Saturday, January 27, 2007
The Weekend Image Depot: 1/27/07
And they're saying Galactus would look ridiculous? Michael Bay laughs.
Transformers
U.S. Release: July 4, 2007
Reno 911!: Miami
U.S. Release: February 23, 2007
The Messengers
U.S. Release: February 2, 2007
Blades of Glory
U.S. Release: March 30, 2007
Source: Paramount, ComingSoon.net, IMDbDiscuss this and other Fakery on our message boards!
Labels: Blades of Glory, Reno 911: Miami, The Messengers, The Weekend Image Depot, Transformers
Continue reading The Weekend Image Depot: 1/27/07Friday, January 26, 2007
The Digital Underground: 1/26/07
Welcome to The Digital Underground! This new column will document those DVD's that are not released by the major studios, the iconoclastic independent films and esoteric cultural ephemera that exist on the edge of the DVD market, never finding it's way onto the shelves of Best Buy, but remaining an enticing temptation for the hungry eye. The DVD market is incredibly wide these days, what with the low cost of producing the product (hell, I burn them on my computer for a few bucks), yet what is visible to the major retailers and press is only a tiny slice, like the visible spectrum of light. So consider this column your peak into the subterranean world.
"Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, an intent to communicate."
- Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
Other Cinema Digital (OCD) is a distribution label set up by Noel Lawrence and Craig Baldwin as an outgrowth of Other Cinema, an underground cinematheque they host in San Francisco. The titles available from OCD range from a documentary on the Rainbow Man/John 3:16 guy to the 60's avant garde piece Sins of the Fleshapoids. Most recently, they've released Tribulation 99, a "pseudo-pseudo-documentary" directed by Craig Baldwin himself, which documents a secret history of alien influence from within the hollow earth on the political climate of the late 20th century. This bizarre shadow history is brought to life using found film clips, mostly from horror and sci fi B-movies, edited together at eyeball-shredding speed, often overlapping each other and producing a strange cognitive dissonance in the mind of the audience. Through a narrator and title cards, we are told that Castro was a robot, and that the communist governments of Central America are all puppets of snake-men from the planet Quetzalcoatl, while the images we are being shown are vaguely recognizable from years of soaking up bad sci fi. As the notes in the accompanying booklet read, "You're presented with a barrage of incredibly complex pieces of information...which are obviously fabrications. But you don't have enough time to think about them or refute them." Barrage is certainly the right word. Tribulation's audiovisual assault may be one of the best examples of cinema-as-drug out there.
When Noel Lawrence sent me a DVD of Tribulation, he threw in a home-burned disc of a film that he claimed was a big influence on Baldwin, a 1965 film consisting mostly of found footage (most notably from The Man With The Golden Arm), arranged to tell a secret history of the Chicago mafia and their role in influencing American politics in the 50's and 60's, including the Kennedy assassination and the Bay of Pigs. Most notable of the assertions made is that the mob had gotten Sinatra hooked on heroin in order to use him as a mouthpiece to negotiate with the Kennedys.
When asked about the origin of this film, Lawrence launches into a 45-minute dissertation on the auteur, one J.X. Williams, a small-time producer of stag loops throughout the 50's and 60's whose work had gotten him deeply involved with the mob. Fleeing to Europe to escape the long arm of the law (an unlikely story involving late-night porn shoots and escaped circus animals, which there is not space to relate here), he ended up as projectionist at a Dutch theater, where he began assembling odds and ends of film to tell the story of the secret history of the 50's and 60's.
Peepshow isn't the audiovisual barrage that Tribulation 99 is, but feels more like a traditional documentary soaked in sleazy noir atmosphere, like the film Ken Burns would make on the downhill slope of a booze-n-hookers binge. Williams narrates, with his story illustrated by clips from old films noir, stag loops, crime photos, and Sinatra's battle with the needle. But both films present a radical idea, not just in these images (it seems no coincidence that Craig Baldwin went on to direct a documentary on aural repurposers Negativland), but in suggesting that cinematic images embedded in our collective subconscious contain secret meanings, a code to figure out how the world works.
