Saturday, February 24, 2007
The Weekend Image Depot: 2/24/07
Sorry for the lack of images this past weekend. Went snowboarding up in Big Bear and got mightily drunk. I feel like I'm only now recuperating from that disgusting Jack Daniel's (though it was delicious at the time).
Anyway, I'm going to start tossing in random one sheets that we come across over the week here at the Depot. Hope you all enjoy!
Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters
U.S. Release: April 13, 2007
Sunshine
U.S. Release: March 16, 2007
For more Sunshine images, click here.
The Condemned
U.S. Release: April 27, 2007
Zodiac
U.S. Release: March 2, 2007
For more Zodiac images, click here.
5-25-77
U.S. Release: May 25, 2007
Source: film ick, Twitch, IESB.net, IMP Awards, FirstShowing.net, Fan Cinema TodayDiscuss this and other Fakery on our message boards!
Labels: 5-25-77, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Grindhouse, Sunshine, The Condemned, The Weekend Image Depot, Zodiac
Continue reading The Weekend Image Depot: 2/24/07Friday, February 23, 2007
The Digital Underground: 2/23/07
Kenneth Anger, arguably the most famous experimental filmmaker in America, finally has a collection of his shorts available on DVD through Fantomas Films. The five dialogue-free short films collected on this first installment are light on narrative, instead focusing on the subconscious power of images. And the images they capture are as difficult to describe as they are to forget.
The first film on the set, Anger's earliest surviving film, is Fireworks (1947), a crude, 16 minute short that Anger says was inspired by a nightmare. It deals explicitly with homosexuality and with what most sources strangely refer to as sado-masochism," but I interpret as gay-bashing, which must have been an even greater fear for gay men in 1947 than it is today. Either way, the violence is intense and graphic, and its impact suffers little from the cheap effects.
After the raw violence of Fireworks, the rest of these films settle into a heightened sense of Hollywood glamor and beauty. Although these films don't have the explicitly gay imagery of Fireworks, they present a very specifically gay aesthetic, a distillation of glamor into fetishistic images. The opening sequence of Puce Moment (1949), where a series of increasingly fabulous fabrics are jiggled before the camera, is pure fetish porn for lovers of high fashion, but it's also an undiluted dose of potent beauty. Similarly, Anger doesn't seem to view the fountains in Eauxd'Artifice (1953) as spurting phallic symbols, but as objects of beauty, and as his camera focuses on the dance of the sparkling water, it works as a pure piece of moving photography.
My favorite of these shorts is Rabbit's Moon (1970), a dreamy piece set in an artificial forest that resembles a stage production of A Midsummer Night's Dream and scored to doo-wop songs like "There's a Moon Out Tonight." The shimmery, silver lighting gives it the look of some childhood dream you can't quite remember.
The centerpiece of the disk is The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), a 30-minute pageant of occult imagery inspired by Anger's fascination with Aleister Crowley. Consisting of Anger's friends and associates dressed up as mythological figures, the film displays a psychedelic beauty that would have seemed unremarkable in the late 60's, but must have been startling in 1954. Again, there are fetishistic shots of jewelry and exotic fabrics, and the brilliant photography resembles that of the Powell and Pressburger technicolor extravaganzas (although even they never managed to get Deborah Kerr or Moira Shearer's hair to show up with the fiery intensity of Marjorie Cameron's here).
Anger provides a commentary for each film. He's not the most talkative commentator, and for the most part just identifies actors and locations, but that's for the best, as these imagist films are well-suited to individual interpretation. There are also demonstrations of the restoration work done, and some deleted scenes from Rabbit's Moon. The disc comes with a 48-page booklet featuring an introduction by Martin Scorsese, and the Crowley-inspired packaging is quite beautiful. Watching these films for the first time, I was astonished by how much of Anger's style seems familiar from being co-opted by later directors. The way certain scenes of Pink Flamingos are scored to pop music, the overwhelming multiple-exposure images of the ballet in The Elephant Man, the clawing zombie hands in Night of the Living Dead, all seem to have originated from the mind of Anger. I've never heard him list Anger as an influence, but it seems obvious to me that David Bowie must have seen these films before creating his Ziggy Stardust persona. If that character wasn't based on the striking vision of Marjorie Cameron in Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, then Todd Haynes' version of Bowie in The Velvet Goldmine certainly was.
These films, of course, were made at a time when explicit homosexuality could never have appeared in a Hollywood movie. Gay themes were pushed to the far fringes of all art forms, and an experimental, independent filmmaker like Anger would be the only type of person who could include these themes in his films. When you hear religious conservatives talk about the good old days, this is what they mean. They seem to believe this situation created less gay people, but I believe it just created more weird people. How many young homosexuals would have grown up to be conservative businesspeople and homemakers if they had been able to find conservative gay role models? Instead, they found Kenneth Anger, William S. Burroughs and The Velvet Underground, and never looked back.
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Labels: DVD Reviews, Kenneth Anger, The Digital Underground
Continue reading The Digital Underground: 2/23/07Justice League: The Ten Year Road To Production Begins Today
WB has taken the first real step towards a Justice League movie. Variety says they've hired Kiernan and Michele Mulroney to write a script for the most superest of all super teams. All I know about these screenwriters is that they're married and one of them has Dermot Mulroney for a brother. And really, what other qualifications do you need to pen the biggest comic book extravaganza since ever?
