Above: a detail of the special edition Julian Schnabel-designed Diving Bell poster that we’re giving away. The deadline to enter our giveaway was supposed to be earlier this week, but whilst at Sundance we got too busy to promote it. So, we’re extending the deadline to Wednesday, February 6. Full details on how to enter here.
Amelie Gilette at The Onion A.V. Club “always thought that Jamie Foxx’s natural career progression would be Booty Call, Ray, Oscar win, release of the R&B album Unpredictable, release of the R&B album Hot Tub, Academy Award (These Are The Words I’m Sayin’ To You), followed by the launch of Academy Award Winner: The Fragrance (musky ego with notes of ugh).” She was wrong.
“In 1993 Justin Timberlake joined the Mickey Mouse Club. In 1993 I officially joined the Mrs Doubtfire Fan Club. While membership is small, we all still share a love of vaccuming to Aerosmith’s ‘Dude Looks Like a Lady.’” Paul Scheer breaks down what sets him apart from the superstar with whom he shares a birthday.
“It’s all in there,” James Toback tells Michael Musto of his upcoming Mike Tyson documentary. “The ear biting, the rape charge, which was indeed a setup, and the solitary confinement. Mike’s survived, but he’s not sure into what future. He talks about being 40 as if it were 105 because a lot of people around him are drugged out or dead. Where does he go now?”
You knew this blog post was coming when Warner Brothers issued a say-nothing statement hours after Heath Ledger’s body was found last week. Now, a little over a week later, the scraps of news and speculative think pieces are flooding in; I read them and put the relevant information in a bullet-point list so that you wouldn’t have to.
Kim Masters at Slate says The Dark Knight hasn’t entered the ADR phase yet, meaning that if any of Ledger’s lines need re-recording, they’ll have to use a voice double. More interesting is the fact that Warner Brothers is spinning The Merchandising Issue as a moral one: if they don’t sell authorized t-shirts with Heath Ledger’s face on them, “The pirates would come out of the woodwork, and then it’s completely out of control.”
Chris Thilk says the third party companies who planned to partner with Warner Brothers on tie-ins (including Hersheys, who are planning some kind of Batman chocolate bar) were mostly not planning on using Joker imagery anyway, and will be able to continue with their capitalization plans unabated.
Borys Kit passes along word that WhySoSerious.com has been appended with a black ribbon. The creepy Joker images and Ledger soundbites otherwise remain intact.
Meanwhile, at Reel Pop, Steve Bryant reports that the “Why So Serious?” poster featuring an image of Ledger, which will likely be taken out of print, is selling for upwards of $70 on eBay. “Does the fact that I desperately want one make me soulless and insensitive?”
I’ve never seen Richard Fleischer’s CinemaScope Noir Violent Saturday, but with a name like that, how can it not be great? Film Forum here in New York will be screening it for a week starting February 29; their press release describes it as star-studded day-in-the-life of a small town, where a trio of bank robbers (including Lee Marvin) collide with a larcenous librarian (Sylvia Sidney), Tommy Noonan as voyeuristic bank manager, and “the usually menacing Ernest Borgnine as a gentle Amish farmer.” WOW.
I’ve embedded the film’s title sequence above. It’s not much, but it’s enough to start to get a feel for the amazing look of the picture–it’s like a 1950s noir dressed up as a 1970s Western. Again: WOW. I’ll be at True/False and then SXSW for most of the film’s run at Film Forum, but I’ll definitely try to catch a press screening and report back.
After finally seeing Spider-Man 3the other day, I’ll be happy to never see another Sam Raimi movie again. So, when it was announced Monday that Guillermo Del Toro, instead of Raimi, was in talks to direct the back-to-back Hobbitmovies, I was somewhat relieved. But now with Del Toro himself pretty much confirming he’s on board for the Lord of the Ringprequels (I know in the book world prequel isn’t the appropriate word, but in the New Line film series, and as far as mass audience is concerned, it is), I’m still a bit worried about the look of the films. Will Gollum suddenly have no eyes, like many of the creatures in Del Toro’s recent works? Will he be played by Doug Jones rather than a CGI Andy Serkis? Will Middle-earth now be a more stylized place?
One of the great things about Peter Jackson’s LOTR trilogy is that he made it look fairly straight-forward. There wasn’t much of the filmmaker’s personality in it. Sure, some of Middle-earth’s design had its influences (Rivendell looked painted by Maxfield Parrish, for example), but you couldn’t say the films necessarily or significantly reflected Jackson in any sort of a stylistic sense. Del Toro is much more of an auteur, though, and it’s easy to imagine his Hobbit duology bearing more a resemblance to his own films than to Jackson’s LOTRs (just look at how Hellboy IIlooks so similar to Pan’s Labyrinth). Of course, New Line couldn’t let too much divert from what the audience is used to, right? No way would anybody permit for Del Toro to do his own thing with Gollum or any other part of the franchise so that it would be unrecognizable to moviegoers. But then why not just hire some new, more malleable director to be Jackson’s Matt Reeves/James McTeague/Tobe Hooper?