Peepshow is, for now, unavailable on DVD--Lawrence says that J.X. Williams remains a prickly individual to deal with, and has preferred to keep the film out of the public eye--but Lawrence has hosted screenings for it around the country, introducing them with discussions of Williams' life and work, and he is currently putting together a documentary, The Big Footnote, on Williams. The one Williams film that has been released is a fragment of The Virgin Sacrifice on Experiments in Terror, a compilation of avant garde shorts that uses horror imagery. The lack of commercial success of the Experiments disc still puzzles Lawrence. "I thought, at least these people who will just watch any awful, garbage slasher movie would be excited to see people doing something new with horror. Instead they were angry that they had watched it!"
This underground aesthetic, an opting out of prescribed popular culture, is an integral part of the OCD philosophy. Even So Wrong They're Right, a documentary about collectors of 8-track tapes, which I assumed would be little more than a campy bit of ironic gen-X nostalgia, ends up making a case for rejecting the dictated demands of consumerism. And Baldwin's other found footage film, Spectres of the Spectrum, is a "science-fiction allegory about 'electromagnetic autonomy' in opposition to the hegemony of the culture-management industry."
If you really want to jump headfirst into OCD, they're currently offering their entire catalog for $250, a steal compared to that Janus box!
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Labels: The Digital Underground
Continue reading The Digital Underground: 1/26/07Thursday, January 25, 2007
Nobody Likes Tom Cruise's Wife Either
"She is SO outta here, I swear!"
The hombres over at Latino Review have gotten some insider dope regarding casting in The Dark Knight. The character of Rachel Dawes will apparently be back for the upcoming sequel, but not in the form of Katie Holmes. That's all they're saying. Score one for Scientology!
Also, Latino Review "confirms" that the character of Harvey Dent will be in The Dark Knight. I thought this was already confirmed, but okay. They claim that Matt Damon passed on the role and that the filmmakers have met with Josh Lucas, and that there's been interest in both Jamie Foxx and Ed Norton. And though they don't mention them by name or whatever, I'm quite sure even Anthony Hopkins, Meryl Streep, and Dakota Fanning have auditioned for the part as well.
Head over to Latino Review for a few other casting tidbits.
The Dark Knight is currently in pre-production, is scheduled to start shooting in March, and can be expected to swoop into cinemas sometime in 2008.
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Labels: Katie Holmes, News, The Dark Knight
Continue reading Nobody Likes Tom Cruise's Wife EitherTuesday, January 23, 2007
The World Turns On Shyamalan
It is currently open season on M Night Shyamalan in Hollywood, and everyone seems to be enjoying shitting on him, spreading nasty, if not necessarily untrue, gossip about the huge ego'd writer/director of The Sixth Sense. The latest one, as described here, details his inability to sell his latest script, entitled Green Planet.
It is an alien invasion script, which is a lot like his earlier film, Signs, I guess, which ripped a whole lot off from Spielberg's Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, and tells a story of aliens using the Earth's ecosystem against us poor humans, so possibly ripping off Spielberg's War Of The Worlds red weeds, not to mention another Speilberg 'protege' Roland Emmerich's environmental disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow. Or maybe it's very, very original, and not at all like Save The Green Planet, A South Korean film about kind of the same thing but has the advantage of a: existing, b: being completely loopy and c: being absolutely brilliant.
Apparently every studio in town has passed on this script. He pissed everyone off in town with his claims of genius, which everyone in town was happy to ignore while he was making massively successful films. His last film, The Lady In The Water, was a bomb though (and shit) and now the knives are out.
