Chris Evans Shirtless: ‘Captain America: The First Avenger’ + Operatic Batman

Forget Jon Stewart.

Taylor Lautner is the most influential man of the year. Just look at the shirtless Chris Evans photo above that was published in Entertainment Weekly.

Evans, of Fantastic Four fame, plays Steve Rogers a.k.a. Captain America in Joe Johnston’s film adaptation of the Marvel Comics hero, Captain America: The First Avenger.

Here’s a synopsis found in EW (via Collider):

The year is 1942, and Steve Rogers is a scrawny lad who desperately wants to fight Nazis for his country but can’t because he’s been deemed physically unfit. His fate — and his physique — is radically transformed when he signs up for Project: Rebirth, a secret military operation that turns wimps into studs using drugs and assorted sci-fi hoo-ha.

There’s a love interest (Major Peggy Carter, played by Hayley Atwell), there’s a sidekick (Bucky Barnes, played by Sebastian Stans), and there’s the Red Skull (Hugo Weaving), Hitler’s treacherous head of advanced weaponry, whose own plan for world domination involves a magical object known as The Tesseract (comic fans know it better as The Cosmic Cube).

According to the synopsis above, Captain America will take place in the somewhat distant past. That’s probably a good thing, for if he were to represent “American ideals” in our time, things could get mighty complicated.

I mean, nuke Iran? Pull out of Afghanistan? Build a ten-mile-high face at the Mexican border? Help Darfur refugees? And, most problematic of all, what would be Captain America’s views on gays in the military?

Also in the Captain America cast: Richard Armitage (who will also be seen in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit), Tommy Lee Jones, Dominic Cooper, Samuel L. Jackson, and Stanley Tucci.

Screenplay by Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely, Joss Whedon.

Captain America: The First Avenger will hit theaters on July 22, 2011.

Image via comingsoon.net.

‘The Dark Knight Rises’: Large Canvas and Operatic Sweep – Will Oscar Care?

Christopher Nolan’s next Batman film, The Dark Knight Rises, will be shot and released in the good old 2D and the not-all-that-old HD IMAX format.

Nolan was quoted as saying in the Los Angeles Times that he wants the upcoming Batman movie to maintain the “large canvas and operatic sweep” of the megablockbuster The Dark Knight, adding that “we’re looking to do something technologically that’s never been done before.”

What exactly are these never-before-seen technological developments was left unexplained. But will Academy members be impressed?

In the technical departments, that’s a given. In the top categories, well, that’s a different matter.

But remember, the Academy’s egregious snub of The Dark Knight for the 2008 Best Picture Oscar was one of the chief reasons – quite probably the chief reason (well, at least the chief motivator; lower Nielsen ratings were the actual chief reasons) – the Academy Board of Governors opted to expand the list of Best Picture nominees from five to ten movies.

Photo: The Dark Knight (Stephen Vaughan / Warner Bros.)