In case you haven’t been following the promotions for Gondry’s latest post-modern surrealist fantasy film and have no idea what “sweded” is, it refers to the cheaply produced remakes of Hollywood movies that Jack Black and Mos Def’s video clerk characters create in Be Kind Rewind in order to restock their store’s rental library after they accidentally erase all the originals. OK, that was a long sentence, and is probably confusing if you’re not at all familiar with this movie. So, check out the real trailer here, and acquaint yourself. (Then check out Karina’s November clip-of-the-day post about “sweded” trailers and posters and her early January BlogNosh post about fan-made “sweded” trailers.)
A low budget musical, highly improvised, shot on consumer video and blown up to film? I’m there. I’ve been wanting to see Laurin Federlein’s Build a Ship, Sail to Sadness since reading write-ups of its premiere at Rotterdam a year ago, followed by a number of conflicted but non necessarily dismissive reviews from LAFF. I’m so excited that it’s finally coming to New York tomorrow. Here’s an excerpt of the synopsis from Anthology Film Archives’ calendar:
An absurdist musical travelogue, BUILD A SHIP follows young solitary Vincent as he rides on his moped through a deserted Scottish mountain region. His mission: to “heal the loneliness” of the few scattered inhabitants by introducing a mobile disco to the area. Driven by messianic determination and an addiction to petrol fumes, he struggles to keep his disintegrating vision afloat amidst the hostile landscape and stubborn indifference of the locals.
Conceived around the idiosyncratically witty and eloquent persona of lead-actor and collaborator Magnus Aronson, whose heartbreakingly poignant pop songs punctuate the low-key proceedings, BUILD A SHIP is based on many hours of conversations between Aronson’s Vincent and the real-life residents of the area and was filmed using two consumer Hi8 video camcorders, resulting in an intentionally low-fi, grungy look that corresponds to Vincent’s defiant struggle: to erect a vision of perfection, glamour, and aesthetic refinement within the imperfections and dullness of everyday reality.
Idolator passes along the news that networks are feverishly trying to counterprogram against “the allegedly low starpower of the veteran rocker” at the center of Sunday’s Super Bowl halftime show, Tom Petty. But how could that be? Peter Bogdanovich spent four hours telling us that Petty is the biggest, most beloved, and most important rock star IN THE WORLD. I simply refuse to believe that a work-for-hire hagiography might have embellished the appeal of the man who commissioned it. If Spike TV execs think their competitive eating special will out-draw “Free Fallin’”, then I can only assume they didn’t see Bogdanovich’s movie.
To be fair to Bogdanovich, Idolator’s Maura Johnston calls a bit of bullshit on the story, which originated with The Hollywood Reporter, and Idolator’s hipster commenters come out in full force to defend Petty’s demo-crossing likability.
That still doesn’t change the fact that the most interesting thing about Bogdanovich’s film is the way it betrays the fact that Petty paid him to make it, an issue which I went into in this podcast. Also of note: I sat through the entire four-hour film, totally sober, and didn’t nod off once, and I STILL don’t know who did the guitar solo on Runnin’ Down a Dream. I would have liked to find out because, to use what I believe is the appropriate parlance, it’s fucking sick.
Alison at the IFC Blog points to the 50th and apparently final episode of Dinner For Five, which premieres on IFC Friday night, but which you can watch online via Brightcove now. According to this press release, it’s basically a promo for a soon-to-be-released film documenting Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show, but in practice, it doesn’t feel that shilly.
The show has always had a boy’s club romanticism to it that can either be fantastic or unbearable, depending on the assortment of guests, but this last episode is interesting if only because it draws attention to the entire series as a work of Jon Favreau/Vince Vaughn autobiography.
How to craft a Varietybox office trend story: line up your greatest hits of disingenuous statements from past stories (Juno–the little movie that could! Cloverfield dropped 68% in its second weekend, but that’s not so bad–even if it wasreally 72%!); find either wildly optimistic or severely apocalyptic structuring rubric to make these old chestnuts seem, uh, less old; repeat.
Speaking of Cloverfield, Paramount, apparently turning a blind eye to the film’s lack of staying power, has offered director Matt Reeves two new jobs, including a Cloverfield sequel. He’ll also direct The Invisible Woman, “a Hitchcock-style thriller that probes the mind of a former beauty queen who turns to a life of crime to protect her family,” from his own script.
Paul Haggis is setting up a production shingle at Tom Cruise’s Scientology rec center studio, United Artists.