Poor man. All he has going at the moment is a director's gig on a kiddie kung fu cartoon called Avatar: The Last Airbender. As I don't have to work with him, I would rather he carried on making movies rather than the legion of averagely-abled hacks like Brett Ratner (X Men 3, Rush Hour 3), simply because tales of great hubris are simply more entertaining, at least at a distance. The same goes for the Wachowski Brothers, brought low after everybody in the world except pretentious goths and me hated The Matrix sequels, who are now directing an adaptation of kiddie cartoon Speed Racer.
In the meantime, here's me having my own go at Shyamalan.
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Labels: Avatar: The Last Airbender, Green Planet, M. Night Shyamalan, News
Continue reading The World Turns On ShyamalanDylan Baker Wants More Screentime Dammit!
Dylan Baker claims Spider-Man director Sam Raimi's got big plans for his Curt Connors character in the NEXT arachnid action adventure romp. We've been teased enough with the guy in the last two films, and maybe 3 will feature him sitting on a park bench, checking his watch, and winking at the camera while mouthing "The Lizard's comin', bitches".
Wait... so is Raimi doing Spider-Man 4?
Ripped from iFMagazine.com: “In this one I am still in my business suit and that’s all I’ll say. I’m kind of the guy that Peter Parker needs to come to whenever he has those quandaries about what’s going on,” states Baker. But then continues on to explain, “All I can say is we’re going to see a lot more of [me] at some point if what Sam says is true, and Sam is the guy who knows, so I am sticking with him.”And would the actor be up for being a main villain in the next Spidey flick?
“Oh yeah [I’d be up for that],” he exclaims. “I’m friends with Alfred Molina and I just saw him the other day and he had so much fun doing Doc Ock, that for me it’s a no-brainer. So, put it in [the movie] and let’s go.”
Okay, so we know Baker is desperate to unleash his inner reptile. But to this day, there hasn't really been any concrete word as to whether or not Raimi and co. would be back for a fourth installment. Baker's comments suggest yes, but I guess we'll know for sure right before Spider-Man 3 opens and makes a billion gajillion dollars. We do know now that David Koepp is in talks to return for writing duties on part 4, though. That's a start.
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Labels: Dylan Baker, News, Spider-Man
Continue reading Dylan Baker Wants More Screentime Dammit!Stallonian Genocide
Having punched his way back into some semblance of filmic relevance again with Rocky Balboa, Sylvester Stallone now seems ready to take up new projects he's got in mind that don't involve nostalgia. Those expecting a return to the bulging and glistening forearms of Over the Top, I'm sorry, you're gonna have to wait. Instead, Sly is interested in tackling a film about the Armenian Genocide by way of Austrian author Franz Werfel's book, 40 Days in the Moses Mountain.
Talking about the idea of the film, Stallone stated: It is an epic about the entire termination of a society. The movie is a hot potato, Turks have been trying to kill the issue for 85 years.
Turkish website SABAH, from where the story originates added: It has been stated that in order to prevent the shooting of the movie, the chairman of the fight against the groundless genocide claim association, Savaş Eğilmez, has started an angry letter campaign. The journal also contained Eğilmez's words: "the book is full of lies; because the author obtained the data from the nationalist and radical Armenians."
As Stallone himself mentions, there's been much debate over nearly the last one hundred years regarding the genocide of the Ottoman Armenians, mainly on the part of Turkey, who to this day claims that the deaths of about 1 million Armenians were a result of cultural conflict and famine during the fallout of World War I. However, according to Wikipedia, 21 countries to date have recognized the event as being genocide. So someone is wrong, and though it could be Wikipedia, from what I know living in a city heavily populated with Armenians of third, second, and especially first generation, it's probably the Turks.
I personally think it would be beyond interesting to see someone like Stallone tackle such a seemingly ambitious film rife with very political and ethnic conflict. It's unexpected anyway, and I guess that's what's appealing to me. There's no mention as to whether he's writing it, wanting to direct it, or simply reading the book while sitting on the can, though. So who the hell really knows what the deal is?Apart from the impending Rambo IV, Stallone's only other projects have been writing gigs for both an Edgar Allen Poe film as well as his take on the murders of Tupac Shakur and Christopher Wallace and the L.A.P.D.'s Rampart Division. No updated word on either of those films. Nor on Over the Top 2: Let's Get Silly.