No word yet as to who will be in the line-up. The moisture you see dripping from your screen right now is from the salivation of a million fanboys drooling online over the possibility of Christian Bale and Brandon Routh squeezing their firm spandexed buttocks into the same frame. Along with that Starbuck chick from Battlestar Galactica as Wonder Woman, of course. Personally I'm hoping J'onn J'onnz makes the cut. Slather William Hurt in some green body paint and give that martian manhunter his long overdue moment in the spotlight. All that's left to do is get Carlos Mencia as Vibe, throw Bruce Campbell in a giant Starro suit and wait for the dump truck to drop the load of Oscars in your driveway.
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Labels: Justice League, News
Continue reading Justice League: The Ten Year Road To Production Begins TodaySunday, February 18, 2007
Trailer Park Handjob : 2/18/07
Can anyone think of a better title for this column? Seriously.
Update: There seems to be a new, full Simpsons movie trailer out, one that doesn't solely feature Homer being dumb but instead features mostly Homer being dumb with added clips of all the other characters acting out their one joke. Oh look, Mr Burns is rich and evil! Gosh. I didn't notice any gags that weren't played out about a decade ago, but you can't fault a trailer for playing up the familiar, I guess. Watch it here.
Die Hard 4.0: The new international trailer for this film seems to have a different title than the American version, which called it Live Free or Die Hard. Both are crap, so who cares? Far more important is the opening text crawl which feels a need to tell us that 'The Entire World Relies On Technology' and that 'Even Technology Can Be Taken Hostage'. The use of the word 'technology' as if it were a single, homogenous and definable thing gives us our first red light. The second comes with the suggestion that an abstract concept can be the subject of a specific action. Next thing you know we'll have a war on terror!
This is an action film aimed at 13 year olds that has the sensibility of a cranky old man, mistrusting that new-fangled 'technology' stuff that's probably all made by 'foreigners' and filled with them 'diseases' that turn you 'gay' or 'commie'.
While we wait to see if the film is entertainingly insane instead of just tediously reactionary, we can watch this new trailer which features most of the same crappy action beats as the domestic trailer and the most uninteresting shot of a building blowing up ever. This film is further guaranteed to be shit by being directed by Len Wiseman, who directed the Underworld films, which are shit. But then you all know they are shit, as you've all seen at least one of them, haven't you. Bad people.
Watch it here.
Lucky You: My ears prick up every time director Curtis Hansen's name pops up because he directed LA Confidential, a film about which no hyperbole can be too hyperbolic. Unfortunately it seems like that film (just like, say, Casablanca) was just that lucky meeting of subject and talent that raised Curtis' game way above normal. All his other films display the very professional skills of a journeyman director, taking what jobs he can get and giving them respectful if uninspired treatment.
Lucky You is his latest and it seems to be just another chick-flick full of MOR rock and neat life lessons. Does it stand a chance of being the sort of date movie us mighty titans of geek testosterone could enjoy too? Well, it stars Eric Bana (a good start) with slightly long hair (long enough to show sensitiveness, short enough to not be all scruffy. pffh.) playing a gambler (yay!) called Huck (?) who has daddy issues (oh crap) with Robert Duvall (yay!) who is also a gambler (oh come on) while trying to have a relationship with Drew Barrymore (I don't know - I think she's cute). The use of gambling as a metaphor for love and stuff leads to lessons like: 'to win in the games of life and poker, (Huck) must try to play cards the way he has been living his life and live his life the way he has been playing cards'.
I think us huge-bollocked men would probably be better off watching Paul Thomas Anderson's first film, Hard Eight, which is kind of about the same thing but good. Meanwhile I worry that the sort of people who would watch Drew Barrymore romantic films might think that it all seems a bit too complex for them.
Hope with me that Curtis makes one more classic before he retires while watching the trailer here.
Bee Season: The second trailer for Jerry Seinfeld's new film is filled with horrendously smug Hollywood-insider gags and celebrity friends who can't act, including Jerry himself, Steven Spielberg and Eddie Izzard. I love Eddie too, but he really can't act for toffee. I guess I should like this trailer just for trying to have a brain in its head but, to be honest, Hollywood knows we're all far more likely to forgive dumbness than a failed attempt at cleverness.
The film is about a bee who does stuff while being smug on account of being Jerry Seinfeld and spouting pop culture references on account of being made by Dreamworks. Also the animation style used at the end is a very uninspiring rip of Toy Story's style. Watch a bear jump off a building here.
Grindhouse: The trailer for this double bill of stupid, violent, immoral, sexually exploitative movies from Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino does full justice to all those awesome adjectives I just used. The trailer says the entire thing will run two and a half hours, which means the films are going to be short, which means no space in between the sex and the violence for anything else! Yay! You could argue that, to be genuinely authentic, the first hour of these films should be incredibly dull, but you could also fuck off if you liked.
This film is actually going to be in our cinemas soon. Get dead excited here.
The Nanny Diaries: It has Scarlett Johannssen in it, but is unlikely to feature any shower scenes. Watch a trailer for a kid friendly movie while thinking about breasts here.
Underdog: Apparently this was a comic or a cartoon or something? It means nothing to me, but this trailer features a superhero that is a dog. It features a terrible joke about catching a 'cat-burgler' and kind of a funny one about 'One Nation, Under Dog', which could be a comment upon the totalitarian power structure implicit in the relationship between normal people and all-powerful super heroes, but is probably just a pun.
Watch it here.
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Labels: Bee Season, Die Hard, Grindhouse, Lucky You, The Nanny Diaries, The Simpsons, Trailer Park Handjob, Underdog
Continue reading Trailer Park Handjob : 2/18/07
