AP - Entertainment highlights during the week of July 27-Aug. 2: More Info
07/24/2008 Celebrity Birthdays
(AP)
AP - Celebrity birthdays for the week of July 27-Aug. 2: More Info
07/23/2008 Aussie actress Wasikowska to play Alice for Burton
(Reuters)
Reuters - Tim Burton and Disney have
found their new Alice -- not in Wonderland or down the rabbit
hole but Down Under. More Info
07/23/2008 Dissident actors could sway outcome of SAG talks
(AP)
AP - More than 30 actors dissatisfied with stalled contract talks said Wednesday they have joined to campaign for seats on the Screen Actors Guild's board of directors, a move that could eventually break the stalemate with Hollywood studios.
07/23/2008 Filmmaker Perry, Lionsgate keep it in the family
(Reuters)
Reuters - Tyler Perry has signed a
three-year, first-look deal with Lionsgate, the studio that
released his 2005 breakthrough debut feature, "Diary of a Mad
Black Woman" and his subsequent films. More Info
07/23/2008 Ferrell and Reilly step down with `Brothers'
(AP)
AP - The title is "Step Brothers." You know, because there are two of them.
07/23/2008 Bale attends 'Dark Knight' premiere in Spain
(AP)
AP - Christian Bale swept into Barcelona on Wednesday night to attend a glittering Spanish premiere of "The Dark Knight," appearing calm as he greeted fans a day after reports surfaced that his mother and sister had accused him of assault.
07/23/2008 "Dark Knight" beats total of previous Batman film
(Reuters)
Reuters - After just six days of release in
North America, the new Batman sequel "The Dark Knight" has
grossed more domestically than its predecessor did in its
entire run, distributor Warner Bros. Pictures said on
Wednesday.
07/23/2008 Ferrell, Reilly ad-lib way through "Step Brothers"
(Reuters)
Reuters - The script never got in the way of
a good fight as comic actors Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly
improvised their way through family warfare in the movie "Step
Brothers," which opens on Friday. More Info
07/23/2008 Smith, Depp, DiCaprio Shake Their Moneymakers
(E! Online)
E! Online - Here's some news Will Smith can take to the bank, along with those eight-figure paychecks: The Hancock star is the top-paid actor in Hollywood, according to the latest figures from the number crunchers over at Forbes.com.
E! Online - Today's the day, fanboys (and girls). San Diego Comic-Con, the world's biggest comic-book convention and pop-culture expo, opens tonight with an expected crowd of more than 120,000.
07/23/2008 Film explores tensions after 2005 London bombings
(Reuters)
Reuters - A film inspired by the 2005 London
suicide bombings that killed 52 people explores the mistrust
they stoked between communities and how Islamist radicals
threatened to drown out the voice of moderate Muslims.
One of the greatest things about Guy Maddin is that his accomplishments come out of creativity and a spot-on eye, rather than money and flashy technology. Give the man an old camera, a few actors, and some weird props, and he can make a film that's not only engaging, but also visually stunning. He knows how to make the least become the most, and with the release of My Winnipeg, he's now inspiring others to do the same.
Jam! reports that UK filmmakers are getting a change to get their Maddin on. Both newbie and experienced filmmakers are getting the chance to submit 3-minute odes to their hometown, and Guy says "anything's eligible." Considering the lap-linked Winnipeg, it's not surprising that the doors are wide open...
Anyhow, the online contest is going to give out 1,500 pounds to the winner and a roundtrip flight to ... dum dum dum ... WINNIPEG! Sure, they also get their film screened and included on the UK's DVD release of My Winnipeg. But who cares when you can head to the snowy wonderland? I'm hoping the winner at least gets to choose the season.
The whole idea of secret children who come out of the woodwork is challenging as it is. Should the secret be revealed, or should it stay hidden? How do you make up for lost years? How do you integrate them into the family? Now, imagine that you're part of the law, and you find out that your secret kid is in jail. That's the basic idea behind a new indie comedy called City Island, and The Hollywood Reporter has posted that Julianna Margulies, Emily Mortimer, and Alan Arkin have joined the cast. Andy Garcia had previously signed on to play Vince Rizzo, "a Bronx prison official who realizes that an inmate (Steven Strait) is his secret love child. His efforts to become his guardian lead to comic complications." Marguiles is taking on the role of Garcia's wife, and it seems that the man is also looking to become an actor because Arkin will play a teacher in the acting class, and Mortimer will be a fellow student he becomes friends with. Garcia's real-life daughter Dominik Garcia-Lorido will play his daughter, and Ezra Miller has also nabbed an undisclosed part.
I really don't know how all of this acting works into prison officials and long-lost bad boy sons, but we should see soon enough. The film went into production this week in the Bronx.
It used to be that the musicians with the beat were the Go Gos. Now the beat is getting manly. The Hollywood Reporter has posted that there's a new indie '80s comedy on the way called We Got the Beat, and Robert Hoffman has just joined the cast. He's been dancing his butt off in a bunch of films and most recently got to groove in the rain with Briana Evigan in Step Up 2.