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Labels: News, Sylvester Stallone
Continue reading Stallonian GenocideMonday, January 22, 2007
Sean Connery: Funds Depleting, Need Money
Legendary Scottish thespian Sean Connery, last seen in the 2002 piece of shit League of Extraordinary Gentleman, is apparently seriously considering coming out of retirement and once again taking the mantle of Dr. Henry Jones in the upcoming (Can you believe it starts filming this summer?) Indiana Jones IV. I don't know about you, but I can't stop starring at this man's boots.
...speaking from his home in the Bahamas, Connery told Scotland on Sunday that he had already had discussions about returning to the big screen in the epic adventure series that has grossed £700m in cinemas worldwide.
The new Indiana Jones film is due to shoot this summer, and after being approached by Lucas, Connery admits he is seriously considering it.
Asked directly if he thought he would be back in front of the cameras this summer as Dr Jones, he answered: "Perhaps."
Choosing his words carefully, Connery then added: "At the moment there's nothing decided. I haven't got the script. Everything depends on the script."
Connery made no mention of financial demands, suggesting money is not his top priority, though he could expect a fee of £10m or more and possibly a share of the gross.
Coy replies? Yes. But I wouldn't be surprised if it actually happened. And I know that I for one would love to see the guy return to the big screen. This would probably be his best (and only) bet too.
Indiana Jones and the Oh My God Old People is expected to hit theaters in May 2008.
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Labels: Indiana Jones, News, Sean Connery
Continue reading Sean Connery: Funds Depleting, Need MoneySunday, January 21, 2007
Trailer Park Handjob: 1/21/07
This week: Monsters, Acid trips aimed at children, hot French lesbian psychopaths and Christians.
The Host: Another trailer for the Korean monster movie that has landed on plenty of geek top ten lists but isn't actually out in America yet. I guarantee it's really good, but I also guarantee that it is being way, way over-hyped. A horror geek finds a horror film that isn't actively shit and then praises it as the greatest film of the year? It could never happen. Anyway, the plot: US chemicals are dumped into a river and ten years later a 20ft mutated fish/frog thing leaps out of the water and starts eating people. One family then tries to save their daughter, which the monster has kept alive in its lair to eat later.
The creature is so very cool and kind of cute and is actually given the behaviours of an animal, rather than the motivations of a monster. The daughter is just so great, and no more shall be said of that. The family however, which is described as 'quirky', is often just comically grotesque and one dimensional. If you saw the older sister (who is introduced as an Olympic archer in her first scene, and then given precious little other character attributes) in an American movie you would scoff at the inevitability of her use in the third act. Equally the film is quite happy to leap from mercilessly (and hilariously) mocking the family's grief to asking the audience to care about them. Tonal shifts, bloated second acts and narrative tangents all stop this being as good as the hype suggests, but it is still good juicy stuff. If you don't go and see it you are slapping Godzuki in the face. How could you? Watch the trailer here.
The Situation: Hailing itself as the first fictional movie to deal with the current occupation of Iraq, The Situation goes on to describe itself as a mix of war movie, thriller and romance, making any sensible man quake in his boots. And guess what - here's Connie Neilsen (not her fault, she's great) as the audience surrogate westerner being shown by a plucky native that 'there are people, rather than sides, in the conflict'. The film reeks of wrong-headed worthiness and the sort of Hollywood thinking that really wants to make a serious movie about real events, but still feels the need to add in a romance sub-plot for the ladies.
Actually watching the trailer reveals that the plot ends up reducing down to 'rescue the pretty western woman', and that the film-makers were struggling very hard to make a bang-bang war movie on a very low budget. It looks, honestly, like a tv movie, both in technical ability and complexity of message. As always, I wish small independent movies the best of luck breaking through into the marketplace, but I'd suggest reading plenty of good reviews before trying this one out. Watch it here.
