Roger Avary, who won an Oscar for co-writing Pulp Fiction with Quentin Tarantino, and who also collaborated on the script for Beowulf with Neil Gaiman, was booked on charges of vehicular manslaughter and felony drunken driving, after crashing into a telephone pole late last night in Ojai, CA. According to reports, a friend of Avary’s was fatally injured in the crash, while Avary’s wife was thrown from the car but survived. Avary himself was apparently not injured. More info here.
The tabloid sites are clouding this story with speculation pretty rapidly as the morning progresses, but I’m posting it here because I know several people who used to participate in the forums on Avary’s website, which was something of a destination in the early days of film-bloggery, so I figured it would be of interest.
Co-writers Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman introduced a reel of fully-rendered footage from Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf last night at Comic-con, and the reviews are rolling in.
David Poland thinks it’s an Oscar contender:
It is very easy to imagine, based on this small amount of footage, that Beowulf could be a huge smash that critics can actually get behind and that it could be a serious Academy player in the way Lord of the Rings was. Though this is not a trilogy, it seems ready to break even more ground in a real way. (The issue of acting nominations was something Avery & Gaiman considered out loud in the room tonight. With big names like Hopkins, Jolie, and Malkovich, one thinks they might actually turn that trick if all the pieces come together. The great Ray Winstone, who doesn’t look like himself, might have trouble on that basis alone.)
IGN’s Todd Gilchrist says that although Beowulf relies on the same motion-capture process Zemeckis used for The Polar Express, the director seems to have avoided the major failing of that film:
The main problem director Robert Zemeckis’ Polar Express faced was its (literal) absence of life behind the CGI characters’ eyes, and Beowulf appears to have conquered this technical challenge: all of the characters act and react with a palpable sense of reality, not to mention a febrile kind of unpredictability, creating a much more authentic and evocative emotional backdrop for the larger-than-life story. Meanwhile, the general proficiency with which computer-generated imagery is rendered has evolved by leaps and bounds since those earlier films, creating an increasingly believable but nonetheless spectacularly melodramatic universe in which Beowulf’s adventures are concrete and also fantastic.
The Post Chronicle’s naked-Angelina Jolie-centric write-up is just creepy:
Brad Pitt’s lover Angie shows her sexy side once again as her naked body emerges from a dark pool of water, with little droplets of water dripping down her every curve.
The film’s trailer is now on Apple, so skip over there if these reports have made you salivate.
IFC is expanding their efforts to bring film festival hits to the masses by developing a second video-on-demand label. Called Festival Direct, it will bring international festival favorites directly to cable boxes, skipping the middleman theatrical run afforded films on the IFC FirstTake program. Already on the slate: Ken Loach’s It’s a Free World…, and the Icelandic festival hit Jar City. 
