The trailer for Lars von Trier’s Antichrist has hit Vimeo (see it here after the jump). If patented Lars Von Trier creep applied to what seems like an old-school horror formula doesn’t pique your interest, the final money shot probably will. Unless you have something against a naked Willem DaFoe thrusting atop Charlotte Gainsbourg, who is herself mounted on a tangle of muddy tree roots and froze, anonymous limbs!
The general consensus seems to be that this film will probably be at Cannes. So will I! I will report back.
Welcome to the first in our second annual series of SXSW previews! As the festival approaches we’ll be asking filmmakers to spill the superficial details about their films, to tell us all the deep personal details of what makes them tick, and –– new this year! –– reveal who they had to sleep with, in the incestuous conspiracy-minded secret society that is the wider SXSW community, in order to get their film programmed at the festival.
Chosen as our first preview simply because I very much support the naming films after Flock of Seagulls songs, Modern Love is Automatic is the debut directorial effort from Zach Clark, who edited SXSW 2006 entry Dance Party, USA. Above, check out the stylish, winky trailer for the movie. Below the jump, Clark describes his Emerging Visions entry as a “a No-Wave Douglas Sirk movie”, professes his love for salsa and “Three’s Company style misunderstandings”, and drops the name of a Bollywood-related work-out video that I feel I must purchase immediately.
Ray Pride points to a trailer for 13 Most Beautiful…Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests, a DVD from Plexifilm featuring 13 of Warhol’s 16mm, single-shot portraits of his superstars and Factory drop-ins (including Dennis Hopper, Lou Reed, Edie Sedgwick and Nico), set to original songs composed by ex-Luna/Galaxie 500 frontman Dean Wareham and his wife/bassist Britta Phillips. Plexifilm says it’s the “first ever authorized DVD release of films by Andy Warhol,” and in addition to the basic DVD, they’re also offering a $250 limited edition package, featuring “a deluxe gatefold LP-style package with an exclusive poster and booklet,” as well as an archival print from a frame from your choice of one of the screentests. Or you can just watch the pretty trailer over and over for free.
Downloading Nancy — the Mario Bello-starring, Christopher Doyle-lensed psycho-sexual-tech drama that was much-maligned at its Sundance premiere in 2008 but vehemently defended by Michael Lerman in his Most Misunderstood Films of 2008 piece — finally has a release date and a trailer.
If you haven’t already heard the news, I’ll sum it up for you: Ridley Scott is directing a feature film version of Monopoly. It’s probably the single strangest thing I’ve ever heard in the film business. I’m not sure if Scott himself seems to know what this movie will be about, because he keeps waffling on the subject: one moment he says it’ll be a broad family comedy, and the next minute it’s going to be dark like Blade Runner. He seems to have only been wooed by the fact that it’s one of the best-selling board games in the world.
This doesn’t mean that making a movie out of a board game is a bad idea, necessarily. It worked for Clue, after all. But unless Scott’s movie features Rich Uncle Pennybags jumping around with his monocle screwed firmly in place, I’m going to have to call shenanigans on it. Check out our list below of the 10 Board Games We’d Like To See As Movies, complete with fantasy casting.
Leonard Maltin has been publishing his Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide under various different titles (The Movie and Video Guide, TV Movies, etc.) since 1969, although he didn’t start putting out annual updated editions until 1987. In 2005 he started publishing Leonard Maltin’s Classic Movie Guide, which only covers movies released in 1960 and before, mostly so he could save space in the annual editions. Either way, the standard annual edition is a pretty fat book, chock full of capsulized movie reviews that are about two or three sentences long, at most.
This past September at Fantastic Fest, Tim and Karrie League of the Alamo Drafthouse introduced me to the wonder of the Leonard Maltin Movie Game. If Maltin has any moxie, he might want to put out his own edition of this, complete with his smiling mug branded all over the box. Although chances are that you already have everything you need to play, right in your own home. Read on to find out how you can entertain friends, and poke fun at Maltin’s writing style, all in one evening.
In the 1980s it seemed like Hollywood hated everything that was going to compete with it: television, video games, books, comics, you name it. If it wasn’t being used as an ancillary product for a movie, then it was the enemy. Why would an executive want to embrace something like Spider-Man or Space Invaders and try turning it into a movie? Which, granted might be why so many movies from the 1980s were classic. Where’s our next John Hughes, already? If there was a video game announced tomorrow based on Ferris Bueller’s DayOff or Weird Science, I would retire this column for eternity. Unless the game sucked.
But what about movies that came out years ago that still live on through video games? Games have single-handedly managed to keep some franchises flush with cash, long before the currently Hollywood trend of retreading, prequelizing, and refurbishing movie happened. Now, you’re just as likely to have a game coming out day in date with the movie, if not a few weeks before in an effort to hype the buzz. But what about those that came before? Here are a few examples.