Written and directed by John Artigo, the film follows "Brad, a high school football player who sets out to prove he's more than just a jock by quitting the team and turning his heavy metal band into a pioneering boy band." But that's not who Hoffman is playing -- he gets to be "Garth, the boy-toy and live-in lover of Brad's mother."
This sounds like one of those films that could be terribly bad, or terribly good. Here's to hoping it's all set to real '80s music and is awesome. The indie begins filming this month.
OK, so I missed my flight to San Diego this morning and I've had a really rotten day, but there's always a small silver lining, right? In the movie world there is: JUST announced (like, within the last few minutes!) is the Toronto Film Festival's Midnight Madness '08 line-up. And, as usual, it looks pretty damn awesome.
I've heard some really good things about Pascal Laugier's Martyrs, Franck Vestiel's Eden Log, and Jon Hewitt's Acolytes -- plus I've been itchin' to see JT Petty's horror-western The Burrowers for over a year now! Other selections include Pracha Pinkaew's Chocolate, Toshio Lee's Detroit Metal City, and Mark Hartley's Not Quite Hollywood. Click right here for all ten of TIFF's Midnight picks --and of course you can expect all sorts of expansive festival coverage once TIFF rolls out in early September. Woo!
(Note: Rocchi got all excited about JCVD being chosen as one of the Midnight selections, which is a title I neglected to mention the first time around. Ditto Sexykiller and Deadgirl.)
It was a bummer to learn that Franka Potente was backing out of Pope Joan back in May, but it looks like she's found herself another weighty gig to add to her plate. Variety reports that she has signed on to star in a new German drama called Flucht aus Tibet, otherwise known as Escape from Tibet. The film, which is based on a true story, will be the big-screen debut for writer and director Maria Blumencron.
Heading out of Che Guevara territory, Potente is moving over to Tibet to play Judy Cronenberg. The woman was a press photographer who led "a group of refugee Tibetan children over the Himalayas to safety nine years ago." There's nothing more being said about the story, which seems to be surprisingly free from the Internet (anyone know the details?), but it is a big German project. The film has received FFF Bayern's largest film funding -- $1.1 million.
It should be a little bit of time before we get to see Tibet, but in the meantime, of course, we can watch her play Tania in Steven Soderbergh's The Argentine and Guerilla.
Three intriguing titles top my list of indie films to check out this week on DVD. Coincidentally, two of them feature actors who also directed (or directors who also acted).
Taiwanese film Help Me Eros, directed by and starring Lee Kang-Sheng, became slightly notorious at the Toronto film festival because droves of otherwise hardy film critics walked out of a press screening, either out of boredom or disgust. Ryan Stewart stayed, even though the first scene made him consider vomiting and the film as a whole was an unpleasant experience. Any film that provokes that strong a reaction, of course, makes it a perfect choice for adventurous renters who don't mind gambling a few dollars on the possibility that they'll never finish watching the movie. (The plot doesn't really matter in this case, does it?) DVD extras are limited to various trailers.
The English-language Big Dreams, Little Tokyo, directed by and starring Dave Boyle, is a culture clash comedy. Boyle plays a man who wants to become a language instruction guru, while his Japanese American roommate (Jason Watabe) wants to become a Sumo wrestler despite his slight build. KJ Doughton at Film Threat gave it a four-star rating ("a fresh filmic entree"). DVD extras include an audio commentary, behind the scenes interviews and "making of" footage, deleted scenes, web spots, and more.
French flick Heartbeat Detector (AKA La Question Humaine), directed by Nicolas Klotz, arrives with little fanfare that I can recall, though it did enjoy a brief, limited theatrical run earlier this year, and Scott Foundas admired "its epic sense of humanity" in the pages of The Village Voice. Mathieu Amalric (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) plays a company psychiatrist with odd methods of motivating the corporate troops. DVD extras appear to be non-existent.
It seemed too strange to be true. Only a handful of months after I watched Jessica Yu's excellent Protagonist, a Euripides-based story about four very different men and their manifestations of obsession, another one of her films was hitting Toronto. But it was nothing like the previous piece -- it was a fictional, comedic narrative about ping pong playing. Talk about drastic twists in themes! Ping Pong Playa' was an entirely new arena for the Oscar winner.
Now The Hollywood Reporter posts that the film is finally hitting big screens outside of the festival circuit. IFC Films has picked up the US rights to the comedy, and it will head into a limited release on September 5. While you might have run the other way from Balls of Fury, Playa' is definitely worth another glance.
The film is a cute look at a basketball-obsessed slacker named C-Dub (Jimmy Tsai) who ignores his family's ping pong inclinations -- his mom runs a ping pong store and his brother is a champion. However, when both of them are injured in a car crash, he has to not only take over his mother's classes, but also put two jerky pongers in their place. It's a story we've seen before, but it's also fresh, sweet, and refreshingly smart and diverse. (Check out a review, someinterviews, and the trailer.)
