Can you not start on anything else until you see how this does and where it takes you?

A little. I don't stop completely. The stuff I do with my camera at home, some animation, I will always do no matter what, if it's a big hit or complete chaos. I will still have my 16 mm camera and I can do whatever I want.

Thanks to a delayed production, changing release dates, Seth Rogen as the lead and Michel Gondry as the director, it’s been hard for anybody to get a direct read on The Green Hornet. Fans of the 1960s Green Hornet television show, which introduced American audiences to Bruce Lee, have regularly cried out, without having seen the movie, that it’s an abomination raping their childhood. The truth is, however, that the movie is actually quite a bit of fun.

As both Katey and Josh have pointed out in their reviews, the film isn’t perfect, but it is a really fun time at the movie theater that manages to successfully blend both action and comedy. Having seen the movie myself and enjoyed it immensely, I felt compelled to explain why audiences should be interested in giving The Green Hornet a shot themselves. Read on below for my 5 Reasons Why You Should Be Excited About The Green Hornet.

It’s Not A Spoof, But It Does Mix Up The Genre

I’m a huge comic book nerd and I love all of the classic stories, but it’s impossible not to recognize the insane number of tropes that nearly every superhero project employs. They all have a hero living under the shadow of a kind and noble father, an egomaniacal villain and the classic damsel in distress. The Green Hornet acknowledges the existence of those clichés, sets up the framework, and then turns it all 180 degrees. Rather than showing his only son a righteous path and teaching him how to be a good person, Britt Reid’s father, played by Tom Wilkinson, is a total prick who has nothing but disdain for his boy. Chudnofsky, played by the Oscar winning Christoph Waltz, is a kingpin crippled by a midlife crisis and massive self-doubt. Lenore Case, played by Cameron Diaz, is not only never placed in a position where she flails her arms and screams, “Help me, Green Hornet!” but she is instead smarter than both Britt and Kato put together.

But even these smaller level changes don’t hold a candle to the biggest change of them all: the relationship between Britt and Kato. This whole story takes the Batman and Robin concept and turns it on its ear, giving the sidekick all of the real powers and abilities. If you’ve seen it in a superhero movie before, The Green Hornet will flip it and make it its own, all while maintaining the highest respect for the genre.

It May Not Be A Spoof, But That Doesn’t Mean It’s Not Seriously Funny

Remember when you went to go see Superbad and Pineapple Express and laughed your ass off each time? Both of those movies came from the minds of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, the same writers who scripted The Green Hornet. While it is, admittedly, a different kind of humor – their newest is rated PG-13 after all – the movie does still have more than its fair share of belly laughs. In this aspect,The Green Hornet's greatest asset is the relationship between Britt and Kato, the same kind of male friendship that made Rogen and Goldberg’s first two scripts so successful. Even though Jay Chou barely knew a word of English before starting the production, he and Rogen have a surprising chemistry and even better timing. Rogen and Goldberg find humor beyond the dialogue, also providing a great deal of physical humor.

Funny as Green Hornet may be, if Pineapple Express showed us anything, it’s that not only are Rogen and Goldberg adept at writing comedy, but they can do action quite astutely as well, which perfectly segues into my next point:

Michel Gondry Proves Himself To Have Serious Action Chops

Even the day one supporters of this project raised an eyebrow when it was announced that Michel Gondry, the director of films such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Science of Sleep and Be Kind Rewind, would be helming the project. Having never done a movie even remotely close to the action genre, nobody had any idea what to expect from the French born director. The verdict? Gondry nails it. Being sure never to let The Green Hornet’s pacing slow down too greatly, there’s always another action sequence right around the corner filled with car chases, giant explosions, and Gatling guns. The director captures them all wonderfully. Even better, unlike most modern action movies, the audience never gets lost in a blur of fire and shrapnel, instead we’re always able to comprehend exactly what’s going on.

As terrific as these sequences are, however, Michel Gondry’s real artistic contribution to the Green Hornet’s action scenes gets a section of its very own:

Two Words: Kato Vision

When Kato’s adrenaline starts pumping and his heartbeat rises, such as when, for example, he is about to get into a fight, something magical happens. Suddenly everything around him begins to slow down, while he continues to move at a normal, if not hyper, speed. Like a great chess player, he can see every one of his enemies’ moves 10 steps ahead, all while identifying every useful pieces of data in his environment. It’s an effect that Gondry appropriately named Kato Vision and it is nothing short of an achievement. If you will, think about the scene in The Matrix where Neo does his famous backbend to dodge the bullets being fired at him. Now imagine that Neo doesn’t have to do his backbend and while the bullets slowly wiz past, he simply walks over to them and flicks them away with his index finger. Watching Neo flick bullets, though, is boring. Kato knocking the fuck out of eight gang members with guns in hyperspeed is not.

But insane martial arts skills is only one trick in Kato’s seemingly bottomless bag. He can make an excellent cup of coffee, he can spin bottle caps off with his palm, he’s a great pianist and he can flip a pen into a cup using a briefcase. As great as those skills may be, they don’t hold a candle to his greatest ability, auto engineering, which happens to be item number five.