It wasn’t that long ago that Activision announced they’d struck a deal with Brett Ratner to develop movies based on their video games –– and that he wants to direct a Guitar Hero film. Now the pendulum is swinging back in the other direction as Electronic Arts just announced that they’ve struck a three video game deal with Zack Snyder.
We caught up with Zack at last night’s Watchmen event to find out the details. As it turns out, he’s a late-night gaming addict, even in the middle of trying to finish a huge Hollywood movie.
Director Peter Sollett turned his short film Five Feet High And Rising into the 2003 Sundance darling Raising Victor Vargas, and now he’s moved into studio fare with the Sony Pictures flick Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. Thankfully, it doesn’t feel like a powerhouse of a film, and he manages to make a night in New York City feel honest, and not like a slickly produced starfest.
Read through the break to find out what it was like making this movie, why he thinks Union Pool is “retarded,” the skinny on MPAA censorship, and how much improv Michael Cera did in the movie. [He also swears and then apologizes for it, which Karina finds super endearing. -- Ed.]
A hit at the most recent Rotterdam Film Festival, Paul Krik’s feature debut Able Danger is a Flatbush, Brooklyn set post 9/11 conspiracy tale that hinges its low budget thrills directly to a studied pastiche of classic film noir and a healthy cynicism of our government’s possible role in the events of 9/11 and the subsequent dive into a state of perpetual middle eastern war in the name of defending freedom. Krik, who occasionally goes by the name Dave Herman, has the hip threads and thousand yard stare that are par for the course for Brooklyn conspiracy theorists, but he also has sure handed feel for cinema. With deftness he milks paranoia out of his crisp, hi-def B&W images and creates an altogether plausible conspiracy that barely name checks the controlled demolition theory, but nonetheless synthesizes large quantities of suspicious information from that sunny tuesday morning seven years ago. On the eve of his film’s NYC release at the Pioneer later this week, we caught up with Paul to talk about––what else?–– Entourage, Atlas Shrugged, the desire to work with Cate Blanchett and Greek versus German philosophy.
There are few board games that have endured the test of time to still get played today even during the video game craze. Games like Monopoly, Scrabble, Risk, and Clue are still available at your neighborhood store, decades after they came out. In fact, they’ve all seen multiple releases over the years. There’s a billion different versions of Monopoly out there, and you can even Make-Your-Own-Opoly. Scrabble is still as popular as ever, especially given the Scrabulous flap over at Facebook, and Risk just came out with a revised edition that has new rules and pieces. That just leaves us with Clue.
Clue, or Cluedo as it is called in the United Kingdom, where it was invented by Anthony Pratt, was created out of a love for murder mysteries. It was first published in 1949 and still endures to this day in multiple versions. To name a few, there’s The Simpson’s Clue, a Clue DVD Game, and even Clue Express for people with limited time on their hands. Clue also came out with a new edition just a few weeks okay, completely updated with biographies for the characters, new weapons, and a second deck of cards. I’m not sure how I feel about Professor Plum being changed to Victor Plum, a dot com billionaire. That’s like replacing Gumdrop Pass in Candyland with “Bean Sprout Way” to encourage kids to eat healthy. Don’t mess with nostalgia, man.
With the movie opening in New York tomorrow, Kino has posted a trailer for Azazel Jacobs’ Momma’s Manon YouTube. If you haven’t seen the film, I think this clip is a pretty strong encapsulation of its overall mashup of slapstick and melancholy. Also, the reviews a starting to roll in, and J. Hoberman’s got a must-read take at the Village Voice. “Although my most vivid memories of Aza Jacobs are as the unnamed infant installed in a crib in a Johnson City apartment and called, for what seemed like a very long time, “Mr. Baby,” I’ve known his parents for nearly 40 years,” he writes. “And so, while I cannot evaluate Momma’s Man with an outsider’s clarity, can vouch for the authenticity…”
The Playlist point to this “teaser” trailer for David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button which spins on the wildly exciting premise that the wisdom and life experience of an old man could travel in the body of a young(ish) Brad Pitt. The trailer is long, slow, and almost dialogue free. We can only hope the movie follows suit.
“The opening 20 minutes of Dai Nipponjin are the most boring 20 minutes in the history of cinema.” That’s Grady Hendrix, selling one of the films he’s selected for the New York Asian Film Festival (the final lineup was just released today), on this podcast at The House Next Door. If that doesn’t have you marking your calendars, allow Grady to continue:
The first 20 minutes are like, him shopping, him complaining about how his wife divorced him and how he hates his job and his government salary isn’t very good, and he’s just this idiot…and then they pump 50,000 amps through his nipples and he turns into this giant super hero in purple underwear and beats up monsters…This is like the porno version of Cloverfield. You find out what happens when giant monsters go into heat. Which isn’t pretty.
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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