The Last Sin Eater: Here's some fun for you - a trailer for a Foxfaith production. Foxfaith is a sub-studio dedicated to bringing out christian movies. As always, it is an evil conspiracy to undermine the righteous and faithful by only bringing out complete and utter shit. I guess we can mock, but the movie called The Sin Eater ,aimed at us satanic movie geeks, was also shit.
Anyway, this one concerns a bunch of settlers with unlikely accents living in an idyllic rural America a long time ago and a little girl who hears the story of the 'Sin Eater' (who eats the sins of the dead so the dead can get to heaven quicker) and wants to find him so he can eat her sins while she's still alive.
The gag will presumably be that the sin eater is revealed as a lie, as our sins have already been forgiven by the love of our Lord Jesus Christ. Huzzah! Not that I'm criticising the basic tenets of Christianity here, only that making a movie in accordance with a strict ideology makes the twists really easy to predict.
The trailer is definitely worth watching for the disconnect of watching a trailer full of 'uplifting drama' tropes, the 'wise and friendly grandpa' trailer voice, pastoral scenes, gentle editing and lots of heavenly light filtering through trees, and then having the title come up as THE LAST SIN EATER!!!!!!. It tickled me. Also a line near the end that goes 'we've all been living a lie!', which is supposed to be about the foolishness in believing in a fairy story like the sin eater but, well, you know. Watch it here, and go to hell if you laugh.
The Page Turner: A French movie about a young lady musician relegated to turning the pages of musical scores for a famous concert pianist, and plotting terrible things in revenge for her lowly fate. Very French, critically acclaimed and with a very pretty young actress in the lead, it played for all of a week near me and I was too busy to see it. If it plays near you, don't let it pass you by.
The trailer gets extra points for not hiding the fact that it is in a foreign language and for pulling the uniquely French trick of being impeccably classy while happily indulging in violence, revenge, pedophilia and lezzing up. Watch it here
We Are the Strange: An independent animation film that seems to mix Eastern European stop motion with CG assisted Anime with the music from a Commodore 64, that is until it gets really weird. I am not going to explain this one. You just need to watch it. When the names of famous rappers turn up for one frame a piece I wouldn't have been surprised if this was a joke, a sign of the end times, or aliens trying to contact us through YouTube. Is this what kids like? We're all fucked. Watch it here.
Sunshine: A couple of trailers for the now worryingly delayed Danny 'Trainspotting' Boyle sci-fi movie about a space expedition to try and re-ignite our failing sun. This movie still doesn't have a proper release date. Sunshine, you had better be good.
Watch the International Teaser Trailer in stop motion Yahoo streaming mode here, which tries to convince us this is the sequel to Armageddon.
Watch another domestic trailer here, which is heavy on the action with added slightly melancholy voice-over for added class. This trailer does at least tell us the film is created 'R' and this, surely, is a good thing. Sunshine, you had better be good.
Nomad: The Warrior: Being Khazakstan's official entry into the Oscar race. Also being the same faux-historical epic-type movie we've seen plenty of times before telling the quasi-mythical story of some hero or other that, by his great deeds and moral uprightness, created the greatness of modern
Watch it here.
Dead Silence: 'From the team that brought you Saw', which is all you really need to know, but I'll add that the dark secret the main character spends their time trying to uncover involves the the murder of a...ventriloquist. Hopefully the sequel will involve a mime.
Watch the trailer here. There's an adults only trailer, but I couldn't access it.
For completeness' sake, Dead of Night is an old black and white British horror anthology movie which contains a story about a ventriloquist that is absolutely terrifying. Equally, Anthony Hopkins starred as a ventriloquist in Magic, which was rubbish.
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Labels: Dead Silence, Nomad: The Warrior, Sunshine, The Host, The Last Sin Eater, The Page Turner, The Situation, Trailer Park Handjob, We Are the Strange
Continue reading Trailer Park Handjob: 1/21/07
