The most popular lists on SpoutBlog have involved sex scenes or Halloween costumes. So, to give the people what they want we’ve decided to combine both topics for our final list ever. It makes sense anyway, seeing as how Halloween is this weekend and seeing as how the holiday has pretty much turned into a sex-based festivity — for adults, at least.
Surprisingly, with all the cosplay fans and other fetishists out there, sex scenes involving costumes aren’t too common. We’ve tried to exclude anything considered a uniform or transvestism, as neither of these is about masquerading. There are two job-related costumes, however, but both have been deemed qualified. And the single example of cross-dressing is more about disguise than transgenderism.
Feel free to add to the list if you think of any that we left out. …Read more
Today’s Extremely Improbable Rumor Sourced From The British Tabloids: NOW Magazine is reporting that Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are “looking at remaking Last Tango In Paris.” It’s apparently part of a gambit to shore up the public perception of both halves of Hollywood’s most routinely questioned couple by having them appear together in “a movie that has a mainstream plot, but also some intense sex stuff.”
At the Guardian, Xan Brooks not only buys the rumor, but is all about it. Well, maybe not the Last Tango part, but the Cruise-on-Holmes on screen action in general. “The thrill is gone and they need it back. They need to have sex on screen, to prove their love,” he writes.
Because the couple who makes a movie sold on the idea that its stars Really Do It stays together, right? Just look at Eyes Wide Shut! (OMG, they should remake that. And then Far and Away. And then Days of Thunder.)
A number of our bloggingfriends have picked up the Alphabetical Favorites meme. The idea is that you list 26 favorite movies, one for each letter of the alphabet. Some people are adding comments, but I think it’s more interesting to just toss the titles out there, to see how they fit together within a single list and how they match up to other lists. Also, it’s been a hell of a week and I’m exhausted. I will say this: after not being able to think of a single movie beginning with the letter “J” that I enjoy more than Joe Versus the Volcano, I noticed that several commenters at the House Next Door had slotted the same film in the same face. So much for Todd McCarthy’s contention in his Doubt review that John Patrick Shanley’s first directorial effort was “misguided.”
Earlier this year, I thought that it was way too late for a Sex and the Citymovie. But then it made a ton of cash, so I guess I was wrong. Still, I’m going to continue similarly thinking it’s too late for another X-Filesmovie. And even if I’m proven wrong and the masses get out to theaters this weekend in search of the truth, I’ll keep on believing that X-Files: I Want to Believeis way past its time.
To celebrate Mulder and Scully’s tardiness, here are 10 other movies that came out too late:
The Godfather Part III(Released in: 1990; Should have been released in: 1976) - Never mind the fact that had this third installment been made years earlier, Sofia Coppola wouldn’t have been cast and therefore wouldn’t have given her terribly infamous performance. The more important matter is that sequels arriving more than a decade after the previous installment are almost always doomed. The longer the wait, the higher the expectations, and the greater the disappointment. Of course, not everyone agrees that it was also too late for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Live Free or Die Hard, Rambo, Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace, etc. …Read more
Though I first buzzed about an Academy Award nomination for Heath Ledger in The Dark Knightmore than a month before his death, I now want to take it all back. I feel all the talk of Ledger’s posthumous Oscar chances will cloud my mind when I finally do see it, and it will probably also cloud the Academy’s judgment, too. Six months from now, when the nominations are announced on January 22 (coincidentally the one-year anniversary of Ledger’s death), if Ledger is not recognized for his role as The Joker, there will surely be an uproar — actually, Hollywood might just up and self-implode.
I’m not the only one annoyed by all the Oscar buzz. Terry Gilliam, who directed Ledger in The Brothers Grimmand the upcoming The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, is calling “bullshit” on the whole thing, particularly against Warner Bros., which Gilliam accuses of exploiting Ledger’s death and chance of a posthumous Oscar for publicity purposes. Considering most Oscar campaigns for live actors are really just part of movie marketing, he has a good point.
Jonathan Levine’s crowd-pleasing (in terms of audience awards at festivals, not in terms of uplifting Hollywood endings) film The Wacknessopens in limited release tomorrow. In case you haven’t noticed from the ads and the soundtrack, it takes place in the New York City of 1994, a special time for the place because Rudy Giuliani had just become mayor and was beginning to clean up the city, Goldie Wilson-stylee (OK, not really Goldie Wilson-stylee, but who doesn’t love a good BTTFreference?).
