Walt Disney Studios have released the first five minutes of their upcoming return to hand-drawn animation: The Princess and the Frog. The studio just recently released a brand new trailer for the movie, so they’re obviously planning to come at us hard and heavy with their marketing campaign.

The first five minutes is a good way to get a feel for the movie and if it’s able to win you over right away. Although many great movies take a while to get going, you can usually tell right off the bat if the table being set is your kind of meal or not. The Princess and the Frog starts off with our main character as a young girl, and sets up her eventual confrontation with a frog seeking her kiss to return him to his princely status. While watching, you can definitely feel the Disney in it, and it looks like it could be a really beautiful movie. You can even hear that old school tone in the dialogue that their actors delivered, which will go a long way in this return to traditional form.

Click on over for a plot synopsis and to watch The Princess and the Frog‘s opening moments!

The Walt Disney Company hasn’t released a hand-drawn animated movie since 2004’s Home on the Range due to the takeover by computer animated movies and their partnership with Pixar and all of their genius releases. Home on the Range was in fact supposed to be the final Disney movie that was hand-drawn like the old days, but thankfully, for now, they decided to get back to it with The Princess and the Frog, which now has a full theatrical trailer available for viewing. As wonderful as the Pixar movies are, there is a magic that comes from these old-style hand-drawn animated movies, and hopefully this means Disney gets back to making more of them.

The movie is a new take on the classic tale of the princess who kisses a frog and turns him into a prince. It’s set in New Orleans and gained attention as the first Disney cartoon to feature an African American leading lady after so many decades and so many princesses. The Princess and the Frog was originally titled The Frog Princess, and is directed by The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, and Hercules directors John Musker and Ron Clements. The main stars aren’t very well-known, but it features a supporting cast that includes Oprah Winfrey, John Goodman, and Terrence Howard.

Click on over for the full synopsis and the brand new trailer for this Southern set traditional Disney musical.

20th Century Fox has hired Randi Mayem Singer to write a script for Big Momma’s House 3, a new installment in the franchise which started off in 2000 with Big Momma’s House. The movie starred Martin Lawrence, Paul Giamatti, Nia Long, and Terrence Howard, and it followed an FBI agent (Lawrence) who dresses up as large older lady who is lovingly known as Big Momma and integrates himself into her world in order to catch a bank robber who has escaped from prison. The 2006 sequel saw the clever disguise put back into action as Big Momma became a nanny at a residence that housed a murder suspect.

Randi Mayem Singer has written similar movies before in Mrs. Doubtfire, as well as the upcoming Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson family movie, Tooth Fairy.

Fighting
Unrated & Theatrical Versions
Directed by Dito Montiel
Starring Channing Tatum, Terrence Howard, Zulay Henao, Luis Guzman
Universal Studios Home Entertainment
Release Date: August 25, 2009

Fighting tells the story on a down-and-out young man named Shawn MacArthur (Channing Tatum) who gets by selling cheap products on the streets of New York City. When one of his transactions doesn’t go so well, he finds himself in a fight with a few guys, who he handles with ease. Later that night, he sees a man who witnessed the earlier altercation, as well as a kid who grabbed his money. When he goes in to get what’s his, the man, named Harvey (Terrence Howard), makes him a proposition he just can’t refuse: the chance to fight and walk away with $5,000. He eventually gains a reputation in the city as an underground fighting talent, which leads to a possible showdown with a nemesis from his past, and a romance with a woman who may be hiding a secret.

The movie starts off all right at first, but as each moment passed by, it consistently lost control of itself, where it wanted to go, and what it wanted to be. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a movie that was so confused within itself before, and it was difficult to watch at times. Yes, the feared train wreck analogy is perfectly fitting here.

Fair warning, there are semi-spoilers after this point, though they’re not significant enough to alter what your experience will be.

Iron Man was a great movie. With an unusual amount of humor and sarcastic wit, the movie took on the usually tough assignment of telling the superhero origin myth and as a result became a summer favorite with audiences. It also was a financial powerhouse, earning nearly $320 million in U.S. domestic receipts by the end of September.

With such success, a sequel is inevitable. Hollywood being Hollywood, someone will always suggest a way to “improve” a monster hit. Take the much-publicized decision to replace Terrence Howard with Don Cheadle in the sequel. While I do not think that Mr. Howard was the strongest link in the first movie, that opinion has much more to do with the fact that the character of James “Rhodey” Rhodes was a minor, supporting character in this version of the origin myth, and not any reflection on Mr. Howard’s acting chops. Yet, I’m sure that someone in Hollywood felt that Mr. Cheadle will add something more to Rhodey either being Iron Man or War Machine in the next film. People say “don’t mess with a winning formula,” but they’ve never heard that rule in Hollywood (or never listened, if they did.)

So, it is in the spirit of messing with a winning formula that I offer some further boneheaded casting changes and the rationale behind them that could be proposed by some mid-level Hollywood creative type hoping to make a mark on Tinsel Town …