Steve Rhodes has pictures from the San Francisco set of Milk, Gus Van Sant’s biopic in which Sean Penn plays the openly-gay San Francisco politician Harvey Milk, who was assassinated by a fellow city supervisor who later claimed he had killed whilst in the throes of a sugar rush. Van Sant and crew have apparently dressed a stretch of SF’s Castro district to match its 70s glory. More photos here.
Here’s a catalog of the coverage we produced during the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. We’ll add any future posts that deal with the festival in the coming days to this list.
Captain Abu Raed, the first film to come out of Jordan in over 50 years, tells the story of an airport janitor who befriends children by telling them he’s an airline pilot. In this interview writer/director Amin Matalqa and stars Nadim Sawalha and Rana Sultan talk about the range of styles that influenced the film and the serendipitous events that led to the casting of the two lead roles.
The soundtrack for Junois a huge hit, currently holding the #2 spot on the Billboard 200 Chart (and the #1 spot on Amazon and the #1 spot on iTunes), and I’m just waiting patiently for the outcries that come afterward when some housewife in the Midwest gets turned on enough by Kimya Dawson and the Moldy Peaches to buy the band’s first, self-titled album. You know, the one that already had enough troubles when it hit stores on September 11, 2001 with a track called “NYC’s Like a Graveyard”. The one that has lyrics about porn and crack and wondering “whose pussy hole needs filling.” Yes, it should go over well with the folks who think “Anyone Else But You” is just the cutest song ever.
Speaking of “Anyone Else But You,” the Moldy Peaches (Dawson and a very unenthusiastic Adam Green) performed the song on The View last week, and one of the lines in the song was altered. Of course, you’d expect that for daytime television a possibly offensive lyric would be changed, censored or deleted. But here the original words (”you shook a little turd out of the bottom of your pants”) were substituted with something seemingly far less kosher (”you blew a little load out of the bottom of your pants”). Perhaps “load” is technically a safer word than “turd” but in the context it goes from being about poop to being about ejaculation. Can that be appropriate for ABC’s daytime audience?
I guess as I haven’t yet heard or read about any fuss regarding the Moldy Peaches’ more R-rated songs, I shouldn’t be bothering to speculate that there could be. But the whole matter made me think back to Karina’s post from a month ago about people (her sister, specifically) being turned on to bands courtesy of hit soundtracks. So, I’ll just sit here and wait for the backlash … any day now … (cough) …
Here I present you with yet another Sundance trailer. But it’s for a film that screened at Sundance LAST YEAR. I know, I’ve already bitched recently about having to wait so long for Sundance darlings to make their way to theaters, but I can’t help complaining again. Not when it comes to Son of Rambow, the movie I heard so much about during the 2007 festival and couldn’t wait to see for myself. And then it never came, and I forgot about it for awhile. Hopefully, I can wait just a bit longer (and not forget again in the meantime) for Paramount Vantage to finally give it a limited release on May 2nd.
At least now I have some more time to get around to seeing the original First Bloodand the other Rambomovies I meant to watch (because I’ve never seen them before) prior to the release of the new Rambo (which, as a result, I also didn’t end up seeing). Son of Rambow is probably still an enjoyable movie without being familiar with those iconic Stallone movies, but since it’s about two kids making a spun-off sort of movie titled “Son of Rambow”, it seems like I’ll appreciate it a little more if I know the inspiration.
In what they’re trumpeting as an exclusive, Defamer reports that the Detroit Free Press has elected not to replace their recently forcibly retired film critic Terry Lawson, and will fill his coulmn space with wire reviews:
We called the Detroit Free Press this morning and learned from a (very confused) HR rep that “We are not planning on replacing [Terry Lawson] at this time.” Very interesting. By our research, all of the other Top 20 newspapers in the United States have at least one major, well-known critic (yes, even the Arizona Republic). However, The Freep’s move clearly signals that there’s a changing tide in the amount of importance (and budget dollars) local newspapers allocate to coverage of the movie business.
The real news here may be that Defamer managed to publish 267 completely snark-free words about anything, let alone the decline of print film criticism. Associate editor Molly Friedman even closes with the seemingly sincere lament that “it still saddens us that there’s not enough room in the budget of a Top 20 newspaper to send someone to the movies a few times a week.”
In all seriousness, the Detroit Free Press‘ move is the latest in an epidemic of regional newspapers dropping their film critics. This is clearly a problem in the short term, but may turn out to be a positive on a longer timeline.
You knew this blog post was coming when Warner Brothers issued a say-nothing statement hours after Heath Ledger’s body was found last week. Now, a little over a week later, the scraps of news and speculative think pieces are flooding in; I read them and put the relevant information in a bullet-point list so that you wouldn’t have to.
After finally seeing 
Alison at the IFC Blog
How to craft a Variety 
In what they’re trumpeting as an exclusive, 