In a perfect cinematic world, you'd be able to watch every movie you wanted to watch as soon as it was released on a big screen with good sound and projection and an appreciative audience. In the real world, we're always making compromises: my friends don't want to see what I want to see tonight, that new indie movie is only playing in New York and may never play in my town, the woman sitting next to me in the theater keeps talking to her friends.
Mad Detective opened on Friday, but as noted by Eric D. Snider in his latest Indie Spotlight, only in New York. I have no idea if it will ever play in Dallas, where I live, but based on recent history, chances are, it won't. I'm a huge fan of Hong Kong filmmakers Johnny To and Wai Ka Fai, who co-directed, and Lau Ching Wan, a great, underappreciated actor (Beyond Hypothermia, Big Bullet, A Hero Never Dies), but I've been reluctant to spring for the import DVD, which would set me back nearly 20 bucks. (The trailer's available to watch at Moviefone.)
So I compromised and spent $5.99 to watch Mad Detective via the "IFC in Theaters" video on demand (VOD) service on my cable system. That's comparable to a matinee showing at a local arthouse -- I paid $6.75 to see The Wackness on Saturday afternoon -- but the experience is, obviously, not the same. For one thing, "IFC in Theaters" is only available in standard definition, so the picture looks only so-so, even on my 26-inch high-def monitor.
Death is the ultimate dramatic device, but great art doesn't emerge from strong devices alone. In Take, the directorial debut of Charles Oliver, the impact of a single, startling tragic death immediately conveys the sense of watching a gravely serious movie, which is definitely the case. However, having immediately provided a tone, Oliver fails to follow up with a story powerful enough to justify it. That's not to say that the experience Ana (Minnie Driver) goes through after her son dies in a freak accident before the start of the film isn't relentlessly bleak, but there's hardly anything distinctive about the circumstances to make viewers care any more than they would if they were glancing at it in the morning headlines.
Still, Olilver has made a quietly observant work solely driven by the specific needs of two downtrodden protagonists with completely believable motives. In flashback, we learn that Ana struggled with her son's elementary school, which wants to put him in a special needs program. Meanwhile, she has a hard time communicating with her husband and finding decent work to get by. Elsewhere, reckless gambling addict Saul (Jeremy Renner) destroys his life in a whirlwind of debt. His misfortune, as it's shown in early scenes at a prison where Saul awaits execution, will lead him to accidentally murder Ana's innocent child, Jesse (Bobby Coleman).
I'll admit it: Most of the indie / foreign horror films that I see at film festivals and then recommend like crazy ... are not exactly "mainstream" titles. My apologies if you watched Inside, Teeth, or Frontier(s) with your mom -- although she'd probably like The Signal. Heck, even my preferences in studio horror fare tend to run towards the bleak, and hats off to The Mist, The Ruins and The Strangers for keeping me on my toes.
So what's my point? There's one particular indie that is absolutely NOT a gorehounds-only affair. I actually expect quite a (relatively) mainstream groundswell of support once Gregg Bishop's Dance of the Dead hits DVD -- and according to good ol' Bloody-Dee, that DVD will arrive on October 14. Yes, the movie is about a prom that's been overrun by zombies, leaving only the dateless outcasts to save the day, and sure, it's got some gore, some salty language, and some playful sexiness -- but dang if the Dance of the Dead doesn't feel like something Spielberg might have done as a newcomer. (And actually liked horror movies.) It's quick and colorful and jaunty and amusing -- and I think that's the first time I've ever used the word "jaunty" in any capacity. Anyway, toss a red circle around this title. It's not just for the horror fans. (No less than eight Cinematical staffers saw and really enjoyed it.)
One of the greatest things about 
The whole idea of secret children who come out of the woodwork is challenging as it is. Should the secret be revealed, or should it stay hidden? How do you make up for lost years? How do you integrate them into the family? Now, imagine that you're part of the law, and you find out that your secret kid is in jail. That's the basic idea behind a new indie comedy called 
OK, so I missed my flight to San Diego this morning and I've had a really rotten day, but there's always a small silver lining, right? In the movie world there is: JUST announced (like, within the last few minutes!) is the Toronto Film Festival's 
It was a bummer to learn that 
Three intriguing titles top my list of indie films to check out this week on DVD. Coincidentally, two of them feature actors who also directed (or directors who also acted).
It seemed too strange to be true. Only a handful of months after I watched Jessica Yu's excellent Protagonist, a Euripides-based story about four very different men and their manifestations of obsession, another one of her films was hitting Toronto. But it was nothing like the previous piece -- it was a fictional, comedic narrative about ping pong playing. Talk about drastic twists in themes! 
I'll admit it: Most of the indie / foreign horror films that I see at film festivals and then recommend like crazy ... are not exactly "mainstream" titles. My apologies if you watched