The Black Beauty

In film and television history there is an extensive list of awesome cars, from Batman’s Batmobile to the Dukes of Hazzard’s General Lee. Now we can feel free to throw 2011’s iteration of The Black Beauty. Built by Kato using the body of a sleek, black 1964-1965 Chrysler Imperial, the whole thing is a brilliant piece of engineering outfitted with an endless number of weapons and gadgets, from a tripod-mounted Browning machine gun in the trunk, to a flamethrower and eight Stinger missiles in the front. Even beyond the weapons, the whole thing is thought out beautifully, from suicide doors to the converted front wheel drive. It’s the kind of automobile even non-car fanatics, like myself, will look at and just say, “Damn.” You almost want to shed a tear in those moments when the action demands that we watch it get riddled with gunfire or lose a door, but then you remember that Britt has a garage with three more of them back home. All you can do is mutter, “Lucky bastard.”

Amid the big Comic Con announcements and footage showed for Marvel's Captain America and Thor and DC's Green Lantern came a superhero a little odder, and maybe a lot more inventive, than the rest. Seth Rogen, Michel Gondry, Adam Goldberg and Christoph Waltz were all on hand to unveil much more from The Green Hornet, the superhero movie that's been under puzzled scrutiny ever since Rogen was first announced as the lead, and which debuted its first trailer a few weeks ago to a less than thunderous online response.

Rogen seemed to be aware of all of this when I caught up with him just prior to the Green Hornet panel and asked him about what he'd be bringing to show off in Hall H, what we hadn't seen from The Green Hornet's visuals that Gondry fans might look forward to, and how a January release date will affect the movie's chances against the other box office competition. Check out the entirety of our very short interview below, and read Eric's take on how the whole panel turned out.

For more complete Comic Con coverage go here.

It's hard not to believe that Michel Gondry's film is cursed. From the very moment that the project was announced it has dealt with every type of issue, from script changes to directors dropping out. The latest tragedy to strike was a black-out that hit the theater where Jimmy Kimmel Live! tapes. What does this have to do with anything? Seth Rogen was meant to be a guest and was going to unveil the first trailer for the film. Like I said, cursed. While the episode was taped by Kimmel using his laptop and will show tomorrow, Yahoo! has apparently said "screw it" and has posted the trailer themselves.

Remember how surprisingly awesome that one-minute clip was from earlier today? It only gets better with a longer run time. Though he's best known for directing movies like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Be Kind Rewind, it looks as though Gondry is going to surprise us as a more than capable action director. The movie seems to be so on point that it makes you wonder why Sony has been treating it so badly.

Check out the trailer below or in HD over at Yahoo!

I've also discovered two new photos on the movie's official website, www.greenhornet.com. Check them out below and head over to the site to see them full size.

Under the original plan, we would have been getting our chance to see a slimmed-down, crime-fighting Seth Rogen play the superhero Green Hornet right about now-- Sony had picked a July 7, 2010 release date for the film before eventually pushing it back to a January 14, 2011 release date and converting it to 3D. Now the movie has an unmistakable air of disaster surrounding it, despite the fact that Michel Gondry is directing and that we can at least be guaranteed that it won't be a standard-issue superhero origin story (like, uh, everything Marvel has planned at the moment).

With a trailer on its way tonight, Yahoo has finally posted the first two official images from The Green Hornet (click on the ones you see below for larger versions). Both feature Rogen's Green Hornet and his sidekick Kato (Jay Chou) engaged in some kind of adventure, and neither give us the slightest clue of what the movie might be about. Still, both actors look pretty good in their costumes, and that's pretty much all you can ask for photos that give us so little information to go with. The trailer debuts on Jimmy Kimmel Live! tonight, and in the meantime, interpret these to your heart's content.

When it was announced back in April that Sony would be converting Michel Gondry's The Green Hornet into 3D, the general consensus was that Sony had lost faith in the project and were using the "conversion time" to push the release date into the worst movie month of them all - January. But while faith may be low, the film is still a $90 million production and an action flick based on a hot property. So what happens to all movies like that these days? They get the IMAX treatment.

Sony has announced via press release that The Green Hornet will be released in IMAX theaters come January 14th, 2011. The film will now be shown in three formats including IMAX 3D, standard 3D and 2D. The film is currently in post-production and the first trailer is set to premiere when Seth Rogen visits Jimmy Kimmel Live on Monday June 21. Until then, cross your fingers and pray that this isn't as bad as The Spirit.

Green Hornet’s production has been plagued with problems all along, from car wrecks to last minute changes in direction, so maybe it’s not exactly a surprise to hear that the film may not have turned out as well as Sony had hoped. What is surprising is that, somehow, they didn’t realize Seth Rogen doesn’t look like a superhero until literally just now.

IESB says Sony execs are unhappy with the Green Hornet movie being turned in by director Michel Gondry. Specifically they think it’s too campy, they don’t like what Gondry did with it, and yep, they don’t like the way Seth Rogen looks. All of this, is pretty ridiculous.