NYC in the ’90s was quite special for me. It’s when I moved here. And moved here a second time (I’ve since moved here a third time), and watching The Wackness made me nostalgic for the decade. It also made me think of some of the other films from or set in that period, a number of which kind of define my experience with the city.
In this week’s New York, David Edelstein lists a number of films that significantly represent the Big Apple. Because it’s a celebration of the magazine’s 40th anniversary, though, it only goes back as far as 1968 (the year of Planet of the Apes and Rosemary’s Baby). So, tragically no timely mention of The Naked City, which lost both its director and star recently.
There are a number of accomplished actors who have worked with infamously bad filmmaker Uwe Boll: Sir Ben Kingsley; Geraldine Chaplin; Clint Howard. And many of those actors have worked with some great filmmakers. Yet who would think to ask Kingsley how Boll compares to Spielberg or Polanski, or Chaplin how Boll compares to David Lean or Robert Altman, or Howard how Boll compares to his brother Ron. Well, Shawn Adler of MTV Movies Blog decided that it would be really amusing if he askedLeelee Sobieski to comment on any similarities between Boll and Stanley Kubrick. Surprisingly, she managed to squeeze out a decent answer — at least considering she’s on camera to wholeheartedly promote her and Boll’s film In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale and has to say something nice about the director.
Sobieski may not be the best person to ask, though. She was only 15 when she appeared in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, and that film isn’t even considered to be on par with the filmmaker’s regular work. Still, she obviously understands the clear distinctions between “the greatest filmmaker of all time” and “the worst director of all time,” as Kubrick and Boll are respectively labeled, and she gives a good response in saying that both ask a lot of questions and both deserve respect for getting things done and not being lazy. As for the rest, its a cop-out, though a good save publicity-wise, but still makes perfect sense as an apples vs. oranges kind of comparison. Even Kingsley, who has been in his share of terrible films (only one of which is Boll’s Bloodrayne) and likely has to defend his choices all the time, would probably say something along the same lines as Sobieski’s claim that people want to be stimulated in a “plethohra” of directions and that there’s room for intellectual films and “great” action movies.
Tom Cruise’s tabloid covers have lined a lot of bird cages, however we saw something fascinating behind his orthodontic masterpiece smile. Once a Hollywood boy-wonder, in recent years he has deconstructed his all-american persona. Now, with the release of the political thriller Lions for Lambs, Cruise tries his hand as studio mogul, heading United Artists. Will it work? What does the future hold for Cruise? Most interesting: What does a deep look into Cruise reveal about our culture’s progress or lack there of?
I confessed my secret dream to write about Eyes Wide Shut for a living.
On this week’s episode of FilmCouch, we talked about Trapped in the Closet (which ended), Superbad, and a punk rock high school flick that you can watch on YouTube.
Good news for fans of Eyes Wide Shut: a new DVD edition of Stanley Kubrick’s final film is on the way, complete with rated and unrated versions of the film, plus two documentaries, commentary from Sydney Pollack and historian Peter Loewenberg, and more. It will be available for purchase on its own, or as part of a nine-disc Kubrick collection, coming out in late October.
And if you read the above and immediately thought to yourself, “WHAT fans of Eyes Wide Shut?”, you should go read this appreciation of the film by Jeffrey M. Anderson. For several years I’ve thought (mostly in a lazy, cocktail chatter sort of way) of writing a book about Eyes Wide Shut — not so much the movie itself as the press surrounding its production, Kubrick’s death, the controversy surrounding preparing the film for MPAA approval, and its reception amongst both critics and audiences. Every time I gear myself up to actually do the writing, I inevitably lose confidence–something happens and I think, “Oh, nobody cares about that movie.”
Jeffrey’s post–and, especially, the comments it has engendered–has possibly convinced me otherwise. It’s one thing for a couple of critics to remain fascinated by a widely-reviled film ten years after its release, but those comments suggest a common relief among Eyes Wide Shut lovers: they’re all basically saying, “Finally, it’s okay for me to come out of the closet about this.”
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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Today’s Extremely Improbable Rumor Sourced From The British Tabloids: NOW Magazine is reporting that Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are “looking at remaking Last Tango In Paris.” It’s apparently part of a gambit to shore up the public perception of both halves of Hollywood’s most routinely questioned couple by having them appear together in “a movie that has a mainstream plot, but also some intense sex stuff.”
A number of our 
In this week’s 
Way back on Monday, we introduced our entry in the 