It’s ridiculous not because it’s untrue (for now this is just a rumor) but because, well, what were they expecting? Of course Seth Rogen doesn’t look like a superhero and of course a superhero movie starring Seth Rogen and directed by Michel Gondry is going to be kind of campy. Apparently Sony didn’t bother to watch any of Gondry’s other movies before they hired him. He’s not exactly Christopher Nolan. He’s known primarily for making sort of weird, whimsical fantasies. Apply that formula to a superhero movie, especially one written by and starring Seth Rogen, and you’re invariably going to come out with something campy. Was there ever any other possibility?

Campy by the way, doesn’t necessarily mean bad. And the fact that Rogen doesn’t look the part doesn’t necessarily mean bad either. It could be different, fresh, and exciting. But whether it's good or not, none of this is news. This is the movie they asked for and it sounds like it’s the movie they got. If Sony’s actually upset, they really don’t have any right to be, though this could explain why we’ve yet to see a teaser image or a poster or even the slightest advertisement for what has been up till now one of the year’s most eagerly anticipated productions. Or maybe it’s still just too far off.

Green Hornet isn’t due in theaters until December, so there’s plenty of time for the studio to tinker with their finished product. If this rumor pans out, expect to hear a lot more grumbling from everyone involved in the months ahead. Let’s hope we’re not in for yet another terrible, holiday released superhero flick. Historically, December is not a good month for comic book movies.

I’d never heard of the band Anvil until someone made a documentary about them called Anvil! The Story of Anvil, so now of course everyone must run around and pretend that they’ve been Anvil fans forever and knew all about them and oh my god how could you not? That sudden adoration for a band no one cared about until this year apparently extended to the folks behind The Green Hornet because they’ve cast the musicians turned documentary stars in their superhero film.

The LA Times says that on Wednesday the band filmed a cameo for the Gondry film in which they play a rock club and, quite literally, explode. I guess they drank dynamite or something. Hey, I hear they’re pretty fucking hardcore.

So here’s my question: Does that mean The Green Hornet is a period movie? I ask because he drives a classic car, seems to spend a lot of time wearing a rather 70sish 3-piece suit, and now the Green Hornet goes to a rock show starring a metal band which not only plays a style of music which stopped being relevant more than twenty years ago but which itself really stopped mattering a couple of decades ago as well. Could The Green Hornet be some sort of 80s flick? If so, sounds good. Count me in man. The 80s need more hair-metal superheroes.

The pairing of Nicolas Cage and Seth Rogen as supervillain vs. superhero in The Green Hornet always seemed like a strange match. They're two guys who both seem to get control over the movies they make, and choose to make very, very different movies in the process. Add in the presence of Michel Gondry, a director whose work is always distinct from anyone else's, and there were probably a lot of arguments about the direction of the film happening behind the scenes.

So it's not actually that surprising to hear via Yahoo! News that Cage blames "creative differences" for his baling on the Green Hornet movie. "'The Green Hornet was something that I wanted to do, I think Michel Gondry is very talented and I had hoped it would work but I think Seth Rogen and Michel had a different take on the character."

But here's the surprising part-- Cage demanded that the villain actually have a soft side. "I had to have some humanity and to try to give it something where you could understand why the character was the way he was but I don't think there was enough time to develop it." Coming from the king of overacting, who could have made an amazing meal of out an over-the-top villain role, this sounds practically crazy. Given all the bad and outright stupid roles he's played in the last few years, why was this the one where he put his foot down?

Of course, because Cage balked, Christoph Waltz got the part instead, and that's a blessing for all of us. If Waltz can't make the villain two-dimensional, we'll know no one can, and maybe Cage was right. But something tells me Waltz might make enough out of this part to prove these creative differences were probably just a giant clash of egos.

Seth Rogen's Green Hornet movie has had trouble holding on to any cast beyond Rogen himself in the title role, especially after Stephen Chow dropped out of the sidekick Kato role. But now casting is picking up steam again, and is heading in some pretty strange directions-- Nicolas Cage is in talks to play the "gangster villain" in the film, and Cameron Diaz is negotiating a role as a reporter and love interest.

Variety says that the film is still set for a fall start date, even though the Kato role has yet to be filled. But let's deal with these two pieces of casting news first. Cameron Diaz, eh, fine-- a decent if utterly uninspired choice for a female lead, even though it's a little weird that she's a solid 10 years older than 27-year-old Rogen. But Nicolas Cage? Wasn't it weird enough when he agreed to play the magic man in Disney's The Sorcerer's Apprentice? Aren't we all kind of sick of seeing him play bug-eyed wild man villain, just a variation on his immortal Face-Off villain?

Of course, this Green Hornet project is so out-of-bounds, so beyond what we usually expect of a superhero movie, that it's hard to predict how any of this will influence the film. After all, Michel Gondry was the genius who thought to cast Kate Winslet as the energetic fireball and Jim Carrey as the sad sack in Eternal Sunshine, and we all know how that turned out. But when it comes to people who would make a good love interest and villain opposite a superhero played by Seth Rogen, Diaz and Cage feel like wrong, overly traditional choices.